Counting down to Shabbat – Vayakhel
Chapter atter chapter of the sidrot this month. we read of the building of the tabernacle in e wilderness. All of a sudden there comes a paragraph about Shabbat, with no apparent connection with the main subject.
The commentators explain the digression in these terms: “Though Moses instructed the people to build the sanctuary, they had to take care not to break Shabbat in the course of the project.”
True, the tabernacle was being created as a focus of God’s presence, but Shabbat was an even higher tabernacle, a tabernacle in time.
Every generation has to learn this lesson. With all the pace and pressure of life’s demands, no matter how many priorities one has, Shabbat must not be allowed to fall by the wayside.
We need the tabernacle in time. Not as a weekly vacation to be spent (as Norman Lamm puts it) in a vacuum of inactivity. Nor as a mere moment of idleness, leading, possibly, to boredom and sheer mischief. No; Shabbat must and can be something positive.
On the famous verse in B’reshit, “And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made” (Gen. 2:2), the rabbis asked, “How could God still have been working on the seventh day?” – and said, “Indeed, there was one thing He did create on the seventh day. Bara m’nuchah – He created rest!” Rest is a positive experience which you have to create.
Zalman Schachter describes the weekday mode as one of aggression and speeded-up heartbeat. The Shabbat mode, in contrast, has a slower pace, the heart beats more calmly, and you take deeper and longer breaths. You get there by a whole count-down procedure.
First comes the urgent thought, “Soon it will be Shabbat!” Then the physical preparations, making yourself and your home ready for the sacred day. You slow your pace down deliberately. You hum a melody, you put on your Shabbat clothes, you get money ready for the tzedakah box.
For a moment you sit down quietly by yourself, not talking, just thinking back over the week, doing personal t’shuvah.
You shift your senses to the Shabbat mode. You breathe deeply. There is a sudden inrush of feeling… “I’m alive!” (Abraham Joshua Heschel called this “radical amazement”‘).
You light your candles. No more “weekday” talk. You come early to the service. You tune in, You let the siddur speak to you as it will. You recite Kiddush as your personal testimony that there is a God who made the world and gave you life.
You eat unhurriedly. You sing slowly. You chat peacefully. You bensch gratefully. You take a stroll, perhaps with a loved one or friend.
You realise what the sages meant when they said that Shabbat is a foretaste of the World to Come.
