The lighting of Shabbat candles on Friday night is a special time of the week, for me and many Jews; it is a moment to slow down, whether alone or with friends or family, and to step outside weekday time. The flicker of the candles’ flame is a time when the sacred may enter our lives most palpably. Abraham Joshua Heschel memorably described Shabbat as Judaism’s ‘cathedral in time’: other religions have soaring towers and domes, but we have a holy moment every week, a ’shrine’, writes Heschel, ‘that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn’.
One of the richest part of my rabbinic study has been deepening my experience of Shabbat. I turn off my phone for 25 hours; I don’t shop or cook; I don’t take the rubbish out or rearrange the chairs. Shabbat gives me the opportunity to try and step out of the six days of melakhah, work, into a sacred realm. For one day we treat the world as perfect, not requiring any change or improvement. That day of respite gives us physical and spiritual energy to spend the rest of the week working to improve the world, seeking to bring it towards that state of perfection which we have momentarily glimpsed.
There are different levels to Shabbat, which I might summarise as a worldly and a spiritual. On the one hand, it is a day of worldly rest, imposing a moment of relief from the rigours of the week. But it is also intended as a spiritual experience, embodying Jews’ special relationship with God. It is a brit, covenant, as we say during kiddush each Saturday morning:
And the Children of Israel will keep the Shabbat, doing Shabbat throughout the generations: an everlasting covenant.
(Exodus 31:16-17)
Shabbat is a way to bring the Divine into our lives by imitating God’s own rest after the six-day creation of the world. It is a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt, treated by Torah as the defining example of God’s love for us. As we rest, we may hear the still, small voice of the Divine.
This week’s Torah reading, Behar-bechukotai, lists rewards we may receive if we keep God’s laws, including the commandment to remember Shabbat: the rains will come in their season; the fields will give their full harvest; the trees will be full of fruit; and there will be peace. The Torah goes on, threateningly, to say what will happen if we do not follow God’s laws: there will be illness; the earth will be hard like copper, the trees will not fruit; God will unsheathe a sword against us. Punishments that might have sounded outlandish when I was a child are today chillingly relatable.
Yet after describing the deepest depths to which we may sink, the Torah makes a remarkable turn. Once we have been driven by desperation to atone for our sins,
Then will I remember My covenant with Jacob; I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham; and I will remember the land.
(Leviticus 26:42)
Even if we abandon our covenant, Torah tells us, God will remember it. It is a comforting, and radical, statement: no matter how many transgressions we have committed, how low we have sunk, our chance at redemption always remains. We are never beyond saving.
Shabbat offers us worldly benefits: by leaving behind our melakhah, work, we recuperate; by ascending the spires of Shabbat’s sacred cathedral in time, we prepare ourselves to descend and do holy work during the rest of the week. The spiritual benefits of Shabbat, Torah tells us, are in our relationship to God: by keeping Shabbat, we play our part in the covenant, so that God will give us freedom, rains, and all the rewards that this week’s parashah describes.
That relationship is able to exist on a one-way basis: whether or not we remember Shabbat, God will ultimately remember our covenant; as the parashah says, ’even then, I will not reject them or spurn them’ (Leviticus 26:44). God recalls it no matter what. But a relationship that goes only one-way, depending on divine mercy, can surely never be as rich as one that is mutual, in which we keep our side of the bargain. Keeping Shabbat and remembering the covenant is how Torah tells us to show commitment to the All-Merciful. When we remember Shabbat, we reciprocate the love that gives us life and a world in which to experience it.
The sense of coming together with the Divine is, I believe, what we aspire to when we observe Shabbat. The route there is, in typical Jewish fashion, signposted with guidance notes; the rules of Shabbat nudge us simply to exist in the world, without trying to change it. Those rules are many and complex, but I would suggest a starting point: try turning your phone off this Shabbat, having tied up your arrangements beforehand. Doing so gives a remarkable sense of liberation; it allows some space to recover before the coming week. Perhaps, in the quiet we enjoy, we will hear God’s whispered voice.
Shabbat shalom.
Tim Motz, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.