(excerpts from what you would have heard tonight)
Underlying just about every Torah portion dealing with some creative act there is a reference to Shabbat. Build this, design this, fashion this, create this…But invariably it also says, “Observe the Sabbath; no manner of work may be done.”…So we ask, “Why bother resting when we’ve got all this work to do?”
We’re the only people who legislate rest via Shabbat. It drove the Romans crazy…”These Jews are weird!,” they said, “No matter what we do to them they refuse to work on the seventh day. Go figure!”
Shabbat and its ramifications are fluid…Liberal Jewish movements have often been creative to give contemporary meaning to an ancient concept. I recently found a new approach which I’d like to share with you; it is based upon the two stories of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis.
In chapter one we find lots of human productivity from the moment God makes humans b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. God created (past tense, as it were), humans create (present tense) …”be fruitful and multiply,” “replenish the earth and subdue it.” Humanity is to have dominion over the fish, the fowl and every living thing.
So, who needs God? The majority of the Founding Fathers of our nation were deists who believed that God created the earth and then remained indifferent. Isn’t that what we are to believe from the words in chapter one?
Along comes the second chapter…We humans were not autonomous and creative; we were passive and dependent. Adam is formed from the dust. He is instructed to guard the Garden, not to subdue it, and relies on God for sustenance. “Eat from these trees, young man, and don’t eat from that tree,” God insists. Well, even though it didn’t last long, it is radically different from the picture of humanity painted in the first chapter.
Then we read that Adam is lonely. Previously he and Eve were created together; now God removes a rib from Adam and fashions a woman. Together they are not “invincible brokers of power,” as Rabbi David Hoffman referred to their first iteration, “They are portrayed as vulnerable…dependent on each other and on God for both emotional and physical survival.”
And from this dichotomy we find also the dichotomy of work and rest.
All week long we produce…whether it’s the farmer or the technician, the scientist or the baker. We do things. We use things. We enjoy things…today our cell phones and laptops are additional examples…We do so because we can, and in certain respects because God told us to.
But suddenly God says, “Stop! Let’s make believe that we’re now in chapter two….A man and woman are chewing on dandelions, waiting for ME.” What God is saying is that there was no room for God in the first chapter after the initial creation, but there is room now….
The two chapters emphasize both human creativity and vulnerability, human strength and human powerlessness. “So too does Shabbat serve to remind us of the tensions inherent in human nature.” We move from creative activity for six days to enjoying the world in the seventh.
The greater founder of Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, said, “Man…is engaged in a constant struggle to gain mastery over God’s creation, to bring nature under his control….He is thus in danger of forgetting his own creaturehood – his utter and complete dependence on (God) for all things. We renounce on Shabbat every exercise of intelligent, purposeful control of natural objects and forces, we cease from every act of human power in order to proclaim God as the source of all power.”
Therefore, in conclusion, Shabbat is a lesson in humility.
S T A Y H E A L T H Y!
SHABBAT SHALOM!