In my year of living biblically, perhaps the hardest commandment for me to obey was Exodus 20:8: Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. I'm a lifelong workaholic. I check my emails about as often as I inhale. So for the first few weeks of my year, I blew it. I broke the sabbath repeatedly, barely making it an hour after sundown before succumbing to work.

Oddly, it was one Tuesday morning that fate gave me my first true taste of Shabbat. It was an enforced shabbat, a midweek Shabbat, but it was powerful nonetheless.

Here's what happened: the doorknobs in our apartment fall off on an alarmingly regular basis. They’re mercurial little suckers. We don’t even need to be touching them – it’s more of a natural-life-cycle type of situation, like icebergs calving or my hairline retreating. I’ll be in bed, reading my Bible, and I’ll hear a thud, and know that another doorknob succumbed to gravity.

Usually, I screw the knob back on. Problem solved – for a week or two, anyway. No big deal. But this morning, it became a big deal. At 9:30, I stop typing my emails and shuffle over to the bathroom – and close the door behind me. I don’t realize what I’ve done until I reach for the nonexistent inside doorknob. It had molted sometime during the night.

For the first ten minutes, I try to escape. I bang on the door, shout for help. No answer. Julie was away at a meeting and Jasper was out with his babysitter. I’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I could unscrew, climb into, slither through an air chute, drop into my neighbor’s bedroom, make a clever comment like “just thought I’d drop in,” and then return home. No grill. I’m trapped.

The next half hour I spend going through a checklist of worst-case scenarios. What if I slip, cut my forehead on the bathtub, bleed to death, end up on the front page of The New York Post? What if there’s a fire and I’m forced to hang by my fingernails from the window ledge?

Even more stressful to me is that the outside world is speeding along without me. E-mails are being answered. Venti lattes are being sipped. George Bush’s childhood friends are being appointed to high-level positions.

At 10:30, the phone rings. I hear a muffled voice leaving a message. This almost qualifies as human interaction. At 10:35, I make a pledge to myself to put more reading material in the bathroom if I ever escape. A Bible would have been nice. I’m stuck with an old Levenger catalog and a candle with a Omar Khayyam poem on the side: “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou.” Khayyam seems to be taunting me. I don’t have a jug of wine, or a loaf of bread or thou. I have a tube of Neutrogena shaving cream and some towels. That’s not paradise enou’.

By 11:00, I’ve become the world’s greatest expert on this bathroom. I know the fake marble tiles with their spider-vein pattern and the power outlet that is rakishly diagonal. I spend half an hour tidying the medicine cabinet. I notice that the ingredients in ChlorTrimeton go all the way from A (acacia) to Z (zein), which, as a former encyclopedia reader, appeals to me.

By noon, I’m sitting on the floor, my back against the shower door. I sit. And sit some more. And something odd happens. I know that, outside the bathroom, the world is speeding along. That blogs are being read. Wild salmon is being grilled. Reggaeton is being explained to middle-aged white marketing executives.

But I’m okay with it. It doesn’t cause my shoulders to tighten. Nothing I can do about it. I’ve reached an unexpected level of acceptance. For once, I’m savoring the present. I’m admiring what I have, even if it’s 32 square feet of fake marble and a tilted electrical outlet. I start to pray. And, perhaps for the first time, I pray in true peace and silence --without glancing at the clock, without my brain hopscotching from topic to topic.

This is what Shabbat should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

At about 1:30, I hear my wife Julie come home. I call out and pound on the door.
“Where are you?”
“In here. In the bathroom.”
I hear her footsteps approaching. .
“You can’t get out?”
“No, I can’t get out.”
“How long have you been in there?”
“Four hours.”
There was a pause. I knew she was weighing her options. A few months ago, when she had trouble opening our bedroom door, I had made her pretend she was in a prison movie and shout “Attica! Attica!”
Julie was the more mature of us. After a few seconds, she just opened the door. I am free. There were emails to return, calls to make. It’s kind of a shame.