Dateline: Tel Aviv
Starting at 3pm on Friday afternoon, for the next 24 hours, Israeli’s say “Shabbat Shalom” to each other. Everyone says it including cab drivers, shopkeepers and my Internet shop staff.
Pretty much everything stops. I’m talking about Tel Aviv. Nearly every store is closed on Friday by 7pm and stays closed until 7pm Saturday. Most reopen with enthusiasm on Saturday evening. All bus service stops. Elevators go on automatic, stopping at every floor or alternate floors, by themselves.
The City has a noticeable change of pace. People walk and go to the beach. Cabs still run. Traffic dwindles.
I have a gut reaction to the rhythm of six days of work and one consensus day of rest - it works.
The consensus is not authoritarian. One of the two lobby elevators in my hotel runs normally on Shabbat. The breakfast is nearly normal without the iced juice drinks and only hot water, on a timer, to make coffee and tea. On the streets and between cities private vans and jitneys run on all the routes with route numbers in the front windows. (They run on these same routes every weekday too.)
The religious in Israel don’t have to pay taxes for public buses to run on the Sabbath. Anyone who wants to work on Shabbat can do so. The jitney trip to Jerusalem worked fine; it took me half the usual time because traffic was so much lighter.
One friend suggested that a country with a big high tech industry really benefits from one day to rest and time to think.