Seudah Shelishit as the Yom Kippur of the Entire Week

In this evocative text, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, known as the Piacezner or the “Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe,” teaches that the gathering of the mystic friends for the Seudah Shelishit (the sacred ritual third meal of the Sabbath late on Saturday afternoon) is to be understood as nothing less than the Yom Kippur of the week, the otherworldly time that purifies the individual’s soul. All week long the soul “yearns and sighs” because of the existential weight and burdens of ordinary life; but on the Sabbath, the transcendent wonder of the otherworldly dimension is revealed and washes over the person like a rinse of purification, introspection, and renewal. Shapira characterizes the weekday life of the soul as one of perpetual spiritual longing and “stretching” toward the divine source, but the workaday world is filled with enemies and adversaries of the soul who constantly seek to “choke” and stain and “weaken” the soul, making its spiritual striving so much more difficult. The Sabbath is a time of release and redemption, a sacred time when the Jew is able to wail out in devotional longing, to sing the Yedid Nefesh hymn of prayerful and mystical love, to cry out to God from the depths for healing, to enter the Holy of Holies of the Sabbath, and to “cast [oneself] upon God.” It is in this space and time, surrounded by the community of one's spiritual fellowship, that this inner sanctum of divine presence is revealed again, that the all-enveloping presence of divinity becomes manifest.