I can remember a period of my life when the melancholy of a waning Shabbat afternoon really hit me hard. This was in my early twenties. I was single, just back from a year studying in yeshiva in Israel, and most often spending Shabbat with friends on the Upper West Side (in a desire to end my singlehood and find a partner). As the sun would sink into the western sky and the shadows of those Manhattan apartment buildings would grow longer, I would often feel a kind of heartache, some combination of yearning to be elsewhere (back in Israel, perhaps) and longing for Shabbat not to end.
While not as intense and qualitatively different, I still feel a bit of creeping wistfulness late on Shabbat afternoons. I often find myself drawn to our family photo albums (among the gifts of finding that partner many years ago: she is a scrapbooker by nature). Or I’ll go find a book from the shelves that store the books of my younger years—sometimes that even results in taking out an old orchestral score from my musician days and mentally working my way through it. But the impulse is most often the same: a desire for this not to end, a reluctance to confront what I sense awaits me the moment I dip the havdallah candle into the kiddush cup and listen as the flame sizzles out.
In recent years, I feel like that anxiety has taken on a new, more urgent color, as coming out of my Shabbat cocoon has thrust me into a world turned upside down. October 7, of course, was Shabbat. The assassination attempt against Donald Trump happened on Shabbat. Just two months ago, the U.S. military went into Venezuela and took its president on Shabbat. And, of course, just last week the United States and Israel began a massive air campaign against Iran on Shabbat.
There are practical issues for those of us who don’t use our phones and computers or watch TV on Shabbat: how to get caught up, for instance. (There’s a niche market for a news summary just for shomer Shabbat people.) But, more seriously, I find that the increasing feeling that big things are happening in the world over Shabbat has an effect on my experience of Shabbat itself. I feel a greater urge to check the news. I find it harder to access the feeling that Shabbat is the sacred island that I’ve long known it to be.
And, of course, these are a version of “First World problems.” To my relatives and friends in Israel, for instance, this is not some aesthetic question of the flavor of Shabbat—it’s about running from missiles and reporting for army service, about life and death. As Maimonides teaches, Shabbat is pushed aside (dechuya) in the face of danger to life, i.e. physical existence, just as all other mitzvot (Laws of Shabbat 2:1). The very fact of my reflecting about Shabbat in this way, worrying about… worrying, is a reminder of my privilege of living in a nuclear armed superpower bounded on either coast by an enormous ocean. But still, it has an effect.
Parashat Ki Tissa mentions Shabbat in the midst of the instructions for building the Mishkan. Rashi offers a reason: “Even though you may be bound up in the mitzvot of building the Tabernacle, do not push away (al tidacheh) Shabbat” (Rashi on Exodus 31:13). That’s a remarkable statement, actually. Because building the Mishkan is not, I imagine, work we would wish to escape from. It’s holy, sacred service, work with purpose that connects us to the Divine and one another—an ideal form of labor. And yet, the Torah comes to tell us that even then, or perhaps especially then, we can’t push away Shabbat.
In an 1886 homily, the Sefat Emet infers a lesson from Rashi: “So great is the spiritual level of Shabbat that it exceeds even the six days of God’s original Creation.” And, he adds, “The ideal form of Shabbat has no limit,” a mystical, poetic comment which I register as an invitation to ground ourselves in the infinite through Shabbat, even as we are limited, material beings in a limited, material world. Shabbat, the Sefat Emet repeats so many times in his writings, is the means by which we experience, and even prepare ourselves for, the limitlessness of the World to Come. In the midst of these Torah portions devoted to the paradoxical, profoundly challenging idea that the Infinite could be at home in the finite, of course Shabbat must be at the center.
The world is heavy these days. There’s yet another war on (or perhaps it’s really just one long war). Institutions, our repositories of trust, are fraying and breaking. As are the boundaries that many of us have come to take for granted: between nations, between home and street, between land and sea, between Shabbat and the workweek. All of which makes practicing Shabbat feel like an even greater act of resistance.
Many Buddhist teachers I know will conclude a meditation sit with some version of the blessing, “May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful and free.” There are a lot of ways I might translate that in the language of Torah, but the simplest might be: May it be that our world allows all of us to practice Shabbat. Or, even shorter: Shabbat shalom.
For Reflection & Conversation:
Our tradition describes Shabbat as “a taste of the world to come.” What does that mean to you? Does your Shabbat practice help you experience it? Why or why not? What might you want to adjust in your Shabbat practice to strengthen it?