Introduction: Sharing Time
One of the most unusual things I ever did was to save television’s “God slot,” if only for a few years. It came about like this.
British broadcasting had long carried the imprint of John Reith’s days at the BBC. The Reithian tradition had a specific moral vision. British society had a shared core of ethical and religious values – predominantly though not exclusively Christian – and it was the responsibility of broadcasting to reflect and even strengthen them. So the BBC’s Handbook for 1928 could state that “The BBC is doing its best to prevent any decay of Christianity in a nominally Christian country,” and twenty years later the then Director-General, Sir William Haley, was moved to say, speaking of Christian values, that the BBC “seeks to safeguard those values and foster acceptance of them.”
One of the legacies of those early days was the so-called “closed period.” Initially this meant that no television at all was broadcast between 6 and 7 p.m. on weekdays and between 6:15 and 7:30 p.m. on Sundays, so as not to compete with religious worship. Inevitably, as Britain became more secular and diverse, the convention was whittled down. The weekday pause vanished. The Sunday interval shrank and became, instead of a time without television, a period in which both major channels (BBC1 and ITV) showed religious programmes. This – the time between 6:40 and 7:15 p.m. on Sundays – was affectionately if irreverently known as the “God slot.” In the competitive, commercial mood of the 1980s it could hardly survive without a challenge, and the challenge duly came.
In September 1988, London Weekend Television proposed ending the closed period. Religious broadcasting would be moved to other times of the day, and against the BBC’s Songs of Praise it would show a news magazine programme. Because the proposal involved an issue of principle about the relationship between broadcasting and religion, it was sent by the Independent Broadcasting Authority to the Central Religious Advisory Committee, of which I was then a member.
As it heard the arguments for and against, the members of the Committee were divided. The commercial programmers made the case that by moving religious broadcasting to earlier and later times they would secure a younger and more varied viewing audience. I was not persuaded. The closed period attracted a remarkably large following. The programme about to be abolished, Highway, had viewing figures of some eight million, a considerable achievement for early Sunday evening. As I listened to the programmers, it seemed to me that they were driven less by concern for religion than by an intense hostility to it. The closed period was like a church in the middle of a shopping centre, an embarrassing reminder of eternal values in a fast-moving consumer age. It was bad for business and should be replaced as soon as possible by a supermarket.
Minor though the issue was, it raised a serious question about the nature of our public culture, of which television has become the most important vehicle. As it happens, the Committee met for its deliberations on the day after Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I felt strong words were needed, and I said something to the following effect:
The Jewish community has become highly secularised. Yet yesterday every synagogue in the world was full. Even Jews who have little to do with Judaism during the rest of the year come to synagogue on Yom Kippur, despite the fact that it is the most difficult day of the year to observe. It is a day of fasting. It is a day spent exclusively in prayer. Why then do they come? Because the Day of Atonement is holy time. Almost every Jew knows that at least one day of the year is kadosh, holy, set aside. It is part of the rhythm and structure of our lives. It is an almost instinctual pause for reflection and self-examination. Without holy times, there is no framework or architecture of time, merely the rush and press of random events. A civilisation needs its pauses, its intervals, its chapter-breaks if it is to be a civilisation at all.
The closed period on television, I argued, makes a similar statement, if inevitably shorter and less intense, about British culture. It says that there is a period of time, no more than half-an-hour, in which the normal thrust of news and entertainment is held back and fifteen million viewers think about more ultimate values. It is one of the last fragments of holy time left in our public life. Ending it, I said, would not be a small decision about programming schedules. It would be a significant step towards marginalising religion in the public domain.
The Committee was persuaded and voted against the proposal. A week later its recommendation was endorsed by the IBA. The closed period was saved. But it could not last.
Under the 1990 Broadcasting Act, radio and television were deregulated. By the beginning of 1993 the new authority for commercial television, the Independent Television Commission, could no longer require its companies to honour the closed period agreement, and it immediately lapsed. By 1994 a more significant defeat had been inflicted on the concept of holy time. Sunday trading was deregulated. Shopping had won its battle with prayer as our age’s most compelling form of collective worship.
Like my predecessor Lord Jakobovits, I have found arguments like these the strangest in which I have been involved. We have both found ourselves as Jews defending Christian institutions: religious education, Sunday rest and the established Church. That is not because Jewish interests are at stake. If anything, Jews benefit from being able to shop on Sundays and watch alternatives to Christian worship on television. What is at stake is not interests but religious principle, in this case a principle that goes far beyond Judaism itself. Not only as Jews but as citizens we believe that faith is not private but shared. It is nurtured, cultivated and receives its finest expression in communities. Faith is a public good. That is at the heart of the idea of holy time.
The clearest contrast between communal faith and an individualistic culture is between a luach, the traditional Jewish calendar, and that symbol of contemporary time, the personal organiser. A personal organiser represents time as a private project. Into it go our appointments, social events and leisure activities carefully prioritised by goals and objectives. Its message is that how I spend my time is who I am. A luach is something else. It speaks of holy days to be shared with family and community, days where time is not mine to do with as I like but ours to live out together the truths we share and the history of which we are a part, and to join our hopes to those of others in praise and prayer. The luach is time as collective experience. Its message is that there is public time just as there is public space: time in which we merge our private concerns with the larger community of which we are a part.
Judaism, as theologians have noted, is a religion of time. The first thing the Bible declares holy is not a place or a person but a day: the Sabbath. The first commandment given to Israel as a people was “This month shall be for you the beginning of the months” (Exodus 12:1), the verse from which tradition derived the mandate to determine the calendar and thus the dates of the festivals. Rabbi Abraham Pam once asked why the fixing of the calendar should have been the first instruction given to the Israelites as they were preparing for the exodus from slavery. He answered: the difference between a slave and a free human being is that the latter has control over his time. Time is the medium within which we work out our inner freedom. It is canvas on which Judaism paints its religious landscapes.
Whether it was because of Judaism’s strong sense of God’s transcendence or our long experience of exile, Jews found God in the when rather than the where. Perhaps it was neither of these things, merely the simple practical truth that religious faith needs regular rehearsal, dedicated time. Whatever the reason, Jewish theology is less to be found in systematic treatises than in the Jewish calendar with its regular enactment of the great principles of our faith and history.
There is a profound difference between the mentalities of ancient Greece and Judaism. Greek thought is logical while Jewish thought is chronological. Logical systems are ideally timeless. Chronological systems are embedded in time. Logical systems are contemplated. Chronological systems are lived. Thus for Jews the creation of the universe is not a metaphysical truth to be accepted. It is an experience to be lived one day in seven. The exodus from Egypt is not a historical truth to be recorded. It is a dramatic episode to be re-enacted every year. The calendar – the musical score of the symphony of time – is how we take truths from the abstract heavens or the distant past and make them real in our shared lives.
In his Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer points out the difference between vacations and holy days. “What is crucial about the vacation is its individualist (or familial) character…. Everyone plans his own vacation, goes where he wants to go, does what he wants to do.” The biblical Sabbath, by contrast, is a collective good. It is “enjoined for everyone, enjoyed by everyone.” Walzer notes, too, the paradox of holy days. They are an abridgement of liberty. A holy day is not one in which we are free to do what we like. Nonetheless, “the historical experience of the Sabbath is not an experience of unfreedom. The overwhelming sense conveyed in Jewish literature, secular as well as religious, is that the day was eagerly looked forward to and joyfully welcomed – precisely as a day of release, a day of expansiveness and leisure.” It is expansive the way a public park is expansive: by not being private property. The Sabbath is time we, not I, own.
The fate of the closed period on television, like the fate of Sunday itself, suggests that Britain is now too fragmented to share collective time. I lament this, as I lament every move towards what John Kenneth Galbraith called “private affluence and public poverty.” The more we move from public to private time, the less egalitarian we will be as a society and the more abrasive the workings of our economic system will become. The Sabbath is a day without work or spending. Within it the rich and poor, the employed and unemployed, are equals, members of the same community standing before God. No weekend of leisure and shopping offers the same sharing of dignity. We become what we can afford to buy. That is too limited and random a measure of the human condition to sustain a society in the long run.
The chapters in this section had their origin in broadcasts or speeches about the holy days of the Jewish year. Their message, I hope, reaches out beyond the Jewish community. They are about time as the vehicle of collective memory and aspiration, and about days made more precious by being shared.