Gift Exchange and the Sabbath Part 2

Quick, before reading any further … What are you thankful for? List the top 5 things that come to mind.

Did salvation or God's great love crack the list? If not, please do not think I was setting you up for guilt. Instead, it was meant as an honest inventory of our thankfulness.

In Part 1 of this post I conjectured that contemplation can help Christians to recognize they are the recipients of a great gift. After contemplation the gift recipient responds with joy on the Sabbath and the liturgy acts as a gift returned to God. It is glorious to think that this beautiful gift exchange has occurred for two millennia and can occur with great purpose, meaning, and fruit the rest of our lives. I wish now to illuminate this set of statements with some background from economics.

In economics there has been a theory of "gift exchange" around for almost 30 years. Nobel Laureate George Akerlof asked the question about why some employers would pay wages above the going market rate. The classic example of this is that Henry Ford paid his workers a wage of $5 per hour when other similarly skilled workers earned about half of that. In fact, Henry Ford doubled the wages of his workers in 1914. As a side note, you commonly hear people contend that he did this so workers could afford the product.; however, this is unlikely.  Akerlof conjectured that these above market clearing wages would occur to attract higher quality workers, reduce turnover, and increase the productivity of workers. And, for some employers it could stem from a sense of fairness.

Others also did theoretical work in this area but to keep things brief I will move on to the experimental work. Ernst Fehr is probably the best known experimental economist working in the area of "gift exchange". The set up is a simple framework I'll explain below.

Consider an employer and employee. The employer can choose a wage of {0,1,2,…,10} and the employee can choose an effort level of {0,1,2,…,10}. The exact payment each actor receives can be manipulated; but, one simple example would be that the employer receives profit= e - w and the worker receives a payment=w - e. In words, the employer benefits from the effort of the worker but must pay the worker. Meanwhile, the employee benefits from the wage but has an effort cost associated with working.

Suppose the timing is such that the employer sends some wage first, let's say, w = 8. What would the employee do? Well, according to standard game theoretic arguments the employee will choose e=0. Game theory would predict this because the employee's payment is reduced when choosing e > 0.  In numbers 8 > 8 - e. This argument would still hold if they were playing the game for many (finite) periods due to the argument of backward induction. Therefore, the employer should know this and offer a w=0.

This might sound quite strange to some of our readers. In fact, when I suggested that game theory predicts e=0 you might have balked and cursed game theory in your heart. And, you might have done this because you believed nobody receiving w=8 would return the employer with e=0! In fact, you're right (on average). There have been numerous studies that demonstrate that people do *not* play the game according to game theoretic predictions. People are reciprocal and return great effort when they have been given a great wage. But, the perception must be that they received a great wage when the employer didn't have to give it to them.

Now I want to transition back to the starting place. Contemplation helps us to correctly see the gift. If we do not see the gift we will not feel compelled to return the gift.

Gift Exchange and the Sabbath Part 1

Since I became a Christian the Sabbath seemed to be special to me. I'd like to think the Sabbath was special for high minded reasons. For example, God viewed creation as good on the other six days but the only day He blessed was the seventh day (Genesis chapters 1-2). Or, because God told his people to keep the Sabbath holy (Exodus 20:8). Or, because Jesus tells us that, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27) so there must be some benefit for us to keeping it. No, I think the Sabbath appealed to me because of some idyllic scene in my mind's eye of slowing down the pace of life.

Those more "high minded" reasons set the Sabbath aside as a unique day in our week and there is more to the day than the quaint notion that was the source of initial attraction. However, slowing down the pace is also important. As Abraham Joshua Heschel notes in his slim book The Sabbath, humans can become obsessed with things in space but the Sabbath is a "palace in time" that marks space with significance and returns us to our roots. One image in particular has stuck with me months after finishing the book. Upon telling the story of two men, Rabbi Shimeon and his son Rabbi Eleazar, who were hiding from government officials in a cave for twelve years Heschel offers this marvelous image,

It was the eve of the Sabbath when they left the cave, and as they came out they saw an old man carrying two bundles of myrtle in his hand, a sweet-smelling herb having the perfume of paradise. 

What are these for they asked him.

They are in honor of the Sabbath, the old man replied.

Said Rabbi Shimeon to his son: Behold and see how dear God's commands are to Israel … At that moment they both found tranquility of the soul. 

Rabbi Shimeon came away with a great sense of how law abiding the old man was; however, when I read this I thought, "The man looked forward to the Sabbath! It is his delight to celebrate." How often do we not see the Sabbath as a great gift? In the last couple years I have been guilty of thinking …. Do I really want/need to go to church? But, this image reminds me that this man looked forward to the Sabbath. He wanted to celebrate the Sabbath.

Perhaps we get to that place when we have engaged in contemplation. Contemplation on the mysteries and the sacrifice of God in His son Jesus is like receiving a gift. I hazard to guess that those who come to worship with joy are returning the gift they came to better understand through contemplation.

The Sabbath (Book Review)

The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel tip-toes the line of soul and mind. The dream-like prose is packed with zeal for a day he calls, "a palace in time":

The seventh day is a mine where spirit's precious metal can be found with which to construct a palace in time, a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine; a dimension in which man aspires to approach the likeness of the divine. For where shall the likeness of God be found? There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God. There is not enough freedom at the top of the mountain; there is not enough glory in the silence of the sea. Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise.

According to Heschel there are two divisions of the world: space and time. We are well acquainted with space, creating and toiling, but, we are less familiar with time. First, we start with space. Our endeavors in space can help us understand God as Creator. For example, I built Adirondack chairs the other week, therefore, I created on a much smaller scale. Furthermore, I can tell you, there is satisfaction in the toil and I feel a connection to the chairs built. In this sense, with this small metaphor I gain insight into God. Yet, as Heschel points out the likeness of God is too grand to be captured in an object.

What Heschel spends much more pages writing about is time. Writing about the nature of time Heschel looks to the Bible and ancient rabbis. Genesis 2:2 reads, "On the seventh day God finished his work," Exodus 20:11 reads, "In six days the Lord made the heaven and earth." Wait a minute . . . He made the heaven and the earth in 6 days but finished on the 7th? The rabbi's resolved this by stating that menuha was created on the Sabbath. Menuha is not an object like my Adirondack chair that can be grasped, rather, Heschel states menuha means something akin to "tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose". God created an architecture in time and menuha is the special attribute of the seventh day.

The fact that God blessed the seventh day, and not the other days, should hint that the seventh day is special. What this means is that time is not homogeneous ---some time is different than other time. What I take this to mean is, there is time for creating and time for remembering that we were created. On the seventh day we remember our relationship with God, that remembrance is a refuge from a fury of sound and distraction. What is more, this remembrance carries us through the rest of the week.

Heschel regales the reader with stories of Jewish people practicing the Sabbath and embracing the day with vigor and longing. There are many stories that could be presented here, but, I will share only one,

Rabbi Solomon of Radomsk once arrived in a certain town, where, he was told, lived an old woman who had known the famous Rabbi Elimelech. She was too old go out, so he went to see her and asked her to tell him what she knew about the great Master. ---I do not know what went on in his room, because I worked as one of the maids in the kitchen of his house. Only one thing I can tell you. During the week the maids would often quarrel with one another, as is common. But, week after week, on Friday when the Sabbath was about to arrive, the spirit of the kitchen was like the spirit on the eve of the Day of Atonement. Everybody would be overcome with an urge to ask forgiveness of each other. We were all seized by a feeling of affection and inner peace.

This book gave me a passion and appreciation for the Sabbath that I did not have before reading this book. Heschel (below) at one point asks, ". . . is there any institution which holds out greater hope for man's progress than the Sabbath?"

This is a great question. Given the level of pressure and stress, which negatively impacts many people's lives, it would seem we need to learn the discipline of rest. Not merely diversion but a palace in time that anchors our identity as image bearers of God.