The Transformative Power of Holy Time

Eitan Fishbane

2011

On Shabbat, the world around us becomes still—all the demands and the heaviness that we carry are released. They will return soon enough, but on Shabbat we are able to step back, to look at our lives from a protected distance, from the warm interior of sacred time. It is the twilight glimmer of the sun in descent—the otherworldly texture of a time…

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In these excerpts from Eitan Fishbane’s The Sabbath Soul, the author seeks to evoke the mystical and contemplative experience of the sacred, how entrance into stillness and quiet may be understood as an attunement of the soul to the divine force of eternity and timelessness that fills reality like the soul fills the body. Reflecting on a range of insights from zoharic to Hasidic Jewish mysticism, Fishbane comments on the stated yearning of the mystic for a liberation from the prison of egoism, from the ways in which the inner spirit can flower newly in holy time: “The seventh day is a time of otherworldly freedom. . . . In holy time we step outside of ourselves. . . .” Several Hasidic masters, and Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger (known as the Sefat Emet) in particular, read this as moving beyond what they call ’artsiyut (earthiness/mundanity).

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