Eternality and Expansiveness in Our Approach to Shabbat
This past Shabbat, our second in a row in-person together as a community, we studied the weekly parashah (Torah portion) as we always do, probing its depths for meaning, asking what eternal meaning its words lend to our own lives, informing us, pushing us, causing us to think.
This week’s parashah was called va’ethanan, which means “I pleaded,” as in Moses describing to the Israelite people how he pleaded with God to be allowed to enter the Promised Land with his people, a plea God rejected.
This parashah is found in the Book of D’varim (Deuteronomy), the final book of the Torah which is essentially comprised entirely of Moses’ parting words and teachings to the Israelites who are about to enter the Promised Land without him.
In particular, in this past week’s parashah, Moses rearticulates the Ten Commandments to the people. This is, after all, 40 years after the initial revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai and many of the present Israelite population were children or not yet born. Further still, Moses is about to present the people with many more sacred laws they are to carry out when they enter the Promised Land. Perhaps in order to underscore how sacred these additional laws are, he reminds them (or instructs them) of the revelatory moment of the Ten Commandments and how all subsequent laws flow from them.
There is a wrinkle, however. When Moses restates the Ten Commandments, he does so essentially verbatim from how they were revealed initially in the Book of Shemot (Exodus), with one exception related to the fourth commandment regarding Shabbat, The Sabbath. When the Ten Commandments were initially revealed, the articulated reason behind the commandment to “remember shabbat and keep it holy” was that “in six days Adonai (God) made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore Adonai blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it,” (Exodus 20:8-11), a clear reference to the creation story.
When Moses articulates the fourth commandment 40 years later, however, before the people are about to enter the promised land, he explains it thusly: “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy,” on the basis that you are to “remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and Adonai your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deut. 5:12-15).
As a community, we identified these two formative moments—Creation and the Exodus—in our evolution and asked how each might inform Shabbat differently.
My teacher Rabbi Jacob Staub points out that the Creation paradigm invites us to approach Shabbat in such a way that conceives of time as not quite our own. Time, under this understanding, is God’s. We are mere tenants in time. When we approach Shabbat in this way, we don’t seek to conquer time, conquer the day, as we do on all other days; we seek to be at peace with time, to recognize our oneness with it—to recognize that nothing is ours but that all is Adonai’s, however we understand that assertion (see Psalm 24: לַיהֹוָה הָאָרֶץ וּמְלוֹאָהּ — “The earth is Adonai’s and all that it holds”).
When we approach Shabbat from the perspective of the Exodus meanwhile, it reminds us of how free we should empower ourselves to feel, and how easily we can tend to feel the reverse of this freedom. As another teacher of mine, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, observes, “time freed up by technology is also consumed by it, and our lives are full of demands for our attention and the expectation of instant responsiveness. Mitzrayim (Egypt) can also mean ‘narrowness,’ and the liberation from Egypt led to a place of Merhav Ya, a wide-open, God-filled place. Observing Shabbat—setting limits so as to create expansiveness—” can help facilitate this sense of expansiveness and freedom. In approaching Shabbat from the perspective that we are free, we think through how we can construct the day in such a way that we tap into this sense of freedom that is built into our evolution as a people.
How important in an age where a sense of overwhelm can creep upon us pervasively to tap into the expansive and the eternal.
