Not white

Yom Kippur’s robes are the color of light that has never fractured. Unadulturated, all-encompassing, streaming, shining white. Yom Kippur wears the white of the sun, of angels and the holiest consecrated secrets. Watching it too long is to risk earthly blindness, to willingly wither away.

There are millions of colors in Shabbat’s coat—a rainbow in every fold. Yellow-brown, ruby-black, rust-gold, cream-peach and more blues than there are permutations in the sea.

Shabbat does not wear Yom Kippur white, though. Every thread in Shabbat’s coat is a remnant of shattered perfection—a soothing multi-faced retelling of the cornea-burning whiteness.

Yom Kippur is draped in purity. Shabbat’s sleeves are lined with loam-brown and blood-red, edged with silver-embroidered teardrops.

I wear Shabbat’s coat because it matches the world I walk through. It looks like peace and restlessness, compassion and gloating, spring, autumn and dawn. It is cut to human size.

Combat nurse

The siege ended two days ago. Now is a time of respite and negotiation. The battered and injured are still, gathering their strength in this quiet time between battles.

I see Shabbat approaching, but she is no longer my well-heeled, festive beloved. She has laid aside her glittering gown for a plain white smock, tucked her hair under a kerchief and scrubbed her face clear of makeup. She pauses beside each soul, offering rest and comfort to those who quake at the prospect of the coming struggle. Her feet slap softly against the rough floor as she approaches me.

“Take courage,” she whispers, lifting medicinal wine of my lips. As she presses a crust of bread to my palm, her smile offers a promise of sweet times yet to come. She moves to her next patient, and I realize that she has never been more beautiful.

The luckiest person

“I had so many calls to make at work today—but just when I thought I would go crazy, Shabbat told me to go home and said he’d take care of the rest.”

“Really? I was at the end of a long checkout line with just one item, and Shabbat let me go ahead of him.”

“Shabbat gave me his seat on the subway when I was so tired that I thought I would fall over.”

“This Shabbat sounds like the same guy who cleared my sidewalk along with his own after the last snowstorm. What an amazing guy! I wonder if he’s seeing anyone.”

“When he opened the door for me yesterday, I noticed a wedding ring. Man, what I wouldn’t give for a guy like that!”

I glance down at my own right hand and hide a smile. He’s a catch, all right.

The Bride

A white leather pump splashes through a puddle on the curb but continues on its frenzied way. The light is red, but the woman in the full-skirted wedding dress runs across, her arms full of white ruffles and tulle. Cars screech to a halt, taxis honk as she glances briefly at them, but she can’t stop. Everyone is expecting her.

The Sabbath bride throws open the double doors at the back of the synagogue just as the people rise to their feet. Her chest is heaving and her hair has come loose to fall in curls around her face. Her cheeks are red from exertion but she can’t help smiling at the exhilarating feeling that she gets every time a room full of people turns to welcome her home.

Running over

Shabbat remains bottled all week, shelved and corked, but present. On Friday night it is unstopped and released into the world, filling every cup in the house and spilling over the table’s edge.

Shabbat continues pouring out, drenching my fingers and seeping into my shoes. Soon the entire house will be ankle-deep in Shabbat.

After the front door crashes open, Shabbat continues to pour out into the world.

Blanket

Shabbat is a blanket large enough to cover my head and drop all the way over my feet. It is thick enough to block everything out, and comfortable enough to provide me with the best nap of my life.

Brought forth

The last of the weekday grunge is wiped clean, so that you are empty and waiting.

The first sweetness and warmth of Shabbat feed your rising song, and each psalm brings a new ingredient. You dance back and forth, mixing together into a pliable mass that folds in on itself, kneading in and out with the pace of a heartbeat. Emotions press softly outward, voices weave together, in a mindfully prepared and delicious symphony.

And in the end, if there is fire in your prayers, you will create something that can sustain you.

Grandpa's house

I can’t wait to go to Grandpa’s house! I’ve been looking forward to it forever. We’ll get out of the car, and he’ll be waiting on the porch for us. He’ll give me a giant hug, and he’ll say, “Look how big you are! You’ve been eating your vegetables!” And, and, I’ll go inside and sit in the sagging green chair, and eat cashews from the candy bowl and Grandpa will let me have some coffee in my milk, and we’ll hear the latest news about the neighborhood, look at pictures and tell stories about things that happened before I was born!

Dad smiles. “But that’s what happens every time we visit. Shouldn’t we try something new?”

No way! That’s how visiting Grandpa goes. If we changed something, it just wouldn’t be the same.

The Sabbath Bee

All day I have been traveling from flower to flower, distracted by every bright color under the sun. Now as darkness falls I lay down my burdens, the collected pollen of a day’s work, and I give myself over to a welcoming family and the sweetness of rest.

Havdalah

Shabbat is a single flame, shining through our interwoven lives. Shabbat grows in intensity every time another soul joins her tapestry, dancing and growing until it seems that her light will illumine every dark place. The flame expands and brightens, overtaking the world of darkness until—suddenly—it goes out.

The day after Purim

Shabbat arrives as usual, dressed in silk with her hair and make-up beautifully arranged.

The room is a mess, and with the exception of a pair of candles glowing on the table it seems that nothing has been prepared.

“What is this?” Shabbat demands. “You knew I was coming! Where is my welcome?”

I scramble, bleary-eyed, to a seated position on the couch. “I’m sorry—really sorry Shabbat, but last night your little brother came in from Persia. He kept me up all night partying. Then this morning he pulls me out of bed again, just a few hours after I fell asleep. He’s exhausting!”

“Oh, him.” Shabbat settles beside me on the couch. “Did the two of you have a good time, at least?”

“He’s a fabulous guy.” I lean into her, nuzzling her neck. “But I’m glad you’re here now.”

What is the Sabbath Bee?

This website is the outcome of a game that I play every week with Shabbat. It is midrash—a living re-interpretation, a story designed to bring new ideas into an ancient institution and pull fresh understandings from a heavily examined religious structure.

For those familiar with the mystical side of Judaism or the Friday night liturgy, there’s nothing unusual about referring to Shabbat (or Shabbos, the Sabbath, Day of Rest, the Seventh Day, and other pseudonyms I’m sure I’m forgetting) as “the bride” or “the queen.” The white dress and the crown require a sizeable mental leap, since in our everyday comparisons of this-to-that, we rarely go so far as to compare days to people. I would probably get weird reactions if I tried telling a friend that he was like a breath of Thursday, and most personifications of days of the week invariably end with clichéd images—Monday with his briefcase, Sunday reading the paper during a leisurely breakfast.

In Shabbat’s case though, the talk of brides and queens is all about big, transcendent emotional connections. Shabbat demands certain behaviors, and the Jewish people scramble to obey these commands. The Jewish people are married to Shabbat because we’ve sworn an oath of loyalty to this day—with all of the grandeur and restrictions that a lifelong contract might entail. Every week is an opportunity to prepare a celebratory feast, to await sunset with the joy and jumping-up-and-down excitement of a groom about to meet his bride.

However, pictures of brides and queens can only tell some of the story. There are things that are true of Shabbat but not true of a bride. There are times when Shabbat might be more like a visiting uncle than a queen. And really, how should people within a representational government feel about queens? By calling Shabbat a queen, am I saying that it is respected, powerful and compassionate or am I calling it an impotent a symbol of an outdated system?

Also, I sometimes prefer to drop the bride imagery for something a little more heterosexual. Sometimes. Femininity is so deeply ingrained into Shabbat that it often feels… wrong… to give this day a Y chromosome. Still, if Shabbat can be a queen, doesn’t it stand to reason that he can also be a grandparent? Or a blanket? Or, to take an idea from the Kabbalist Shlomo Halevi, the ruins of a mighty city? How about a jealous girlfriend that sabotages your relationships with other people? There are definitely times in my life when Shabbat is the jealous girlfriend.

That brings up another reason why I put together the Sabbath Bee. Shabbat is different every week, because we are different every week. Sometimes Shabbat shows up with dancing shoes, other weeks with a cup of cocoa and a bedtime story. Whether or not it should be, Shabbat cannot be a wedding banquet every week. Sometimes the table is set and guests are arriving with covered casseroles, other times a quick shower and a sandwich are all I can manage before sunset. One week I might say, “Oh, it’s Friday again!” and the next, “Oh. It’s Friday. Again?” Shabbat can evoke both emotions, and everything in between.

Therefore, each week I let Shabbat come as it will. Some weeks Shabbat might be happy to give me a quick hug and let me return to my conversation with friends, while other nights the prospect of a mystical joining is so exhilarating that Shabbat and I run off to the nearest janitor’s closet together.

I hope that some of the vignettes will resonate and maybe even help my readers to expand their own ideas and feelings about Shabbat. Some of the passages, I know, will be meaningless or even off-putting to some. I sincerely hope that none come across as offensive. A living tradition inhales and exhales, and concepts that are greater than human endeavor cannot be fully described by any single finite comparison—or even a cacophony of them. Still, hundreds of thousands of facets all taken together might form a reasonable outline of crystalline perfection.

How did this project start?

I made my first Shabbat image in late 2007. It was on Shabbat Noach, at the end of the holidays—a day that I later dubbed Shabbat Normal because it was our first return to the regular weekly rhythm after a month of joyful, soul-searching, thought-provoking and sometimes uncomfortable holiday upsets.

The timing is significant because, due to that year’s series of three day holidays and Yom Kippur’s invasion of Shabbat, we had gone for a solid month without offering a single welcoming party for the Sabbath bride. It was as if she had come in quietly through the service entrance week after week, ceding her position to the visiting dignitaries of the month of Tishrei.

I didn’t realize how much I had missed her grand entry until the evening of Shabbat Normal, when we began to sing. I cannot write with certainty that the spirit in the room was better on that night than on any other night, but it felt to me that everyone in the room was just as enthusiastic as I was about finally bringing Shabbat back to her place of honor. We welcomed the Sabbath bride not like a weekly visitor but like a long-awaited, yearned-for beloved.

During L’kah Dodi, as we sang about the arrival of Shabbat and the tune quickened halfway through the song, I felt that Shabbat herself was sharing our eagerness for a true reunion. Excitement drummed through me while voices thundered similar sentiments and words of welcome from all sides. The whole community seemed to be saying, person by person, “Finally, it can be just me and you again—with no distractions.” When we turned to the door to greet Shabbat, she entered as if on New Years Eve—with champagne, confetti and a breath-hitching kiss.

That evening’s reunion gave me a more intimate appreciation of Shabbat than any that I had experienced before, demonstrating what the Kabbalists meant by “the bride” and “the queen.”

Without meaning to at first, I began making up new Shabbat images every week. I kept them inside my head for about half a year, until a bleary-eyed post-Purim Shabbat story was funny enough that I wanted to share it. The positive responses I received from friends made me think that perhaps other people would be interested as well, so I began recording them week by week.

Tell me about the vignettes.

As a rule, I come up with an image for the week’s Sabbath Bee while singing L’kha Dodi on Friday night. Somewhere between the first and last lines, inspiration always strikes. The Sabbath Bee of the week will appear, full-formed and ready to be written. Unfortunately, by the time I actually write it down—usually Sunday afternoon—I practically have to make up the story again from scratch. To make each week’s Shabbat feel like a word picture, or a brief moment in time, I restrict my entries to 150 words each, not including the titles. My goal is to keep them short and readable, somewhere in the grey area between poetry and prose. (Note: Each entry is back-dated to the Friday when the action took place.)