Why did God rest on the seventh day if He never gets tired?

Rabbi Landau teaches that “Hashem didn’t stop creating because he was tired. He stopped so we can feel him.” The world, he explains, does not reveal God; “the world actually conceals God.”

Every day of creation was “another layer of concealment.” Light became form, form became matter, and matter became noise, until Hashem said, “Stop. If I go one step further, they’ll forget me completely.” Every moment of creation was God turning the light down one more notch, until He whispered, “Enough.” That is the moment Shabbos enters.

This is why, Rabbi Landau points out, the Hebrew word for world, olam, is connected to the word for hiding. “What you call reality is just God hiding in plain sight.” The world hides the Artist so well “that we mistake the painting for the painter.”

But on Shabbos the dimming stops. “The light paused, and for one day a week, you can see through the mask.” The secret of Shabbos, he says, is that on that day “the creator and his creation became one again.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Hashem did not rest on the seventh day out of tiredness. He stopped creating so that His creatures could still feel Him.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Rabbi Landau teaches that creation is a process of concealment: had it gone one step further, people would have forgotten God completely. In A Soul at Peace he describes the feeling of a prayer that rises, hits a ceiling of worries, and comes back empty as the hiding doing its work.

Underlying need or longing

What does a person really want from Shabbos?

Beneath the noise of the week, a person longs to see the Painter and not only the painting. Shabbos is the day the dimming stops and you can see through the mask.

Deepest human truth

The Creator and His creation are not truly separate. On Shabbos, Rabbi Landau teaches, they become one again, and a person can feel it.

More questions from this teaching

• Why is God so hard to see in the world around us?