Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour through the entire Talmud, and this week we are focusing on Tractate Shabbos, the second tractate after Brachos. And this is a fascinating tractate that is about, you guessed it, Shabbos, the seventh day of the week, where the Jewish people are commanded to rest. And Shabbos is something that is so sublime and so central. Throughout the Talmud, one of the proxies in which we evaluate Jewish belonging and Jewish connection is through Shabbos itself. Whether or not a person observes Shabbos in the Talmudic parlance is a proxy for understanding are they still a part of the larger Jewish community.
Why is Shabbos so central, and how does the Talmudic vision of Shabbos differ from our understanding of like this beautiful temple in time? There is a book that I’m sure many are familiar with. I read it when I was much younger. I’ve had many teachers recommend it to me. I think it is the most beautiful book when it comes to disclosing the beauty and centrality of Shabbos, and that is The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. And he has this beautiful language called Shabbos as a temple in time. It is the way that we rebuild the temple, not in Jerusalem, but literally through time itself.
Now, it’s a beautiful idea, it’s a poetic idea, but when you open up Tractate Shabbos, it is a terrifying mess. It opens up and throws you in, and the opening mishnah is one of the most technical legal questions about whether where you’re allowed to carry, what are you allowed to carry, what are considered the different forms of property. It is deliberately confusing. And in fact, the opening question of Tosfot, the first question of Tosfot in Tractate Shabbos, is like “Why are we talking about this now? Like start with the beauty. Start with maybe a more clear, sequential idea of the laws.” And instead, Tractate Shabbos opens up with questions about what you’re allowed to carry, what are the bounds of where you’re allowed to go.
And the real idea is that Shabbos, if you pay close attention to the word Shabbos, comes from the very root word of shav, meaning to return. And Shabbos is all about returning to our most essential selves. Returning to that part of ourselves that has Godliness. The most essential part of who we are is that kernel of divinity that rests inside of our souls, and Shabbos is about a return to that most essential self.
It’s a beautiful idea, and it’s really one of the most powerful and central ideas about Shabbos as a state of being and a temple in time. But if you go around and you go through this tractate, this tractate is all about what are you liable for, what are you not liable for, how do you do it, how do you not do it. It is really the very nitty-gritty details. It is not this soaring narrative about how to really explore your inner self, which one might expect if you had just read The Sabbath, this beautiful poetic work which I absolutely recommend.
But Tractate Shabbos is really about the nitty-gritty, and this can make Tractate Shabbos look absolutely ridiculous. In fact, I want to share a little video clip with you. When Joe Lieberman was running for vice president with Al Gore. This is many, many, many years ago. I think the best moment I’ve ever seen on broadcast television was a moment on The Daily Show.
The Daily Show was with Jon Stewart, and the correspondent was Steve Carell, who went on to fame with The Office, and he’s a big movie star now. And they imagined in this clip what’s going to happen if Joe Lieberman gets elected? Joe Lieberman was widely known, publicly known, as Shabbos-observant in the traditional sense. So what’s going to happen if he gets elected? Check out this clip of them exploring the possibility of Joe Lieberman entering the White House.
[Video Clip Begins]
Steve Carrell:
As an Orthodox Jew, Lieberman must follow a whole different set of rules. For instance, he must diligently observe the Sabbath, during which many activities are strictly forbidden. Talmudic scholars have compiled these activities into a sacred text entitled The 39 Avoth Melacha of Shabbath. Jon, if you can see, that’s from the Little Scholar series.
The book details 39 forbidden acts. Among them, if I could, would be winnowing, threshing, hitting with a hammer, and binding sheaves. Now, Jon, can our nation survive with a vice president who is restricted from binding sheaves on a Saturday?
Jon Stewart:
I think we could. That’s never happened.
Steve Carell:
Really? The year was 1897. Garret A. Hobart was serving as vice president under William McKinley. Not an easy thing to do. French emissaries brokering a trade deal with McKinley demanded sheaves, but those sheaves were delivered to the White House unbound. The fragile pact would have disintegrated if not for Hobart’s quick work. Jon, it was a Saturday.
Jon Stewart:
Steve, that that never happened.
Steve Carell:
1965! To help push Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act through Congress, Vice President Hubert Humphrey winnows through the night! I don’t think I need to tell you what night that was.
Jon Stewart:
I guess you don’t.
[Video Clip Ends]
Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
So if you enjoyed that clip, this is the book that is referenced on The Daily Show. It is not a tractate of Talmud. It is called The 39 Avoth Melacha of Shabbath. And I want to explain these categories and the centrality of these categories in observing Shabbos. Now, this happens to be an absolutely wonderful book. It’s really designed for kids, but I’ve read it. I find it really opens up and makes Shabbos rest and Shabbos observance very easy to explore.
But I want to talk a little bit about wherethese categories come from and their actual centrality. So in Tractate Shabbos, they actually mention what is permitted and what is not permitted work on Shabbos, and they present 39 categories of work. Now, where do these categories come from and what are they about?
In Tractate Shabbos, on page 73a, we begin to explore the actual categories of work that are prohibited on Shabbos. And there are 39 categories of work that are called melacha. Melacha is literally defined as work, but as we’ll see, it’s much more than just work. You can lift up, I don’t know, ten pounds. That is not a problem on Shabbos. It is specifically going to be 39 categories of creative work. And where does this come from? This comes directly from a verse in the Torah.
If you look in Chapter 35 of Exodus, the thirty-fifth chapter of Exodus, the commandment to observe Shabbos is presented to the entire Jewish people. This is kind of like right at Sinai, right after we received the Torah. The Jewish people are then given the details of Shabbos observance. And right afterwards, right next to the commandment of keeping Shabbos, is the commandment to build the temple in the wilderness, what is known as the Tabernacle or the Mishkan.
Now, they built this kind of traveling temple to accompany them in the desert. They would build it all up, and then when they would travel, they would have to take it all down. The categories of Shabbos derive from the 39 categories of work that were needed to literally erect and deconstruct the traveling Tabernacle, what’s known as the Mishkan, throughout the Jewish people’s travels in the desert. And it was each of those categories of work that were then used to develop different categories that are now prohibited on Shabbos.
Now, there’s something really amazing about how the Talmud essentially institutionalizes and creates community through legal categorization, and it is worth thinking about. What the Talmud derives from this is that only certain categories of work are prohibited. What the Talmud calls, and this is the language of the verse describing the building of the Tabernacle itself, is meleches machsheves. Meleches means work. Machsheves, you may be familiar, comes from the root word machshava, in Hebrew means thought.
It means thoughtful, deliberate, creative acts of work, and there are 39 categories. Perhaps the most famous category is cooking. We’re not supposed to cook on Shabbos. Everything is supposed to be ready before Shabbos.
The way that the Talmud essentially categorizes these categories of work is actually essential to the actual beauty and the experience of Shabbos itself. And this is where you really see the marvel of the Talmud in creating an actual lived experience that can be shared with others. Because here’s the problem. If Shabbos just becomes a day of rest and a day of relaxing, everyone’s going to do it differently, everyone’s going to think about it differently. Everyone is going to say, “Ah, this is work for me, it’s not work for you. Oh, I enjoy doing this, I don’t enjoy doing that.” And you know what would happen? Everybody would have a different Shabbos. It would not create community.
Part of the brilliance of the Talmud is actually taking concepts and operationalizing them into day-to-day life. Operationalizing the concepts that we have in the Torah, and operationalizing them so they can be integrated in our day-to-day life.
And what Shabbos is trying to do is ensure that this is a day to really turn inward:to be with family, to be with community, to make sure that you’re not just hustling and bustling and dropping kids off at soccer practice and then picking this up at Target and going here and going there and responding to all the unanswered emails. No, that is not what Shabbos is supposed to be. Shabbos is supposed to be a legitimate return to self and almost a shrinking of the world, which is why the most difficult part of Shabbos is there’s no… You can’t prepare. You’re not supposed to prepare anything on Shabbos. That is what the rest of the week is for. And then we’re supposed to enter Shabbos and have that exhale.
How do we learn to do that? Everyone would do it differently. This is where you see the genius and the brilliance of the Talmud, of how it operationalizes through halacha, through Jewish law, to ensure that on Shabbos, not only is every individual having that experience, but what it’s actually doing is connecting everybody together. It’s actually building communities. If you return back to your community—Shabbos is about returning—then you can’t go outward. You’re not traveling on Shabbos. You’re not cooking on Shabbos.
Now here’s something that I want to say upfront.
If you’ve ever kept Shabbos or if you’ve ever been in a place where others are keeping Shabbos, you will notice something that especially leading up to Shabbos is extraordinarily hectic. I think that’s a Yiddish word:hectic. It’s like it’s chaotic.
I remember like Erev Shabbos was like intense, like, “Did you remember to do this? Did you remember to bring this out? Did you pick up the dry cleaning? Did you get the fruit from the store? Did you put up the cholent?” All of this stuff, because you’re not cooking on Shabbos. So everything needs to be fully cooked beforehand. We have ways of keeping things warm, but we’re not cooking new things, we’re not putting chicken, we’re not barbecuing.
This creates an experience on Friday where, honestly, Shabbos can be very… Like Erev Shabbos, Erev Shabbos meaning that on Friday, the day before Shabbos, erev meaning the dawn of, right before Shabbos, can be extraordinarily hectic.
But I want to share something that I think is so important to understanding how Shabbos works. You know, I one time heard from somebody who is not Shabbos-observant that, “Shabbos this week is it’s just really inconvenient. We have too much going on, we can’t do it.” And here’s the real answer: if you expect Shabbos to only be there when it’s convenient, you’re not going to have Shabbos.
Shabbos deliberately comes as a rhythm, and it’s never convenient. You have to learn how to truly prepare for a day where there’s going to be a day where I’m not touching, I’m not fixing, I’m not perfecting. What we’re doing on Shabbos is through the inversion, through abstaining from these categories of work, we’re actually building that Temple. The same way that we would erect and deconstruct a temple that followed us through the desert through our travels. This is what we do in our everyday lives.
By abstaining through acts of work, we also create a temple, and that temple is known as Shabbos itself. Anybody who has entered a Shabbos-observant home who gets a hang of the rules and the cadence and the rhythm of Shabbos knows that there is a feeling. There is an environment that emerges from Shabbos that only comes specifically through understanding how these categories of work, each of which you can learn about here.I think the most important in contemporary times is no cooking. That’s the hardest one. No cooking, no traveling, no electronics. But these categories of work are derived from the construction and deconstruction of the Tabernacle of the Temple.
And in the same way, as Heschel exactly said, this is how we build Shabbos in our own lives. We have a day where we have categories of work that there is a consensus around, and this is the beauty of Talmudic thinking:creating a consensus where everyone is creating and everybody is participating in the same Shabbos environment, in the same Shabbos community. It brings families alive, it brings communities alive, and it sustains, quite literally, the Jewish people.
So I’m so excited to explore Shabbos and all of the operational definitions, the 39 categories of work. There’s so much to get to, but let’s keep making Torah sweet.