A Cathedral In Space — R' Steven Sermon

You’re traveling through another dimension, beyond both time and space. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: Shabbat! Heschel famously likened Shabbat to a cathedral in time. But in his sermon on March 7th, Rabbi Steven shared wisdom he has received which emphasizes Shabbat’s spatial dimension. How does this ancient practice connect us across generations, restoring our very souls?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

In 1897, Jewish leaders and intellectuals gathered for the First Zionist Congress. Their purpose was to discuss the existential issues facing European Jewry, and figure out what might secure a safe Jewish future. Reflecting on the meeting, the journalist Asher Ginsberg (writing under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’am) argued:

משישראל שמרו את השבת שמרה השבת אותם
More than the people Israel have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the people Israel.

Ha’am believed that, more than anything, a cultural and linguistic revival would save the Jewish people. He advocated for a Jewish Renaissance, that would engender a durable sense of pride regardless of where a Jew might find themselves. Shabbat was a cornerstone of this project, allowing the individual to resist and build resilience against a world that often made it hard to be a Jew. He wrote, “Without Shabbat returning their souls each week, the tribulations of the workweek would pull Jews ever lower, until they reached the lowest stratum of materialism — and moral and intellectual degradation.”

The rabbis teach that we are re-ensouled on Shabbat. In verses we sing every week (which come from this week’s Torah portion), we are told that God – having finished the work of creation — shavat va’yinafash, rested and was refreshed. But that word, va’yinafash comes from the same root as nefesh, or soul, so yes it means “to restore” or “to recuperate”, but not simply of our energy — but of our vital essence, the part of us that our tradition teaches was created in the divine image, the very thing that makes us human. For Ha’am, Shabbat was an essential bulwark against living among people who treated us as “less than.” It was a repeated reminder that our dignity (and the dignity of all human beings) is as immutable, as it is eternal.

That lesson is no less important now than it was then. While who is the victim and how they are victimized may have changed, we still live in a world that devalues human life. The images coming out of Iran, out of Lebanon, Israel, and Gaza are terrible. But the fact that we speak of casualties, whether military or civilian, as an unfortunate but inevitable facet of war is in some ways the greater tragedy. Too often we (and by we, I mean the societies we participate in) talk about people as objects, valued for their productivity but in the end expendable. This conversation takes its toll on us, as individuals, yes, but also on humankind as a whole.

And so Shabbat comes in as a much needed counterpoint. It says: put down the tools and measures of the workweek, and just be. And in being, be enough. And not just “enough” in the sense of meeting some minimum standard, but “enough” in the sense of deserving the kind of attention that we would give to something special and sacred, because that is exactly what we are: special and sacred. Shabbat is a time of rest and recuperation, of taking care of ourselves and each other, of carving out time for what re-ensouls us — whether that is song, or prayer, or learning, or long walks by the lake, or good food with the people we love.

In the biblical imagination, and according to what we just read in the Torah this week, Shabbat is an ot hi l’olam, an eternal sign between us and God: it is a reminder that our dignity is not arbitrary, but given to us by the source of all things — constant and enduring, moving between past, present, and future. It is a sign that has existed since the beginning of time, a zecher ma’aseh bereishit, when God paused, looked at all that had been created, and said tov, good (and more importantly, looked at humankind and said tov m’od, very good). And whether we call it intelligent design or the fortuitous unfolding of the cosmos across billions of years, as a reenactment of that very first Shabbat, this day reminds us that all the things we are worried about, all the things that might seem insurmountable or too terrible to bear are nearly imperceptible against the backdrop of creation. It is a terrifying realization, but one that I sometimes find comfort in. The small stuff seems so petty, so trivial when we contextualize it within our rapidly expanding universe. And the hard stuff? Well, this too shall pass.

And as an eternal sign, Shabbat also faces us forward. The rabbis teach that this day is me’ein ha’olam ha’bah, a taste of the world to come. According to this tradition, Shabbat is a moment when we step outside the world as it is to experience the world as it should be. If it is a reenactment of the very beginning, it is, in this way, also a pantomime of the very end: a post-messianic age when all the ills that plague us, as individuals and as a society, no longer exist. We momentarily take our attention away from everything that challenges us, whether big or small, and refocus on what brings us comfort, safety, and joy. It is a reorientation toward what is important. This is not to say that we should not fight to end the wrongs of the world — but that we should also remember what, exactly, we are fighting for.

By simultaneously orienting us toward the past and the future, Shabbat also contains every other Shabbat that has existed and will exist in between. When we light the candles, when we open the siddur, when we kiss the Torah as it circles the room, I like to imagine how many people, over thousands of years, have done the same thing — from the ancient temples of Judea to the shtiebels of Ashkenaz to the synagogues of Kolkata to here, where we are, in Chicago. And I also imagine how many more people will, for thousands of years, do the exact same thing. When the rabbis speak about revelation at Sinai, they teach that every Jewish soul that ever was and ever will be was present at that moment. I think of Shabbat in the same way, each of us connected to every other Jew, ever, through our words and actions.

It is easiest to picture Jewish time as a coil. It is linear, of course, moving from past to future. But it is also cyclical: connected to the flow of seasons, the phases of the moon, and the cycle of the week. And so we are present, here and now, in this Shabbat. But we are connected to every other Shabbat — from the beginning of time, when God finished birthing creation and rested, to the end of time, when all of existence will shift into an entirely new way of being. And so this coil, like an accordion, expands and contracts as we move through these moments of connection. The theologian Arthur Cohen once wrote that the Jew, more than any other person, exists in the recollection of first things and anticipation of the last. Standing in the present, we have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. In this way, Shabbat is not about stepping out of time. It is about stepping into time.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.” Shabbat, he teaches, is our great cathedral. It frees us, he says, from the tyranny of space so that we can become attuned to the sacred character of time.

It’s a beautiful idea. But every time someone invokes the image of Shabbat as a “cathedral in time”, the voice of my teacher David Kraemer pops into my head. When I was in rabbinical school, I took a course with him on the halakhah of Shabbat. In our very first class, he sat us all down to give a lecture on the spatial concerns of Shabbat. Yes, Shabbat occurs within time — but it also occurs within space.

Shabbat fundamentally changes our relationship with the physical world. There are laws about what we can and cannot touch, as we avoid tools of the workweek. There are laws about carrying things between the public and private domain — and how we define those spaces. There are laws about how far we can travel.

And even for those of us who do not observe Shabbat in this way, it changes how we interact with space. Take where we are right now, at CJDS. During the week this is a place of study (for the students) and of work (for the teachers), but today we have turned into something else entirely. On Shabbat, the classrooms of CJDS turn into sanctuaries and its hallways into places to sit down with each other, enjoy some coffee, and eat lunch. While most of us may not notice, I can imagine how aware a student or teacher would be that we are using this space in a new way.

And so I think about the idea of Shabbat as an ot hi lo’lam, as an eternal sign, yes, but perhaps a cosmic worldview. It is a fundamental perspective shift, asking us to pause, and take a wider view of time and space. Shabbat gives us a moment to ask ourselves: Is this really how we want to use the lives we have been given? Is this how we want to treat our bodies, our relationships with the people around us, the resources of this world? These questions push back against the moral and intellectual degradation that Ahad Ha’am was so concerned about. They help us clean off the accumulated shmutz that obscures the brilliance of our souls. We are re-ensouled, not because we were missing that vital spirit, but because we are given the chance to reconnect with what was already there — but had been hidden by the false message that we were somehow lacking.

Shabbat is a countercultural lens against a world that defines us by productivity, and discards us when we are no longer useful. It is anathema to concepts of necessary collateral or unfortunate losses. It reminds us that who we are, as we are, is enough — and in that enoughness, every human being is deserving of care and respect. It is a way of peering beyond what is to imagine what might be. It puts the challenges of this moment into perspective. It reminds us — looking back at how far we’ve come and reminding us of where we want to go — that change is possible.

More than ever, we need this ancient spiritual technology. The world is a hard place right now. Incredibly so. But this cathedral we have built can stand the test of time.