The Shabbat Effect

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the poll I posted last week. It was a bit of a softball, I admit. Everyone agreed that Jewish values provide the best guidelines for us to follow as we contend with the challenges of 2025. I promise a tougher question next time.

We’ll continue into that exploration via a little detour because, as I announced here, my new book – “The Shabbat Effect” – was just released on Thursday. I’m really pleased to see this work come into the light of day, and grateful that it is currently ranking as the top New Release in Jewish life on Amazon!

As the book begins its journey into the world, I’m going to turn into the byways of Shabbat that run off the main highway we have been motoring along up until now. All I have had to say about your personal spiritual curriculum and the mutual fund of Jewish values, etc., etc., is broadly applicable to everything in our lives, seen through a Jewish lens. The lane I want to turn into now runs through the territory of Shabbat. That subject follows nicely from the topic of Jewish “first principles” that we have been exploring.

Those “first principles” are what we need to learn, practice and internalize if we hope to live up to the ideal of what a life could and should be, according to Jewish tradition. And, if “Pirkei Avot” is, indeed, a book of chapters of Jewish first principles, as I translate that title, then the first of those first principles is bound to be something we need to pay attention to. The first mishna of Pirkei Avot begins, “Moses received the Torah at Sinai.”

The very first subject this book of wisdom and guidance stresses is receiving the Torah. And in the 1800 years since Pirkei Avot was redacted as part of the Mishna, that subject has remained paramount.

History has taught us in ways that have been neither kind nor gentle that no physical place, no building, no bricks and mortar, can be relied on to be the foundation for Jewish spiritual life. Indeed, the Temple in Jerusalem was intended to be such a place, but it was twice destroyed, we were exiled, and it has not been rebuilt.

The synagogue and rabbinic Judaism as we know it was born in response to the cataclysmic destruction of our central place, but synagogues also come and go on the tides of history. Since 1970, 20% of American synagogues have closed.

The Jews of Morocco did establish pilgrimages to the graves of tzaddikim (righteous people) but since 1950, over 98% of the Moroccan Jewish population has emigrated. The population at its peak in the 1950s was estimated at 300,000 people, which has shrunk to fewer than 3,000 today.

The examples are endless.

Islam has its Mecca and Catholicism has Rome and we have Torah, prayer, the inner life, connection to the divine and a holy calendar, none of which are dependent on fixed locations in space, like a building.

You might be thinking of the city of Jerusalem at this point and its centrality to contemporary Jewish life, but reflect on the fact that the holiest Jewish site in Jerusalem is a ruin. I’m thinking of the Kotel, the western wall. All that remains of the temple is this one retaining wall and its presence bears many lessons. One of them is that no matter how big and solid the stones, they are liable to be shattered by the tides of history, not unlike the “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone [that] stand in the desert,” all that remains of a statue of a great Egyptian pharaoh in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias.

The Torah has been and remains the tentpole of Judaism. And within that central source come Ten Utterances that state the most profound first principles of the Jewish people. Early among those 10 comes the commandment to observe a seventh day of rest.

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:8-10).

There has been much commentary over the fact that in one listing of the Ten Commandments, we are told to shamor [guard; observe] the Sabbath day and in the other it directs us to zachor [remember] Shabbat, but that distinction has no impact on the fact that Shabbat is central to the lessons of the Torah, and the Torah is central to the existence of the Jewish people.

As I wrote in the Introduction to my book:

It is hard to overstate just how revolutionary that command was in human history. It actually redefined human life. If every day of the week is given over to productive labor, then a human being is little more than an implement for material gain. But when work is limited to six days of the week, that makes room for something other than work to take a place in our lives. Six days a week a person is a laborer, and then the seventh day comes along and says, “You are more than just your labor. Who you are is more than just the sum of your productivity.”

When I started on my path of studying within the Mussar tradition, my intention was entirely spiritual. I was seeking guidance for my own soul because that inner self was hurting and lost at that moment. Then, when I took myself to Far Rockaway, NY, to become a student of Rabbi Perr, zt”l, I found Mussar embedded in a framework of Jewish religious observance that was not at all what I was looking for.

In “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” I record a conversation with Rabbi Perr in which I asked him about that disjuncture. Could I study Mussar without taking on the religious observance I was seeing all around me? He responded in the positive, but with an analogy that qualified his answer. “It’s like in a car,” he said, “The radio works as a radio, the water pump as a water pump. You don’t need the whole car to play the radio. Of course, from my point of view, I have never seen anyone using a car radio except in a car.”

That question about the intersection the religious and the spiritual has been a persistent theme as I have navigated my path over the past 25 years. (“Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” was published in 2002.) Shabbat offers the perfect frame for this exploration. It is a dominant and central religious obligation, one of the Ten Commandments, but its practice, its intention and its impact all register in the spiritual realm.

We can also say that the spiritual is primary. “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to be in awe of the Lord your God, to walk in all God’s ways, to love God, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 10:12).

But for spirituality to grow beyond unique peak experiences to become the substance of a spiritual life requires a path with a structure.

I’ll close for now with a metaphor I developed in “The Shabbat Effect.” When we recite the blessing over wine on Shabbat or a festival (that is, kiddush), the verbal formula we recite is unequivocally directed to the wine. We bless “the fruit of the vine,” and the wine is the agent of sanctification. Yet the fact remains that (except under extreme circumstances) we do not make kiddush without a cup. We lift the two together and then recite the blessing.

The cup represents the religious form, which is solid, and the wine represents the spiritual essence, which is fluid.

Although the priority clearly falls on the side of the spiritual, a container that holds the form is nevertheless essential. In our observance of Shabbat, the focus is on the spiritual, but without the “cup” of structure, the wine just dribbles away.

I know myself – and advisors have cautioned –that this focus on structure might possibly be heard as alien or even off-putting to some people. Help me get a gauge on this message by telling me:Have you had any experiences where structured practices played a role – positive or negative! – in your own spiritual life?