The Shabbat Effect

According to the Mussar teachers, working to develop our inner traits is the central activity of every aspect of our lives. Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz, an influential Mussar leader in Europe in the early twentieth century, illustrated this nicely by saying that if we ask a person who is baking matza what they are doing, the answer should not be, “I am baking matza,” but rather, “I am developing the traits of watchfulness and alacrity."

The notion that everything is perfect on Shabbat is not meant to be a verifiable fact but, as we have seen previously, a chosen and adopted inner attitude. Or, if you will, an “as if.” We have the power to make the choice to conduct our day “as if” it were perfect

The work of creation is ongoing. But how can we square that knowledge with the teaching that after six days, God declared creation complete? The answer is that creation was not complete in an absolute sense, but it was declared complete for that moment, in order that the seventh day would be one of rest. It was not that God had wrapped up every final detail of every aspect of creation for all time and had finally earned a day of rest; rather, it was that in order to rest, God declared creation finished, for the moment

God created the world with Ten Utterances, the final one of which was to create the human. That happened on the sixth day of creation, and it was only later, on the seventh day, that God “rested” from creating the world and in the process, created menucha [rest] itself. This implies that rest was not part of the corpus of Utterances with which God created the world, which ended with the creation of the human on the sixth day. Not being uttered, rest must have been created from a silence when God did not speak. Silence itself is therefore the root source from which menucha springs.

A metaphor I like to use to explain the difference is that emunah means that you recognize there is a wall, whereas bitachon means shifting your center of gravity to lean on it. That’s where trust comes in.

God can tolerate several alternative realities simultaneously, in potential, and it is only our action of becoming worthy that determines which reality becomes manifest in this world. Our worthiness is determined by our bitachon.

Shabbat practice teaches us that the locus of control in our lives is not in our own hands. True, we are not powerless, but neither are we anywhere near as powerful as we seem to believe we are responsible to be