Two halves of a whole.
The coronavirus shines a poignant light on one-half that has virtually no toehold in our consciousness.
It’s strange. If we take a different whole, we couldn’t excise one half. Marriage, for example, or a tight-knit business partnership. They don’t work if one-half of the whole is absent.
But sometimes, one half of the whole is forgotten. Take something as simple as a day: work and relaxation, or work and family. If I am asked what I did today, and I answer only work, or only what I did before or after work, half of the whole is forgotten.
That is the way it was with Shabbos — before the coronavirus hit.
It’s instinctive to forget one half of Shabbos. Ask what Shabbos is all about and the answers will range from candles to wine to family to rest to prayer to family to holiness to Torah study to sleep to gourmet food and the list goes on.
The entire list adds up to one-half.
The entire list focuses on one day of the week, on Saturday, on Shabbos itself.
The entire list ignores the way Shabbos is set down in the Hebrew Bible. The entire list reads like this:
“Six days shall you work . . . and the seventh day . . . you shall not do any work . . . “ (Exodus 20:9-10).
That’s the whole.
It starts with six days. That is one-half. The seventh day is the other half.
Meaning: It is difficult to find meaning in Shabbos if one’s week is lacking in meaning.
Because of the coronavirus, with “sheltering in place” and “social distancing” and massive job loss, the first half of the weekly whole has become a mighty challenge for countless Jews.
The Talmud in tractate Shabbat (119a) put it this way: Don’t read the first word in the first mention of Shabbos in the Hebrew Bible this way: “And the heavens and the earth were finished.” Rather, read the first word this way: “And they finished the heavens and the earth.” Who is they?
Wasn’t it G-d alone who created the heavens and the earth? Actually, not.
Each person is to be a partner with G-d in creation. G-d and me: that’s they finished. I am supposed to find meaning in what I do all week. I am supposed to find so much meaning that I have a partnership with G-d. My job at the end of the week — just before Shabbos begins — is to ask myself this question: Have I been a good partner this week? Have I made my six days count? Have I done what I am supposed to this week?
Have I done G-d’s work?
That is the first half of the Shabbos whole that is so often absent from our consciousness — because we take it for granted. We get up. We go to work, or stay home with the children, or go to school. Whatever we do, we do something. We have a partnership with G-d.
Not so for many people right now.
Now, the challenge is less how to honor Shabbos on the seventh day than how to go into Shabbos from a position of meaning on the previous six days.
I have heard: “Every day I am home. On Shabbos I am home. What’s the difference?”
That is the Shabbos challenge in the coronavirus era: to fashion new meaning, a new job, a new partnership, a new way to fill my six days. It’s a new discipline, even if, we fervently hope, one that will soon pass.
When it does pass, G-d willing, perhaps we will carry forward a fuller understanding of Shabbos as two halves of a whole. The deeper the meaning in the first half of the whole, the holier and more rewarding the second half.
“Shabbat shalom” — a whole Shabbos.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
