Shabbat Gathering: The separation and reunification of Shabbat.

Dear Chevra, as is our custom, we will gather tonight at 5.45p ct to welcome Shabbat. These are the coordinates:

Zoom
Meeting ID: 963 5113 1550
Password: 1989
Phone: +1 312 626 6799

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Here we go.

Separation and reunification. In general, popular and religious culture prefers the idea of reunification. We strive to live in a world where "All is One,” to borrow a quote from Dr. Bronner’s bottle of soap. Separation is considered evil. Segregation, apartheid, social and economic classes — all these are considered as something wrong with a system that must be moved, by any means necessary, to a state of reunification.

Some people sometimes gain a perspective of reunification through chemicals. Psychedelics famously help some people view the world as one, a unified sphere without chasms of separation. Then there was the famous picture of “Earthrise” over the moon that some people believed help them see the world differently, without separation. And in science, there is the Gaia hypothesis that there are no discrete systems in the world, that everything is tied together into a single, unified system.

The separation.

In the Jewish tradition, the biggest separation we might think about is the separation Hashem used to create the Earth, the separation of the light from dark, water from the dry land, woman from man, Shabbat from the rest of the week and so on. At Shabbat, we celebrate the separation of Shabbat from the rest of the week, but I also regard it as a reunification with a better world.

The reunification.

Some of the rabbis of Talmud believed that on Shabbat we are given an extra soul, the soul that for the rest of the week resides “above” to use common theological geometry. On Shabbat we are reunited with the Divine. On Shabbat, if the situation is propitious, we are physically reunited with our lover. On Shabbat, we are temporarily relocated from this petty world to gan eden, paradise, and glimpse what Hashem promises us.

We greet Shabbat with blessings, candle light, delicious bread, and sweet wine. When Shabbat ends, we say good bye with an extra bright candle, the smell of sweet spices, and more wine and these are suppose to make us feel nostalgic for Shabbat. For both ceremonies, we sing beautiful songs about the blessings of Shabbat.

Shabbat separates us from the rest of the week, but it is holy as it reunites us with the divine.

And may it be for all of us a blessing.

See you tonight!
Gut Shabbes!

All my love,
brian.

PS

I'm going to "color outside the lines" a bit with this post script and share something with you that, many years ago, made a profound impact on me. It isn't from the Jewish tradition. Ram Dass wrote a book entitled Be Here Now and Maria Popova wrote about it in her newsletter, The Marginalian. It has to do with reunification.

When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.

This is a difficult notion for the Western mind to grasp — too easy to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too quick to slip into the tyrannical Romantic ideal of merging.

At its heart is something else altogether: a kind of transcendent ego-dissolution under which the self ceases to be and becomes Being.

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