Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour of the entire Talmud. And today, we are continuing our exploration of Tractate Shabbos. And today I want to focus on practice: how to actually bring Shabbos into your life. And there is a difficulty in being able to do this. Obviously, in 10 minutes, we can’t cover every single detail—all of the 39 categories of intentional work. There’s so much to explore. We’ll try to give book recommendations. Shabbos is bookended, as we mentioned, by kiddush and havdalah. Kiddush is how we enter and sanctify Shabbos, and havdalah is kind of that exit of how we sanctify the rest of the week. Havdalah literally meaning to separate and kiddush literally means to sanctify.
I want to focus on something else, which is about kind of the lived Shabbos experience, and I want to discuss something that I had the privilege to write about in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where I wrote about the struggle right now that all people have, not just the Jewish people, of unplugging and being able to find a time to just extricate ourselves from technology and phones.
You know, I noticed something very interesting. There are so many people, brilliant people—at the top of it is Professor Jonathan Haidt, who has been screaming at the top of his lungs, saying, “We got to start unplugging. We are too connected to technology, and it is affecting the way our children develop. It’s affecting the way that we develop, our attention spans. People aren’t reading anymore. They have a hard time getting through a page in a book.” And yet, we know how badly we need to unplug, and we still struggle to do it.
And yet, we have a community, communities of thousands and thousands of people who manage to do this each and every week, and they do it through Shabbos observance. What do they know that other people are not getting? Everybody else who’s struggling with digital detoxes or 24 hours without my phone, and it doesn’t take on, and it doesn’t catch on. How is it that we have communities that are able to be Shabbos observant, five-year-olds, seven-year-olds who are able to do this, and yet as a society, this is of the most central struggles that we have as a civilization? And I want to talk a little bit about how to actually make Shabbos come alive, and these are points that I wrote about in that Wall Street Journal op-ed.
And the op-ed was titled “The Sabbath Is a Chance to Read Again.” I don’t pick out the titles. But one of the things that I notice is that if you go into a Shabbos-observant home, this is really remarkable, you always see stacks of magazines. It used to be you go to somebody’s house, they’d just have a People magazine, a Time magazine. You would see magazines. You don’t really see magazines anymore, except in Shabbos-observant homes.
Why? Because they need to print out everything they’re going to read on Shabbos beforehand. So, Shabbos is literally a way to preserve reading, but Shabbos needs to be created. We need a Shabbos experience, and how do you do that? So, that’s what I want to focus on.
In the 35 chapter of Exodus, the Jewish people are given the commandment of Shabbos, and it is right next to the commandment to build a tabernacle, that traveling temple that the Jewish people had in the desert. And that juxtaposition is where the 39 categories of work emerge from. But there’s something else really, really important in the introduction of these verses, and that is the way that the Shabbos is introduced to the Jewish people is with a very particular verb. And that verb is vayakhel—that it says that Moshe “gathered” the Jewish people together. No other commandment in the entire Torah is prefaced with the verb of gathering the Jewish people. Why do you have to gather the Jewish people?
So, if you listen to the word vayakhel closely, it comes from the root word that you may be familiar with, from kehillah, meaning community and congregation. And here is the first tip about actual Shabbos observance and experiencing the Shabbos. Shabbos, like much of Jewish life, is not a solo sport. Shabbos requires community. Anybody who has ever practiced or had Shabbos by themselves will know that is not the ideal practice of Shabbos. It can feel very isolating. It can feel very constricting. It can feel very removed. That is not what Shabbos is supposed to feel like. Shabbos is supposed to connect. Shabbos is supposed to animate.
How do we do that? Shabbos requires community. Shabbos requires others. Shabbos, in fact, is trying to shape and build community. If you go into a Shabbos-observant community, you see kids on the front lawn playing in the backyard. You see people around the table talking—one of them napping on the couch. At the heart of Shabbos is community itself.
There’s something else that sustains Shabbos, and this emerges from the 39 categories of work, and the brilliance of how halacha and the Talmud operationalized Shabbos observance. And that is, at the heart of Shabbos observance is the need for preparation. You can’t just enter into Shabbos. You can’t just say, “Okay, I’m working up to the bone, and then the moment Shabbos starts, I’ll turn off my laptop, my computer, and then go, and now Shabbos is going to happen.” That is not how Shabbos works. Shabbos requires preparation. Your meals need to be prepped beforehand. You need to make sure that you have all the things that you need on Shabbos. If you’re going to read a book or a magazine. I always try to buy a new magazine or a new book and read it over Shabbos. People who are familiar with my work may even know that I post every Motzei Shabbos on social media, “I read this over Shabbos,” what I was reading. I’m not just flexing of how many books I read. What I’m really trying to do is remind people of what Shabbos is able to create. Shabbos creates a reading culture, but that requires preparation. You can’t just enter blindly into Shabbos.
One of the things that I would recommend, especially in homes with young children, is buy special food for Shabbos. On Shabbos, and this all emerges directly from our tractate, we’re told to wear special clothes. We’re supposed to walk differently. Shabbos is an environment. It’s not just a list of prohibitions. Shabbos is almost like a place in the same way that the Tabernacle was this traveling place. Shabbos is our temple in time itself. But that requires preparation.
One thing that that my wife does that I think is so sweet. If you have a home with children. Shabbos morning the kids wake up, and they have candies laid out before them, each in their place for breakfast. Special Shabbos treats. A lot of homes have something called Shabbos parties, where they put out little nice snacks for the kids to have in the afternoon—maybe popsicles, or ice cream, or potato chips, whatever it is. Make Shabbos a time that you want to look forward to it. That requires preparation. You have a special wine that you enjoy, special cut of meat that you enjoy, save it for Shabbos.
That really creates, the way my wife and I talk about it, is we don’t get to go on vacation all that much, we have little kids. But you know what? We have a vacation every single week. It’s built into the calendar. Shabbos is our weekly vacation. A vacation that is uplifting. That is spiritual. But it requires, number one, community, and number two, it requires preparation.
I want to talk about the last point, which I think is a point that sometimes gets overlooked and people almost find out about it too late.
One of the difficulties on Shabbos is that you’re supposed to abstain from work. So this is what happens to me every summer. In the summertime, it gets like very sweaty and you’re like shaving before Shabbos, especially in that under the neck area. This is where it’s really hard to shave. And it’s like a sweaty Erev Shabbos, and you try to like, last minute, you’re shaving, and then Shabbos enters, and you know, what do you realize? You’ve got like a mohawk growing out from your neck. It’s just like you missed 10 spots. And now it’s like, “Oh rats, I have to go through all of Shabbos like this.” That’s a very real frustration of Shabbos. It’s the same frustration of like, “Oh my gosh, did you remember to buy the chicken?” and you’re like, “Oh shoot, I forgot.”
If you go to any Shabbos-observant home, especially on Friday, you’re going to see people reminding each other, “Did you remember this? Did you remember that?” Every reminder is an example of something they forgot a previous week. It is so easy to forget something, and then you get stuck. There’s a feeling of like, almost, “I’m stuck now. I’m stuck within Shabbos.” That’s a holy feeling. It’s a holy feeling because more than anything else, Shabbos is an exercise in self-acceptance—accepting you where you are and how you are.
The rest of the week, we’re perfecting, we’re trying to make things better, more efficient, optimize, etc., etc. On Shabbos, we stop from all of that, and we finally say, “I want to learn how to accept myself exactly where I am and how I am.” And in fact, there is a custom and the way that we enter into Shabbos that really captures this.
The last thing we’re supposed to do before we bring Shabbos is light Shabbos candles. And we light two candles for Shabbos. This can be men or women. Traditionally, the mother of the home has been the one to light Shabbos candles. And this is the last melacha, the last act of work, that we do to enter into Shabbos.
There are two things remarkable that come out from this. Number one, why is this the last thing that we’re supposed to do before Shabbos? You want to know why? Because lighting a candle is a metaphor for Shabbos itself. The rest of the week is the wax, is the wick, but a candle doesn’t really reach its purpose if it stands as a clump of wax with a little wick inside. We only reach our purpose when we light that candle, and now it’s finally fully a candle. That’s what Shabbos is in our lives and in the week. Shabbos is the soul of our lives. It’s where we finally get back to our most essential selves.
But there’s something else remarkable, and this is done everywhere on Shabbos. In 1955, on the cover of Life magazine, they had a picture of a woman lighting Shabbos candles. And if you’ve ever seen a traditional person light Shabbos candles, they do something very unusual, which is they cover their eyes and then they make the blessing.
Now there is a reason in halacha why we do this. We don’t want to make the blessing before we light Shabbos candles, otherwise it’s going to be Shabbos and then you can’t light the Shabbos candles. So we make the blessing afterwards. But it emerged organically of why we specifically cover our eyes and we make a blessing on the candles then. And this is something so beautiful.
Do you know why we cover our eyes when we light Shabbos candles? It’s because we’re reminding ourselves to stop looking. Stop looking at all the imperfections in our lives, in our families, in our community, and in the world. There are a lot of imperfections in the world. Shabbos is the opportunity to stop looking, to light the Shabbos candles, which is a metaphor for what Shabbos is in our own lives. We then cover our eyes, and we say we stop looking. And this is a time traditionally where people pray for their children, for their parents, for their family. This is a time where all of our deepest hopes and dreams for our lives and our family life. We finally say, “I’m wishing for the best, but I want to also pray for the strength and capacity to accept all those loved ones around me as they are.”
We spend the whole week studying, doing better, looking for promotions, optimizing, perfecting. Shabbos is a return. Shabbos is an act of self-acceptance. So in terms of bringing Shabbos to daily life. Number one, it needs community. Number two, Shabbos requires preparation. And number three, the frustration, the stuckness of Shabbos is not a bug. It’s a feature of Shabbos. Because what Shabbos is ultimately trying to teach us is how to have self-acceptance for ourselves, for our families, for our community, and for the entire world.
So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.