Class 4: Redemption in Time through the Sabbath Liturgy

Past, Present, and Future as One

The mystics believed that the Sabbath brings the past, present, and future into mysterious unity—something akin to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s characterization of the Sabbath as a “glimpse of eternity within the palace of time.” 

This notion of the fluidity of time, the eruption of the eternal into the present, is developed in early Chabad kabbalistic thinking. 

In this view, the Sabbath is an opening into an awareness of perennial re-creation. On the Sabbath, an individual’s experience of the seventh day in the here-and-now is simultaneously an entrance into the mystery of the time of creation. In other words, the individual feels both the revered past and the divine in the present moment. 

The Sabbath is a unique opening in time when the shekhinah descends into the world as crowns of light. And this happens, weekly, in a readily available manner. A mythic drama is thus linked to the entrance of the Sabbath on Friday at dusk and to the Sabbath liturgy. This metaphysical-psychological mythos, namely, the descent of the extra Sabbath souls onto the people of Israel, is described in a prominent passage of the Zohar. The Sabbath is a remarkable moment of the meeting of the upper and lower realms, or as Heschel puts it, “when heaven and earth kiss.”

Kabbalistic theology understood the shekhinah as a part of the divine that encompasses humanity. The Sabbath thus plays a special role in restoring the relationship between God and the human being. Similarly, the power of spiritual fellowship and community becomes manifest on the Sabbath. And on the Sabbath the individual’s experience of divinity is particularly emotionally charged (see the text by the twentieth-century Polish rabbi, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, in particular). 

On the Sabbath, the human realm is seen and experienced as a cyclical process, as “cosmic time,” rather than a purely linear one (Elliot Wolfson has discussed the idea that the cyclical is linear and vice versa as a fourth dimension characterized as the “timeswerve”). In this view, the human practitioner both participates in and influences an eternally returning rhythm of divine being. 

The seventh day is a semblance and temporal embodiment of the metaphysical “world to come,” as the sixteenth-century Lurianic kabbalist Elijah de Vidas notes. 

And the seventeenth-century mystic Isaiah Horowitz reflects upon the correlation of the soul to the Sabbath, as well as on the Sabbath as the “world to come,” focusing on the spiritual meaning of the sense of smell.

In each of these instances, a new state of spiritual consciousness is enabled through the portal of Sabbath time. This is also powerfully reflected in the excerpt from the writings of the eighteenth-century kabbalist and Hasidic master, Nachman of Bratslav. 

For Nachman, the Sabbath constitutes an entrance into a heightened state of knowing and even prophetic consciousness—an experience of the temporal in which the devotee reaches beyond the rational or analytic mind, into a supernatural time-space. The devotee encounters the eternal God who is the Place of all places, the ultimate sacred Space that contains all space, and the ultimate eternal Force that encompasses and absorbs all time. 

To enter into the Sabbath is to stand in the presence of God, to be awash in an elevated and altered state of knowing.