The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character (review)

It is easy to attack Alan Dundes's overly orthodox Freudian analysis, to dismiss his work as irreparably corrupted by too stringent a hold on one theoretical paradigm, particularly when that paradigm is apparently at odds with "proper" folklorisitic (read: ethnographic) thought. To do so, however, is to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, and in his latest book, The Shabbat Elevator, there is much material to recommend.

The book begins with an autobiographical prologue: while in Israel in 1999, at the Hotel Dan-Panorama, Dundes came in contact with the concept of the "Shabbat Elevator." He asked at the front desk about the term and relates the reply: "That's for our Orthodox patrons....They are not allowed to push elevator buttons on the Sabbath and so we always assign Orthodox visitors who are here over the Sabbath to rooms on one of the first three floors because the Shabbat elevator is set to stop automatically at each of these floors" (p. xi). The apparent absurdity and hypocrisy of this practice struck Dundes as significant, leading to the current study, an extended essay on how Orthodox Jewish law allows for the circumventing of Sabbath laws (p. 32).

The book begins as a comprehensive account of the variety of Orthodox Jewish Sabbath customs, how Orthodox Jews find ways of circumventing those laws, and the rationales behind those circumventions. Dundes focuses on "counter customs" (p. 85), those actions of circumvention that are in themselves customary. Dundes's research into the diversity of Orthodox Jewish Sabbath customs and how to circumvent those very customs is truly awe-inspiring. Although the research is book-based, rather than ethnographic, it reveals a depth of scholarship that is accessible, yet scholarly and discursive.

Where the book begins to break down, however, is when Dundes begins to ascribe meaning to these (counter) customs, and in true Dundesian fashion, Freudian analysis takes over. To give credit where credit is due, the author's application of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis is detailed and insightful. I would rather read a Dundes psychoanalytical interpretation than most other attempts at Freudian discourse on cultural phenomena, but that does not mean such analyses are (pardon the pun) kosher. In fact, Dundes's psychoanalytic analysis is so well researched that his interpretation is almost plausible. This clearly problematizes the whole position of Freud vis-à-vis any kind of cultural discourse: while it creates a nice, neat package of meaning—in this case, that (Orthodox) Jews are anal-erotically fixated (p. 97), and that the counter-customs documented herein represent a kind of childlike "outwitting a parent['s]" rules (p. 92)—this interpretation is completely unverifiable. Such analysis is academically safe, yet ethnographically dubious.

Despite the academically unassailable argument that Dundes constructs using orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis, he does not seem to take the entire thing too seriously; or rather, he is less than dogmatic about his interpretation. Dundes ends his essay by discussing the argumentative quality of Jews (p. 146–65), asserting that Jews love to argue and debate, which is why such circumventions of Sabbath customs can exist at all—to argue and debate the laws themselves. Something about Freud's writings leads me to believe he has been largely misinterpreted by the Gentile world, that he presented his ideas with the intention that someone would pick up the gauntlet he threw down and say he was wrong, that the right thing to believe was something else entirely. Truth lies not in what one person says, but when someone else argues with that first person. Truth is the terrain between those arguments. Dundes, at the very end, throws down a similar gauntlet: "If I'm fortunate enough to elicit any comments from Jewish reviewers, and if these reviewers just cannot resist arguing at length and in minute detail with my thesis, either by pointing out all my many mistakes or better...