שבת בתל-אביב- בין קודש לחול

The individual shakes off mundane routine frequently— every week. “Shabbat comes and so does rest!” The soul begins to shed her harsh chains. “The Lord has given you rest from your sorrow and trouble and from the hard service that you were made to serve.” The soul then seeks higher pathways of spiritual desire that are consonant with the nature of her source. “It is good to praise the Lord, to sing hymns to Your name, O Most High, to proclaim Your steadfast love at daybreak, Your faithfulness each night with a ten-stringed harp with voice and lyre together.” “It shall be a sign for all time between me and the people of Israel.” This is a holy day when the innate inclination of the people for a godly life emerges from its hiddenness and is a sign for the people that its soul treasure contains within it the need and the ability to rejoice in God, in the delight of the divine. This is concentrated in the point of the extra soul that dwells within each one of the people’s children. What Sabbath does for the individual, shmita does for the nation as a whole. The Jewish people, in whom the godly, creative force is planted eternally and distinctively, has a special need to periodically reveal the divine light within itself with full intensity. Our mundane lives, with their toil, anxiety, anger, and competition do not entirely suffocate this creative force. On the shmita, our pure, inner spirit may be revealed as it truly is. The forcefulness that is inevitably part of our regular, public lives lessens our moral refinement. There is always a tension between the ideal of listening to the voice inside us that calls us to be kind, truthful, and merciful, and the conflict, compulsion, and pressure to be unyielding that surround buying, selling, and acquiring things. These aspects of the world of action distance us from the divine light and prevent its being discerned in the public life of the nation. This distancing also permeates the morality of individuals like poison. Stilling the tumult of social life from time to time in certain predictable ways is meant to move this nation, when it is well-ordered, to rise toward an encounter with the heights of its other, inner moral and spiritual life. They touch the divine qualities inside them that transcend all the stratagems of the social order and that cultivate and elevate our social arrangements, bringing them toward perfection.