Twinning - Shabbat

As it is stated: “Only keep My Shabbatot for it is a sign between Me and you for your generations to know that I am God Who sanctifies you”(Exodus 31:13). When the Holy One, Blessed be He, gave Shabbat to Israel, He told Moses to inform them about it. That was also taught in a baraita: The verse states: “For I am God Who sanctifies you,” meaning that the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: I have a good gift in My treasure house and Shabbat is its name, and I seek to give it to Israel. Go inform themabout it.

Bavli Shabbat Daf Yud

The Talmud (Shabbat 10b) states that Shabbat was God’s precious and guarded treasure, which was given to the Jews as a gift. It was His day of rest, and He shared it with the Jewish people. Shabbat was the day to be dedicated to building a relationship with the Divine, and reconnecting with the spiritual after a week of toiling in the physical world.

From Bialik's letter to the pioneers at Geva: "The people of Israel will never abandon the Sabbath, which is not only the foundation of its Israeli existence, but also of its human existence. Without the Sabbath there is no image of God and no image of the human within the world. If work were a purpose in its own right, then the human would be no different than the beast. All the civilized nations have received the day of rest from Israel, in one form or another, and it has acquired a human form to an extent. Without it all would be left in their animalistic state… I have devoted my comments to the preservation of the Sabbath, which I consider equal not only to the observance of all the 613 Israelite commandments, as our Sages said, but also to the preservation of the human spirit in its entirety. Without the Sabbath there is no Israel, no Land of Israel, and no culture of Israel. The Sabbath is the culture.

H.N. Bialik’s Letters, Vol. E, p. 128.

“This is the advice of the wicked Pharaoh, who said: “Let heavier work be laud upon the men and let them keep it and not pay attention to false words” (Exodus 5:9). He intended not only to leave them no spirit whatsoever, so that they might not think or plan against him, but he attempted to deny them any opportunity for reflection through the constant and incessant burden of labor.”

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesilat Shalom, Chapter B

"More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews."
Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg, poet and Zionist ideologue: 1856-1927)

This statement is part of the key to the great puzzle of our generation: how to keep Jews Jewish? We have survived exile and genocide, only to find that assimilation and a lack of Jewish knowledge have become an even greater threat.

Sunset on Friday begins a window of time in which the flowers of the field stand before the human as equal members of the universe. I may not pick a flower or treat it as I wish. As Shabbat begins, the flower becomes a being in its own right that has a right to exist regardless of its value for me, the human. I stand in silence before nature as before a fellow in God’s creation, and not as an object that I may control. I am forced to confront the fact that I am a human and not a God. The Sabbath seeks to heal the human arrogance of technological culture. […]

Something very far-reaching will happen in Judaism when we confront the challenge of reflecting in our economic and social systems the Sabbath declaration that the world was created and that humans were created – that we are not complete masters of nature, nor masters of one another.

Rabbi David Harman, Renewing the Covenant, p. 316

We rest the Sabbath rest when we stop intervening in the world. By so doing we imitate God’s rest on the Sabbath, when God stopped intervening in the world. We imitate God… when we relinquish our control over the world for one day, for the Sabbath.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan – teacher, writer, and thinker

People now are talking quite a lot about the sad state of the Earth. I hear everyone saying that we need to do something urgently, such as a day without cars, a day without trains, a day without airplanes, a day without buses and motorbikes, a day without smoking, a day without smoke, a day without washing machines, a day without clothes dryers, a day without dishwashers, a day without telephones, a day of saving energy, a day without cooking, a green day, a blue day, a purple day, a day without accidents, a day without work, a day without pressure, a round day.

And I say: we have had such a day ever since we remember ourselves as a people. We have had such a day since way back when. Since the world was created. We have Shabbat – yes, folks, Shabbat!

After all, Shabbat is the ultimate Earth Day. It’s good for the air and for the soil, it’s good for the roads, for water, for wind, breath, and soul. It’s quality time for the environment, quality time for the family, quality time for rest…

Ehud Banai – Earth Day

Why was the Sabbath created?

For the purpose of distinction.

For all created things are controlled by their movement.

The sun determines morning and night and never stops.

The soil never rests.

Plants never stop growing and animals never rest. The world is in motion and stops

only for the purpose of death and oblivion.

And we have already learned that water that has no motion is no longer living water.

Only the human controls movement, and as the Sabbath is sanctified, the human creates a distinction.

This is not an easy struggle: movement has many forces.

But through body and spirit, the human stops, treasures, and creates control over their world. That human is at last a free person, distinguished from creation, and yet still alive.

A.D. Gordon