We are all familiar with the acronym "TGIF"--thank God it's Friday. (My father recently shared with me a new one--""HITSIC"--hang in there, shabbos is coming:) Both of these express our appreciation for a break from the craziness of our week. In Letters for the Next Generation (a must read, check out chiefrabbi.org), R' Jonathan Sacks writes something really interesting that so eloquently express the amazing quality of Shabbos and the spiritual lesson that we can learn from it.
He writes:
There was one moment in the Torah when the people
started worshipping gold. They made a Golden Calf. The
interesting thing is that if you read the Torah carefully you’ll
see that immediately before and after the Golden Calf,Moses
gave the people a command, the command of Shabbat.Why
that command, then?
Shabbat is the antidote to the Golden Calf because it’s
the day when we stop thinking about the price of things and
focus instead on the value of things. On Shabbat we can’t
sell or buy. We can’t work or pay others to work for us.
Instead we spend the day with family and friends around the
Shabbat table. In shul, we renew our contacts with the
community. We listen to Torah, reminding ourselves of our
people’s story.We pray, giving thanks for all the blessings God
has given us.
2 comments:
Interesting how the Judaicized version is the one that leaves out God.
I think that we do not think about and therefore talk about God enough. Some of the most central mitzvoth of the Torah are belief in God, loving God, and fearing God--they all entail thinking or feeling something relating to God. How can we focus on these more?
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