Dear TBT Family,
One of my chief joys in the last week has been putting my winter blanket up and taking out my summer “cooling cover.” While there is a sense of coziness that comes with the winter blanket, I find a sense of freedom with the summer cover. Meanwhile, it feels like the porch is calling my name in the evenings as the sun takes its sweet time setting over the hills. And the beach beckons each Shabbat.
Our lives are marked by recurrences in time and season that nonetheless are not truly a circle, but rather a spiral, in which the return of the familiar sounds more like a harmonious echo than a repetition.
The rabbis recognized this sense of not-quite-recurrence. After the flood receded, God promised to never again upturn the laws of nature, but God also gave us a way to step out of the regimented time we, as humans, seem to need. Shabbat, a weekly vacation from the clock, is that space.
Rav Yehuda HaLevi, a medieval Spanish rabbi, poet, physician, and philosopher put this into words in his poem Avdei Zman (Slaves to Time), writing “Slaves to time are slaves to slavery /only those who work for God are free.” On Shabbat, we let go of our metered labor and instead welcome in an extra “ensoulment” of rest and repose in the presence of the holy.
What this looks like is different for each person who practices it. For some, lighting candles with the family on Friday night as Shabbat comes in is the moment of separation from the week. For others, it can be as simple as choosing not to listen to the news on Saturdays. Rabbi Zalman Shalomi Schachter famously explained that if walking around the mall was one’s way to let go of the weight of the week and reconnect to the inherent Shalom of God, one should get in the car and drive to the mall on Shabbat.
I encourage you to find your special Shabbat space this summer. We will continue to enjoy our Shabbat evening services each week—both in our new sanctuary and on our airy veranda. We will celebrate Clara Calvert later this month as she is called to the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah. And our choir has already begun to prepare for our Board Installation Shabbat Service that same weekend (June 23-24).
We would love to see you there.
Kol Tuv,
Dr. C