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The Shelter of Shababt
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Rabbi Lisa Goldstein
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The morning I wrote this greeting, I woke up very early. We had just concluded the final retreat for our second Clergy Leadership Program cohort and I was heading to the airport to return home for Shabbat. In the eastern sky there was the tiniest sliver of the crescent moon, just rising, heart-breakingly beautiful. It was just a few days before the month of Av began, with that same crescent moon setting in the west.
We are heading towards the end of the Three Weeks, the period between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, the season of loss and horror in our mythic history. It is the season of siege, deprivation, enormous suffering, terrible destruction and there are many traditional customs of mourning that mark this season.
In fact, the one thing during this period that continues to be a beacon of joy is Shabbat. It is worth asking, if the world is burning around us, how can we celebrate Shabbat? Shouldn't we be dedicating ourselves towards fixing this world that is experiencing so much horror? How can we take the time to dedicate to spiritual practice?
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Shabbat Meditations
Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg
If we look through the lens of Shabbat at ourselves, our world, and our lives, Shabbat is the harvest. It is the receiving. Shabbat is rest, repose, reflection, completion in the ongoing creative process. We recite the Shabbat prayer,
Yismechu B'malechutecha
-Let us rejoice in your realm, in your
malchut
.
Malchut
means kingdom or realm and in Jewish mysticism is identified with Shabbat.
"Let us rejoice in the
malchut of
malchut." Let us rejoice in being present, right here - in being present to this moment.
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Rabbi Jonathan Slater
What does it mean to be an adult? Among other things, it has to do with learning to control impulses to allow us to attain longer-term goals; learning to understand and feel responsible for the needs of others; letting go of childhood fantasies and misperceptions about how the world works for science, facts and reality.
In the end, most people who have attained the chronological age called "adult" can perform these tasks, some of the time.
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Rabbi Miriam Margles
"By cultivating a personal practice, we are receiving the holy texts that we have inherited by making them wholly our own. "
- Rabbi Shefa Gold
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Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell
"There is a realm of time," Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in his classic book
The Sabbath
," where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." We might conceive of the Sabbath as one of the core Jewish mindfulness practices. Practicing mindfulness and the Sabbath go hand and hand. Like mindfulness meditation, observing Shabbat asks us to let go of something in order to have something greater: something deeper, less familiar, and more ultimate. It helps us tap into what we all yearn for: balance in our lives, completeness, peace, joy, connection and wholeness. Its value can only be known in the doing.
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