Discovering the Gift of Shabbat

The first time I observed any kind of Shabbat I was 22. I had just moved to the city after college and I was living with four roommates on the Lower East Side. We had almost no furniture, except a massive IKEA table. Every Friday, we’d have 17 to 20 friends show up for Shabbat dinner.

We couldn’t afford to cook anything fancy, so I’d make a huge vat of spaghetti and everyone would eat a well-balanced meal of pasta, wine, and challah.

We were just kids, thrown into the big city - a little lost and a little overwhelmed - and those weekly Shabbat dinners gave us community.

We were just kids, thrown into the big city - a little lost and a little overwhelmed - and those weekly Shabbat dinners gave us community.

In my mid-twenties, after I married, my then-husband and I agreed not to use technology on Shabbat mornings. We’d read and go for walks, and even though we didn’t observe the full day, those mornings gave us a glimpse of peace and rest.

Those rituals were important to me, and they brought valuable aspects of Shabbat into my life - community, rest, peace. But it was only years later, once I started to observe Shabbat fully, that I realized they were only fragments, tiny shards of a much greater whole that is only seen and understood in its entirety.

I adopted a more observant practice of Shabbat slowly, and then all at once. I was nervous at first. Much of Shabbat is focused on the home and the family, and as a single woman, I worried that I would spend the day lonely and isolated. I wanted a partner who would build an observant Jewish life with me, and I wanted to start keeping Shabbat together. But someone rightly asked me how I could be sure I wanted that if I had never fully kept Shabbat. So one afternoon, sitting at my rabbi’s Shabbat table, I decided to go all in. No tiptoeing into the water, just swan dive into the deep end.

That first week was rough. I have an automatic trash can, so I couldn’t throw out my trash. My electric toothbrush - also unusable (you can’t turn on electric items on Shabbat). I couldn’t open my fridge because the light would go on. I had no food besides a few rice cakes in the cupboard. I couldn’t see anything after dark. Suffice to say, I was learning.

By the next week, I had timers on my lights, a regular toothbrush, tape on the fridge light, and the trash can was set to stay open. I learned how to prepare food for Shabbat, how to host, and most importantly, how to proactively build a community and prepare for Shabbat to ensure I wouldn’t spend it alone.

It took commitment and effort, but as I settled into it, what Shabbat felt like and meant to me shifted fundamentally.

I was transported into a parallel world - transposed right on top of this one - whose grandeur I could never have predicted. I understood, finally, why Abraham Joshua Heschel called Shabbat “a palace in time.”

He wrote: “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. … The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity.” (The Sabbath, p8/15)

Isn’t It Restrictive?

I can see why Shabbat would seem restrictive from the outside - like a long, long list of “don’ts”. Don’t flip a light switch, don’t open an umbrella, don’t use your phone, don’t cook, don’t boil water, don’t listen to music, don’t write, don’t rinse out a stain, don’t blow out a candle, don’t, don’t, don’t. How does that not feel restrictive?

And yet, it doesn’t at all. In fact, it’s the opposite.

All the things I can’t do are like a protective barrier between the outside world, the six other days of the week, and the rarified air of Shabbat. They separate the holy and the profane. Together, the 39 melachot (the Hebrew term for creative work that is prohibited on Shabbat) form the walls of this protected space and time.

As I light the candles on Friday night, I see that palace of holy time take shape. Once inside, I am free to roam, protected and utterly at peace.

As I light the candles on Friday night, I see that palace of holy time take shape. Stone by stone, its rooms and halls and spires form around me. Inside, I am free to roam, protected and utterly at peace. It’s expansive and freeing.

Before I stepped inside that palace, I would never have understood why Sabbath rest is different than all other rest.

Aryeh Kaplan nicely summarizes what it means to rest on Shabbat. He writes,

“We rest in a Sabbath sense when we no longer interfere with the world… During the six days of Creation, God asserted His mastery over the universe by actively changing it. On the Sabbath, He ‘rested’ by no longer asserting this mastery. We emulate God by relinquishing our mastery over the world on the Sabbath.” (Sabbath: Day of Eternity, p35)

To observe Shabbat – shamor, in Hebrew - is to let go of all efforts to exert control. To stop focusing on what is lacking, on what you want to change or improve or adjust. It is to step out of the modern world’s relentless focus on improvement. It is to move through the world without affecting it or influencing it to even the smallest degree. It is to simply be.

The effect is that you get to exist in the immediate world around you. Untethered from your devices, this protected time offers reprieve from the constant onslaught of information from every corner of the world, from the constant barrage of opinions and updates and other people’s lives. To observe Shabbat is to be in your own life.

To me, that is a great relief. It’s a sigh of submission to God and a reminder that I am held by a force greater than myself.

The ability to stop striving frees me then to remember Shabbat - zachor. To enjoy the light of the candles, to be present in prayer. To experience the joy of settling into long meals, walks on the promenade, afternoon naps, hours spent reading. To celebrate the beauty of the world exactly as it is and the improbable wonder that we exist in this world at all.

Shabbat in Jerusalem

This summer, I got to experience Shabbat in Jerusalem for the first time. The bustling mornings on Emek Refaim with everyone doing their last minute shopping. The flower shops spilling out onto the sidewalks. The racks of challah outside the bakeries. The chorus of people wishing each other Shabbat shalom. Then the quiet that settles over the city. No cars on the road, the shops closed. Groups of people walking to shul in the last shadows of dusk, the melodies of kabbalat Shabbat carrying through the streets from open windows and doors, overlapping and intertwining. I have never experienced anything like it.

In the wake of October 7, I have been thinking of Shabbat in Jerusalem. Of what it feels like to be in the one place in the world where Shabbat is not at odds with the bustling world around us but in harmony with a nation, gathered and free in its homeland.

Old City, Jerusalem (Dan Gold, Unsplash.com)

I’ve been thinking of this beloved bride that we love enough to marry again every Friday night, to see her always with the love and hope and anticipation of a groom looking at his new bride, and yet to have spent thousands of years by her side.

Since I started observing the day, I have welcomed and wanted its arrival each week, but in the last couple months, I’ve needed it – to stop checking social media, tune out the news, focus on joy and community. It has alleviated the weight, and it has reminded me that we may not always know or anticipate the full depth of the reasons why our rituals are so important, or why we are commanded to do them, but when we follow them, their value is revealed over time.

This marriage between the Jewish people and the seventh day provides what all the best marriages do - a reliable, trusted foundation that is there to shelter you, strengthen you, and carry you, week after week, year after year, constant when the world is kind and steadfast when it is cruel. That is a love that truly sustains. Thank God for this extraordinary blessing.