All Your Work Is Done

“Six days you shall work, and do all your work.” Opening A young married man once came to see me. There was a sadness on his face, a quiet sadness, the kind that has no tears in it. He said to me, “Rabbi, I keep the Sabbath. I light the candles. I say the blessing over the wine. I sit at the table. I do everything just right. But I don’t feel anything.” I asked him, “What else?” Then he told me the real thing. “All week long I fail. There are things I do that aren’t right. There are thoughts. There are words I say. There are days that are just empty days. And then the Sabbath comes, and I sit there and I feel: What, this is me? This hypocrite is the one sitting at the Sabbath table?” My friends, this is a real question. And it is not only his. All Your Work, Even the Work Inside You Our Sages teach in the Mekhilta, an ancient commentary on Exodus: “All your work is done. Let it seem to you as if all your work is done.” The simple meaning is about the work you do for a living, the business of the weekdays. Do not walk into the Sabbath with your head still in your accounts, in the store, in your plans for next week. But there is a deeper meaning, and that is what I want to share here. “All your work” means all of it. That includes the work of the inner self. It includes the inner accounting you keep, the guilt about Monday, the shame from Thursday, all the “I should have” and all the “why did I do that.” These are also work. Weekday work. And about them, too, it says: let them seem to you as if they are done. Finished. Set down. Carrying all that baggage into the Sabbath is itself a kind of labor. It is work. And a Sabbath like that, where a person sits weighing himself, lecturing himself and feeling he is not worthy, is not a Sabbath. It is a courtroom. The Extra Soul: Something New, Not Something Added The Talmud teaches: “An extra soul is given to a person on the eve of the Sabbath.” The holy Zohar, the classic book of Jewish mysticism, explains that this soul comes “from the days above.” It comes from higher days, from a completely different reality. Notice the exact words. It does not say a person is given extra strength, or an extra feeling. He is given a soul. A whole new reality of soul. And this soul does not remember Monday. It knows nothing about Thursday’s failure. It is clean. This is not because something was forgotten. It is because this soul was not there. It is a different soul. Here is the new idea we are talking about. When you walk into the Sabbath carrying the whole load of the week, you are taking this new, clean soul and dressing it in worn-out rags. You are refusing to accept the gift. Weekday Work and Sabbath Work On the weekdays the command is “You shall be holy.” It is in the future tense. It speaks of a process. Do, toil, purify, climb higher. This is the work of sorting out the good from the bad, the work of the weekdays. And it is a very honorable work. But on the Sabbath it does not say “You shall be holy.” On the Sabbath it says: “For you are a holy people.” You are holy, now, today. Not “you will be.” Not “if you try hard.” You are. The work of the Sabbath is not to become holy through one more effort. The work of the Sabbath is to agree to a state of holiness that is given from above. To set down the need to justify yourself. To receive. And here, my friends, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains this point. Heavy sadness and dark gloom over past sins can pull a person inward, into heaviness and despair. When they do that, they are the advice of the evil inclination itself, the inner voice that pulls us toward wrong. That voice knows that a person sunk in sadness cannot serve Hashem. In Closing The Sabbath is not a courtroom for the week that passed. The Sabbath is, in the words of the Talmud, “a taste of the World to Come.” And in the World to Come there is no courtroom. There is revelation. So on Friday night, when you begin the songs that welcome the Sabbath, “Come, let us sing to Hashem,” know this: you are not walking into a courtroom. You are walking into an embassy. Into another country. A new soul is waiting for you at the door, and it knows nothing of what came before. There is only one question: Will you agree to set down the baggage and come in?