Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour of the entire Talmud. And we are continuing our exploration of Tractate Shabbos. And today we’re trying to talk about the inner meaning of what Shabbos is all about.
Now, a principle that we will come back to over and over and over again is that the legal parts of the Talmud and the narrative theological parts of the Talmud are always wedded together. And if you want to understand the deeper meaning of any tractate of any concept, don’t just pay attention to the laws. You definitely have to pay attention to that. That’s the daily practice. You also need to pay attention to the stories that are inserted.
And there are two stories that I want to highlight that I believe are central to Tractate Shabbos, which I believe in words is the longest tractate in the entire Talmud. It is a very, very long, very dense, very central and important conceptually of how we understand it.
And the first is a story that appears in Tractate Shabbos on page 33b, and is the story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who is the personality associated with mysticism. Whose ideas are then canonized in the Zohar, which is a mystical text. We’re not going to get into the entire history of the Zohar. But Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is this kind of mystical personality of the Talmud that appears throughout. He is a student of Rabbi Akiva, somebody else who I’m sure we will talk more about.
And there is a story about him fleeing from the Roman army as it’s conquering and trying to wipe out the Jewish people. And the Talmud says on page 33b that he and his son, Elazar, go to hide in a cave. And this miracle happens. They’re there alone in the cave, and a carob tree springs up in the cave. They’re able to eat, and they’re able to kind of… What the Talmud is trying to transmit is they are leading this very mystical existence of life. Like they’re totally removed from the world. They’re in a cave with everything that they need, and they don’t really need to engage with the rest of the world. They’re hiding out there, and “We’ll be safe. We have sustenance here, and we can just live our lives, the remainder of our lives, in this cave.”
Finally, one day, Elijah the Prophet comes to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son, and he stood at the entrance and says, “Somebody needs to tell them that the emperor died. The decree is over. It’s now safe to come out of the cave.” They finally step out. They’ve been in this cave for years. They see somebody who’s kind of like plowing and just doing day-to-day business and work, and they say, “Oh my God. What’s this person involved in? Just plowing and sowing the ground, doing farm work?” [They say, “You are leaving the eternal world, you are leaving eternal life, thinking about God, thinking about spirituality, and you’re just involved in these ephemeral activities?” And the Talmud says whoever they would look at, they would immediately burn. They would like burn up.
And then a heavenly voice came out and said, “Is this why I had you survive, to destroy My world? Go back into the cave. We don’t need you here. Go back into the cave.” So Rabbi Shimon and his son, they go back in the cave. And then again a heavenly voice comes out and says, “Okay, now you can leave.” What happened this time? They came out of the cave, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai like keeps it together. His son is still laser-beaming everybody. But every time he laser-beams somebody, Shimon bar Yochai goes and he heals them. And then, as they’re walking. They’re out of the cave. His son is still like, ah, laser-beaming everybody, ach, just dismissing them. And Rabbi Shimon is healing them. And then all of a sudden they bump into somebody. They see an elderly man.
A lot of stories have an elderly man, and the elderly man is somebody significant. Somebody said this is also Elijah the Prophet, according to some opinions. But this is clearly somebody who’s coming to teach them a serious lesson. And it’s an elderly man who doesn’t look that impressive or that important, and he’s holding two branches in each hand, myrtle branches, what’s known as hadasim: the same plant that we take in part on Sukkot. And he sees in each hand he’s got these myrtle branches, and they’re like, “What are you doing there?” And he says, “I got someplace to go.” He’s running, he’s out of breath, and he says, “What are these?” He says, “You know why I’m holding these? I’m holding these in honor of Shabbos.” He says, “Okay, why do you have two?” Says, “One corresponds to shamor, meaning to observe and guard the Shabbos. The Hebrew word for guarding the Shabbos is shamor, which comes from the very verse in the Torah. And in the other,” says, “zachor es yom haShabbos, to actively remember Shabbos. And I have one in each side.” And they look at each other, and Rabbi Shimon turns to his son, and he says, “Look at how beloved the mitzvot are to the Jewish people. Look at how beloved Jewish life is to the Jewish people.” And then they were put at ease.
What is this story about? Shabbos observance? And they say, “Oh, they love the commandments, everything is good,” and then they finally calm down. This story is really telling us something central to what Shabbos is all about. Shimon bar Yochai and his son go into a cave. They are removed from society. They just literally sit in a meditative state. And then they come out. And you know what the problem is if you spend too much time in the wilderness just meditating? You look at others and you become so dismissive and so negative. It’s almost as if you’re burning them. You’re killing them. You look at somebody and you’re just like, “These people don’t get it. They don’t have depth. They’re not serious. They’re just kind of drones going through life.” And so many of us, especially when you get involved in religious life, you can end up looking at others who maybe don’t have that opportunity, and you start to get dismissive. You start to say, “I’m doing the real thing. I’m involved in the eternal world. These people, enough of them. They’re not doing the serious work.” And this is not what God wants, and this is in fact at the heart of what Shabbos is all about.
What Shabbos is teaching us and what Shabbos teaches Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is that the simple act of honoring the Shabbos is how we allow eternity to fill up the entirety of our lives, even when we’re working. Because the beauty of Shabbos is that Shabbos also requires six days of work. In fact, on Shabbos, the way that we enter Shabbos, is we first make kiddush, we sanctify the day, but when Shabbos is finished, again we have a ceremony called havdalah. And havdalah is how we separate Shabbos from the rest of the week. And we make a separate blessing on havdalah.
Rav Tzadok HaKohen miLublin, the Chassidic thinker who animates so much of my own life, says something so remarkable. “You know what havdalah is?” says Rav Tzadok. “Havdalah is the kiddush, is the sanctification, we make on the other six days of the week.” This is what this elderly man is telling Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Judaism doesn’t want us to just stay in a cave in a meditative state. What Shabbos represents is the integration of our ambitions, of our work, of our creativity, of our individuality, but having at the end of it, at the center of it, just being and knowing that nothing that we do is how we earn our value. But we have inherent value in life itself. And Shabbos is returning to that most essential value, and that is the lesson that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai learns from this elderly man who takes these two palm branches. That’s something that he innovated on his own. That’s not an obligation. But he sees instinctively the Jewish people they love bringing these values into their own lives. Not just in the mountains and in the caves and in a meditative state. But bringing this and integrating it into our lives. And this is at the heart of what Shabbos is about and what Tractate Shabbos is about.
And this is why what is so amazing is that later on in Tractate Shabbos on page 88—you can look at it—the entire story of the giving of the Torah all appears in Tractate Shabbos. All of the narrative, all of the stories about the revelation of God at Mount Sinai all appear in Tractate Shabbos. Why is that? Why here? So aside from the fact that the Talmud tells us that revelation took place on Shabbos, but even more beautifully, Shabbos is that continued act of revelation in our lives. We may not be able to go back to Sinai, but we have revelation right here and right now in our lives.
Shabbos is an act of revelation where we find God. Where we remind ourselves of divinity. Not in the mountains. Not in the caves. But we show ourselves that divinity can be found in the very fabric, woven into the very fabric of life itself. So Shabbos, in many ways, is revelation itself. It’s not the historic revelation at Sinai, but it’s the ongoing revelation that takes place every single week after six grueling days of perfecting, making the world better through creativity. One day a week, each of us in our own way: we take like those two myrtle branches and we show ourselves, we show our family and we show the world how beloved the lesson that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai learned. How beloved Torah and mitzvot are in the life of the Jewish people.
Let’s continue our exploration of Shabbos, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.