Shabbat - The Sacred Pause

"Torah says “Shavat v’yi’nafash” – God stopped creating and was re-ensouled, re-inspirited, refreshed again….But if we read shavat vayinafash as “stopped (speaking) and breathed again… (God exhales)"
Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going, A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life page 190

The Sabbath and Mindfulness

Both the Sabbath and mindfulness are…subversive. They ask us to withdraw from doing and to focus on being. They ask us to withdraw from a focus on content and focus on the relationship to what is. Shabbat is introduced in Genesis when it says: Vayishbot – God ceased – on the seventh day. Shavat me kol m’lachot – God ceased from all the work of creation. The Sabbath is God’s ceasing, the Creator of All just stopping. This models a rhythm for our lives. The same is true for meditation. It is a sitting (in Hebrew, the same root as Shabbat: lashevet) and stopping.

The Sabbath was created on the seventh day. Pausing is not an option. Pausing is part of the plan. Shabbat makes its appearance after the human being is created. Why? We are the completers. We are the ones who can embrace and include in our awareness the whole of creation. We are the ones who are prone to forget that we are not self-created. We are most likely to confuse creativity with control…Only we can impose our purposes on time and forget that time is so much grander than our purposes.

Mindfulness practice, like the Sabbath, can lead us with tenderness in to the territory of the unseen. By pausing and opening to all that exists without our effort, we deepen our appreciation both for our own potential and for the vastness of creation. In the place of pause, the empty space between the out breath and the next in-breath, we touch mystery. If is from that mystery that another miraculous breath, moment, or new idea is born. Without pause, without space or rest, there is no place for the new to enter. (emphasis added) Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg

"Thinking Shabbat" Rabbi Lawrence Kusher in A Shabbat Reader p 199-201

My grandfather, alav ha-shalom [may he rest in peace], a German Reform Jew, used to make Pesach as follows. We would religiously remove leaven or hometz [leavened products] which we defined as bread and cereal) from our home and stash it in an off-limits cupboard. Though we were conscientious, we were also human and oversights did occur. I remember once, a few days into Passover, how we found a box of "The Breakfast of Champions" that one of us boys, months earlier, must have taken to an unlikely place and forgotten about.

"Look, Grandpa, some hometz we missed. What should we do?" "What hometz?" he said, staring right at the cereal box. "This one here," I said. "I don't see it." he replied. And I understood.

You do the very best you can. But when the deadline comes, whether or not you are done, you announce that you are done...

...Work is to Shabbat like hometz is to Pesach. Come twilight on Friday afternoon I announce: All my jobs, tasks, and work, whether they are done or not, I hereby declare done. I reject their claim on me. I deny their existence...

We need a way to describe liberal Jews who are serious about Shabbat. Shomer Shabbat, Keeper of Shabbat, based as it is on the language of the actual commandment in Deuteronomy, could be ideal. Unfortunately it has been appropriated and defined, meticulously and oppressively, by someone else. So we return to the text of the Fourth Commandment and realize that it is said twice, once in Deuteronomy and again in Exodus. In Deuteronomy (5:11) we are told "Shamor," keep the Sabbath. But in Exodus (2;7) the verb is different: we are told "Zachor," remember the Sabbath. Perhaps it is for us to create a new standard of Shabbat behavior called "Zachor Shabbat." One who is "Zocher Shabbat" would remember throughout the day's duration that it was Shabbat. (Not so easy as it first sounds.) We say to one another, Do anything you want--as long as you will remember that it is Shabbat, amd that will insure that whatever you do will be lichvod ha-Shabbat, for the honor of the Shabbat.

Rashi (France, 11th Century): An expanded "heart" for rest and joy, open to comfort, to eat and drink without the soul bothering her.

Rabbeinu Bahya (Spain, 13th Century): During the six days of the week the soul may be compared to someone who is merely a guest without a home. On the Sabbath the soul is like a guest who has found a home. This is why the Torah used the word ויברך יהוה את יום השביעי, “God conferred a blessing on that day,” i.e. the soul derives a blessing from its source on that day.

Rabbi Arthur Green: If I have spent a Shabbat at your congregation, you have heard me share my interpretation of Lecha Dodi. I call it a flirtation song with the neshama yeteirah. I do not believe, you see, that the “extra soul” we have on Shabbat comes floating down from heaven at 3:42 in the winter season and or 7:29 in the middle of summer (at least in our Boston climate!). I believe that the soul, the most intimate, and therefore most vulnerable parts of ourselves, is there within us all week long. But it is afraid to come out. It fears being trampled by the pace at which we live, shouted down by the loudness of our encounters with the hustle-and-bustle of ordinary life...But, on erev Shabbat we promise it, “It’s all right, you can come out now. I promise, for the next 24 hours, to live at a slower pace. No rushing, no fighting, no screaming. No despair over the stock market or the business cycle. I promise not to get depressed by watching politicians on television. It’s safe in my Shabbat world; you can come out now.” (CCAR Journal, Personal Theology)