Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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A gift

I have the good fortune to share a birthday with one of the great poets, Robert Burns. The reason I say good fortune is because Burns’ birthday is no mere date on the calendar (January 25 if you’re wondering). It is an evening for friends to share cheer, drink and food and, of course, the immortal words of the bard.

So I am lucky that at least once a year I am reminded of Burns’ sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant (often both) perspectives on life.

One line in particular is reverberating these days: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” These words, made eternal by John Steinbeck, find themselves in “To a mouse,” about a mouse who ventures onto an open field for sustenance, only to meet its demise by the teeth of a plough.

Burns’ meaning is a version of the Yiddish idiom: “Man plans.
G-d laughs,” a reality we’re all living with today. How many of us planned to travel for Passover? Or were readying for out-of-town guests? Or had large seders planned with relatives we see only annually?

“The best laid plans . . . ”

Amid this chaos, however, there is something steady, something consistent, an event that hasn’t been postponed or cancelled: Shabbat. It may look different, but it’s still Shabbat. Every seventh day. A day to rest. To turn off the devices — to stop following the latest on the coronavirus.

In times like these we realize what a gift G-d gave us when He rested. He showed us that we, too, can take one day to leave the rigors of daily life. The Hebrew word used is menucha, which in his volume The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls “happiness, stillness, peace and harmony.” It sounds blissful.

It is.

Shabbat Shalom.

Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]

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