Sublime

For Sforno, this verse is a call to organize the week to make room for Shabbos, to make Shabbos feasible. It takes careful planning and thoughtful organization to ensure that what needs to be accomplished is done in six days rather than seven, that by Friday afternoon one can reasonably and responsibly call the workweek finished.

Judaism insists that chessed be the driving force of history and redemption. Chessed is a special kind of love, a love that accepts and treasures life as it is, even as it sees and embraces its potential for perfection.

Minhagim have often stultified Jewish life. According to Rabbenu Tam, the word minhag consists of the same four letters as the word gehinom.ai

Shabbat imposes the same structure onto the larger arc of our life, so that we understand that we participate in it, both in the moment-by-moment rising up and falling away of our lives with each breath, and in the fact that we ourselves will fall away one day. We were born and we will die, and this is the natural order of things and not something

h’assidim et les mitnagdim

we had no compulsion to try to be what we’re not. The freedom to say about a program, “That worked one year, it doesn’t work now,” is incredibly liberating.

Carrying a niggun in the heart throughout an entire week is a particularly powerful practice. The niggun becomes our anchor, our anthem, our lifeline during this period.

Il s’agit d’un commentaire linéaire sur les divers enseignements de la Mishna.