The Boundaries and the Soul of the Holy Sabbath

The Question in the Heart There is a moment every young married man knows. It is Friday afternoon, an hour before the Sabbath begins. He is standing at home, putting things in order. And he feels that the Sabbath on its way is mostly a list: what is allowed, what is not allowed, what has to be prepared ahead of time, what he must not forget. Then he wonders in his heart: Is this it? Is this what Hashem meant when He said, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”? This question does not come from denying faith. It comes from love. The soul wants to experience something: delight, a calm mind, closeness to Hashem. And sometimes it feels as if the detailed laws are standing in the way. It is as if he were saying: I have a soul, and I have the Sabbath, and between the two of them stand the thirty-nine main categories of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath. Body and Soul in the Torah But anyone who has studied chapter four of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, knows that this question starts from a mistaken assumption. The commandments are not outside the soul. They are its garments. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, writes there that the commandments are “garments” for the soul. This is not a garment like a piece of clothing that you can take off. It is a garment that becomes part of the soul itself. It covers the soul and reveals it at the very same time. There is something deeper still. The holy Zohar, the great book of Jewish mysticism, says that the Torah has a body and a garment. The body is the command itself: the details and the action. The garment is the plain meaning that the eye can see. But inside the body there is a soul. In the Zohar’s words, the deepest secrets are the soul of it all. The soul is not off to the side of the law. It is inside it. The same is true of every law of the Sabbath. Each one has a body: the exact, technical boundary, which we may not move away from at all. And each one has a soul: an inner light hidden inside that very boundary, waiting for a person to reach it from within. An Example: Sorting Let’s take an example: the forbidden work of sorting. The body of this law is that on the Sabbath you may not separate unwanted bits from your food. There are rules, measures and cases, as there always are in Jewish law. A person who is not searching reads this and feels only a limit. One more restriction. But let us ask: What is the soul of this law? What light is hidden inside it? The Sabbath is a day when a person steps back from the work of “fixing.” He steps back from the endless need to arrange, to sort, to separate and to improve reality. All week long a person works hard. He fixes, he sorts, he picks out. On the Sabbath he rests from sorting. He accepts the world just as Hashem has given it to him. This is an experience of deep freedom. It means letting go of the need to be in control. Now, every young married man feels this freedom in his own way. One feels it about his business. Another feels it about the thoughts that trouble him. A third feels it about the tension with his family. The framework, the law, is the same for everyone. The experience, the soul inside it, is private and personal. It cannot be handed from one person to another. “His Own Way” Does Not Mean “Off the Track” And here is the new idea. When we say that each person must “find his own way” on the Sabbath, we do not mean paving a new road beside the law, and certainly not, Heaven forbid, in place of it. We mean the very same track, with the very same boundaries. But the view each person sees from his own window is different. The soul finds its own unique path toward the light while it travels on the shared track of the whole Jewish people. In the words of the holy Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement: nothing is empty of Hashem. The laws of the Sabbath are not empty of vitality. They are full of it. The inner work is not to run away from the boundary to look for some other vitality. The inner work is to dig inside the boundary until you uncover the light that is waiting there.