JEWISH RITUAL — 5.2 (Sabbath)

CREATING THE ISLAND OF SHABBAT

To create space in your life to observe the Sabbath – that island of peace – you have to have some sense of boundaries. It can be hard to create that island, especially if you are very busy all week long. A friend told me that the sole rule of Shabbat that she and her family observe is to have Friday night dinner together, the only meal of the week when they are together. At dinner, they go around the table and describe their week—the difficulties they had, and the blessings they felt. Sometimes it is a wonderful experience from the moment they all sit down together; sometimes her teenage daughter opens up in a way she never does during the rest of the week.

But on other occasions her husband will call and say he is going to be late, and her daughter will grumble as she sits down, in that pouty-teenager sort of way, about having to make blessings and share time with her parents. Sometimes the strain of getting together makes everyone mad at each other right through the blessings and into the salad. And if the point of the Sabbath is relaxation, Shabbat appears to be "backfiring." But, she says, eventually, sometime between the main course and dessert, when everyone has decompressed long enough to realize that the goal is to be together just this one time a week, they relax, and the transcendent experience of Shabbat sets in.

THE SHABBAT AS A SYMBOL OF ONENESS

The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Scriptures. Their revelation at Mount Sinai is first recorded in Exodus and the retold in Deuteronomy. The Book of Exodus says that you should "remember" the Sabbath and keep it holy. Deuteronomy tells us to "guard" the Sabbath. To Jewish readers of the Bible, this slight semantic difference looms large. Commentators see in this shift of wording two ways of observing the Sabbath. "Guarding" Shabbat means adhering to the myriad restrictions imposed by Jewish law that ensure that you will not work. This represents the passive aspect of Shabbat—refraining from work. "Remembering" Shabbat, by contrast, means taking positive actions to increase the joy and peacefulness in your life.

Jewish tradition commemorates the two times the Ten Commandments appear in the Bible by lighting two candles on the Sabbath. This is just one of a number of rituals on Shabbat, which, like the animals on Noah's ark, come in pairs. "Everything pertaining to Shabbat is double..." (Midrash Tehillin on 92:1). Customarily, two loaves of challah (braided egg bread, plur. challot) are used to represent the double portion of manna that fell on Friday for the Israelites to gather when they were wandering in the wilderness for forty years. We even have two souls on the Shabbat: The Talmud says that on Shabbat we receive a second soul, which goes away at the conclusion of Shabbat (Betzah 16a). The Talmud also says that a pair of angels escort a person home from synagogue on the eve of the Sabbath (Shabbat 119b).

Yet for all the doubling, Shabbat is ultimately about two becoming one. For the mystics it was the male and female aspects of the Divine uniting. The Zohar, the primary text of Kaballah (the practice of Jewish mysticism), says that just as the male and female aspects of the Divine unite above, so they also unite below in the mystery of the Oneness. Some take this to mean that we should engage in the "double mitzvah" of Shabbat—that is, to make love to our partner, the ultimate expression of two becoming one. The Rabbis even say that the two times where the Ten Commandments appear in the Bible, God actually spoke them at the exact same time, somehow, in the mystery that is the Oneness of God. The Sabbath prayer song Lekhah Dodi (Come, My Beloved) says this quite simply: Shamor vezakhor bediboor echad, God uttered the words guard and remember as one word.

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