Seudah Shelishit as the Yom Kippur of the Entire Week

Be sure to sit together every Sabbath for Shalosh Seudot [Seudah Shelishit] (the Third Meal) (which I have already discussed). The time of the Sabbath Shalosh Seudot is the Yom Kippur of the entire week. The Yom Kippur of the year unveils your soul and purifies it of its stains of the entire year. And Shalosh Seudot, the Yom Kippur of the week, purifies your soul, revealing it and all of its yearnings and sighs that were hidden from you throughout the entire week.

Also, during the entire week, although your soul is stretching upward, it is choked and weakened by its enemies and those who trample upon it. The body’s forces and its distractions stand upon it and trample it, sealing its mouth so that its voice cannot be heard, so that you do not know and do not hear that your soul is sick with love.

But when the Sabbath arrives, when you leave the entire world with its commotion and crowds—and particularly at Shalosh Seudot [Seudah Shelishit], when you enter the Holy of Holies and you cast yourself upon God—then all of your soul’s outcries from the entire week, day and night, come forward and are revealed to you, sometimes with a powerful yearning (“Draw Your servant to do Your will . . . “ [Yedid Nefesh]) and at times with profound pain and an outcry from the depths (“Gaze, Hashem for I have been struck and wounded and pushed away from You”; and you weep, “God, please, heal my soul” [Numbers 12:13]).

Every member should consider the group’s meeting place as a sanctified spot, the central region of the world, a place where souls are bathed and purified and brought into the camp of God’s Presence—which is here.

When you go there, you should feel that you are leaving the arena of the world and going to a branch of the lower Garden of Eden, which God has brought down into this meeting place.

So rejoice and be glad with holy trembling for being so very fortunate, because even in this world you can take refuge beneath the wings of God’s Presence. In particular, when you are already at the meeting place, be glad and think that God’s holy Presence is here in your midst. “My soul is sick with love for You. Please, God, please heal it by showing it Your pleasant radiance” (Yedid Nefesh). Arouse your desire for God to reveal in your heart a spark of the pleasantness of His radiance and the beauty of His strength that reside in this meeting place.