Holiness of the Sabbath: Portal into the Ultimate Knowledge

In this excerpt, the master Hasidic mystic Nachman of Bratslav discusses one of his signature ideas, stated as a kind of enigmatic paradox, that “the ultimate knowledge is that we do not know.” Of a piece with William James‘s classic discussion of ineffability as a core cross-cultural quality of mysticism in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, Nachman asserts that true wisdom is the realization that the deepest knowledge of divine reality is elusive and transcendent, beyond the ken of ordinary comprehension and contemplation, the realm of erasure and nothingness. Indeed, for him, this is the meaning of God surrounding or encompassing the world as a transcendent, mysterious being, building upon an ancient rabbinic statement that God is the place of the world, and not the world the place of God. That is not to say that mystics like Nachman did not argue that God constitutes the oneness of all being and is immanent and present in the life of the world. Rather, to make a more radical theological statement, the reality human beings experience as earthly is actually inscribed and circumscribed within an all encompassing circle of divine existence and being. This is the implication of Naḥman’s final statement here, recasting a classic biblical restriction that “no man may leave his place on the seventh day” as a statement about Sabbath consciousness, and reflecting the vivid truth that divinity is the all-present, the encompassing circle of being, the infinite Place within which all other space and time is included and circumscribed. As is the case in numerous other instances in both Bratzlav literature and in Hasidic mystical literature more broadly, the sacred time of the Sabbath effects an elevation and transformation of human consciousness into the revelatory state of da‘at—here described as the dimension of ultimate mystery and mystical wonderment.