Quiet spaces

Shabbat loves the quiet spaces, you know.

Sure, you expect to see him in big, boisterous rooms filled with laugher and singing, sitting at tables warping under the weight of good food, writing guest lists a mile long that keep growing with every somebody who looks a little lonely on the way home.

But Shabbat also likes the quiet spaces.

He likes big, yawning chambers, with maybe two or three people talking earnestly in the corner. He likes simple companionship, the silence between good friends. Shabbat values quality above quantity. He would rather have all your dreams than everyone’s favorite movies.

When you see him laughing in a crowded room, you might notice that he’s not always all there. He likes the bluster and the mirth—

But he loves the quiet spaces.

Garden fantasy

After a long afternoon of reading stories with the kids, I started to imagine Shabbat visiting the community that crawls and slithers around my garden. When evening sets in, the earthworms stop working the soil just long enough to poke their heads aboveground. The more refined cicadas climb out of their drab weekday dress for the occasion. The ladybugs gather, catching up on local news and munching aphids while they wait.

And then Shabbat arrives on nimble feet, a tiny Thumbelina in a cottonwood gown. Or maybe she’s a frog princess, vivid in yellow and red.

The spiders have covered the meeting space with a latticework of webbing that drips with flower petals, plump flies and other tasty treats. When Shabbat looks up through the impermanent ceiling she might see fireflies blinking in and out in time to the cricket philharmonic.

Rehearsal

The evening was already half gone when Shabbat staggered in, charming as usual but a little distracted. She looked wan and washed out in her unabated white, and when she smiled in the receiving line her eyes had a faraway and wistful quality to them.

All through the night her lips moved as though she were memorizing lines, and in off moments she hummed long, clear notes that arched upward near the ends toward the wide, black sky.

At the end of the day she flitted out quickly, with barely a goodbye. Later this week I expect to see her among the angels, singing her heart out in seraphic devotion and shining in dazzling purity among all the other promises I have tried to keep.

Coming full circle

Evening arrives with a soft hum, slowly expanding to the O of a conch.  It thrums and vibrates down to the toes, it whirls as it grows, circling, eddying, rising around itself in a ramhorn spiral, warning that the day is closing and giving a cochlear reminder that another rotation is nearly complete. 

The last pre-Shabbat moments tumble too fast around the clock face, egged on by the high drone of whirring food processors, blaring vacuums, curling blow-dryers.  The frenetic preparations crescendo, the windows shake as the air blasts with warning, until no one can ignore Shabbat’s siren song.  With a sharp upturned ripple the day/the year/the moment passes, and Shabbat swirls in—plump and curvaceous but nevertheless eclipsed by the new moon.

Water damage

Sometimes life slams into you like raging floodwaters, ripping up your most carefully laid plans and clearing away the collected dust and debris of the years.

Sometimes life seeps in, boring subtly through the hidden cracks to drip questions and new growth into your unsuspecting world.

That might be why Shabbat sometimes appears slowly, like a gathering of gray clouds on the far horizon, and sometimes with the immediacy of a lighting bolt ripping through the retaining walls.

Invisible royalty

Because Shabbat has no physical form, it instead imposes reality upon the pre-existing world around it. It smoothes over rough walkways, adding a sheen and a softness to cement and filling out the missing branches of storm-damaged trees.

This improved world is only visible to those whose hearts beat in time to Shabbat’s singular destiny. Their neighbors must think it odd see otherwise rather sane individuals carefully pulling off coats and gloves as though they were made of ermine and velvet, and raising plastic cups of juice in tribute as they would goblets of gold-flecked ambrosia or sparkling Champaign in the hall of the king.

Double manna

In olden times, when food from skies was the only way to dine,
And the Sabbath’s rest was ensured and blessed by Friday morning time
With manna once and manna twice, double providence divine,
Our stomachs filled with heaven’s yield, headier than wine.

Pet shop with allegory

Shabbat tells the story of the time when she went to the pet store. There was a box full of adorable tiny puppies, but she could only pick one. The puppies all ran away from her—except for one little runt with floppy ears. And Shabbat picked up that puppy and she said, “I will love you and feed you and take you on walks, so long as you play with me and welcome me home every day.” So Shabbat and the puppy lived happily ever after.

“A puppy?” I ask when she finishes. “Really? In your version I’m a puppy?”

“Yeah, why not? Just look at those big brown eyes. You are so cute!”

Before I can stop her, Shabbat leans over and ruffles my hair. I protest, but I know that if that’s how she remembers the story, then that’s how the story’s getting told.

Road ends

Shabbat? It’s a lot like driving forty miles over the speed limit when all of a sudden a sign in front of you announces, “Road ends, 500 feet,” and sure enough, 500 feet later there’s no road and you have to smear rubber across the highway because otherwise you’ll drive into thin air. You’re in a hurry and there are places you have to be but the road just isn’t there right now, though the workmen tell you to be patient because it’ll be up again soon… -ish.

You can get mad, sure, you can yell or make frustrated phone calls and pace, but instead maybe you pocket your keys and step outside. There’s a field of wildflowers in the median and the birds are singing, and even though you’ll have to work twice as hard to catch up, you don’t mind the delay—not really.

A song for Shabbat

Shabbat she sits, staring—seeming to stir when I start to sing but only swaying softly, her starlit eyes conspicuously somber as she searches across the scattered landscape. Does she seem scared? I yearn to assuage her fears, to assure her even in her unsettled stupor that she is the sole possessor of my spiritual devotion, that if she should smile—only smile!—my soul would shatter into shards and wisps of splendor.

Geode

Shabbat is a time for contracting, for drawing in the widespread arms and fingers of influence. It is a time to abdicate some of the enormous responsibility of the earth, to admit that the sun and moon will continue dancing across the sky whether or not we try to prod them on their way.

On Shabbat, the world becomes a geode. It sits and waits. Later, when we look into it, we might find just a few tattered shards of meaning. On a perfect, transcendent week though, the simple act of drawing back from mundane concerns might led to something entirely new—a glittering paradise that would never have been possible in a more densely packed world.

Pomegranate

Shabbat is in my kitchen late Friday afternoon, standing beside the fruit bowl and examining a dark, round pomegranate. “What is this?” he asks.

So I tell him that the pomegranate is one of the seven species, that its profile was stitched on the hems of the high priests’ robes. I mention that the rabbis claimed that it has 613 seeds inside, one for every commandment.

“Really?” Shabbat tries to smell the odorless fruit. Then he perks up and presses his nails through the thick outer skin, splitting it down the middle. He looks carefully inside, as though counting every seed, and then he shrugs and hands me half. With cherry-stained fingers, he pulls out a clump of seeds and stuffs it in his mouth like a greedy child. “You forgot to mention that they’re tangy and sweet… and crunchy,” he reproaches me, his mouth still full.

Hiddur mitzvah

So this Wednesday in Hebrew school we learned about hiddur mitzvah—that’s making all your Jewish stuff look as pretty as you can because it shows God how much you like being Jewish and making God happy. And anyway, so I decorated my very own shabbos candlesticks, with gemstones and yellow paint, and I worked really hard at it, and at the end of class my teacher smiled and said, “Good job!”

Last night Friday, while Daddy was driving home he stopped at the light on top of the hill, and after he stopped Mommy said, “Look at that sunset!” And then we all looked, and it was bright pink and my favorite color orange with just a little bit of sun halfway set, and the clouds looked like carnival cotton candy.

Then the light turned green and Daddy kept driving and I whispered to God, “Good job!”

Lifeblood

They all entered into the flow, constricted by the walls but refreshed, red with excitement and propelled forward by a force they could not control.

They came trudging in at the end of the cycle, fatigued and stumbling along, demanding replenishment, needing energy before they could do it all again—

And then they joined together, pulled by an irresistible desire—and with an uprising of might they crushed through, crossed the barrier into a new realm—which was the same realm they had entered thousands of times before.

Past the electric, frenetic crush, the sweetest part came—when they entered the red-walled chamber, the treasure-room where fresh air and new energy were freely given to all. They lingered for a moment, luxuriating, before they began the cycle again.

The Sabbath tree

One Sunday, when I was small, I took the bag of havdalah spices and buried it in the back yard. The sun shone down on the spot, and I watered it daily. A tiny stem sprouted, with silken-green leaves, and every day it grew more. By Friday morning it was a sapling taller than I was, with tight buds at the end of its branches. Through the day I checked on it, watching the buds slowly open.

As the sun set, the smell of spices seemed to fill the air. Just as darkness crept into the yard, the flowers opened wide. They had white, glowing petals that curved like shaved cinnamon, with tiny star-anise-shaped patterns within. I sat under the tree all evening and much of the next day, breathing in cardamom and turmeric until the sky darkened again and the petals snowed slowly down.