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PARTNERING WITH THE UNIVERSAL |
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I was thinking about the difference between a Kabbalistic, a Jewish mystical approach, to Jewish observance and a more normative Jewish approach to observance, particularly with respect to the Sabbath.
According to our tradition, Shabbat is a time of deep rejuvenation, a time of letting go. Ideally, it is a time when we let go of our regular work and allow ourselves to reconnect with the essential nature of our own being, with the natural rhythms of the whole of creation. Ideally, Shabbat is a moment that reminds us of the incredible beauty we each carry within ourselves, of the incredible beauty that is reflected in every other being. And it is a reminder of the integrity and the wisdom, of the love and the compassion, that yearns to bubble up from the spaces of the heart and the spaces of the mind and the very cells of the body.
What Jewish mystical tradition adds is that our observance of Shabbat not only supports our own healing and our own growth. Kabbalistic tradition says that our observance of Shabbat supports the healing and the expansion of creation itself. In the Kabbalistic scheme, God needs persons as much as persons need God. We are co-responsible for the blessings as well as for the curses, for the peace as well as for the violence, for the possibilities as well as for the stuckness.
And so to celebrate Shabbat in Kabbalistic terms is literally to partner with the universal. It is to allow ourselves to understand that behind our apparent separateness and behind the apparent fragmentation of our world, we are connected.
So as you enter into Shabbat in your homes or in your places of worship, as you light the Shabbat candles and speak the blessings that welcome the Sabbath, you might imagine that not only are you allowing your own souls to rejoice, not only are you allowing yourselves to rejuvenate from the inside out, to reconnect to the source of your own being, but that you are contributing to Creation itself.
Blessing means acknowledging the beauty and the truth, the rightness of ourselves and of each other and, most especially, of the moment. Let your own consciousness be filled with blessing. It is your gift to the universe.
© 2001 Rabbi Ted Falcon, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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