Resting with G-d

By Moshe Parelman


… And G-d finished on the Seventh Day His work which He had done, and He rested on the Seventh Day from all His work which He had done (Genesis 2:1).

Six days you shall work and the seventh day you shall rest … (Exodus 23:12).

Creating the world in six days was a mammoth undertaking. But did G-d really have to rest? We’re talking about G-d. Man getting a day off, however, makes perfect sense. What perplexes me is that G-d thought He needed to make the world’s rest day a commandment. Resting from backbreaking labor just makes good health sense. What did G-d add by consecrating my weekend? To answer that question, to understand how rest can be holy, we need to first consider something more familiar, the work that makes rest desirable.
Right now I am writing, which I consider work. To perform this work I must invest my creative powers. I draw from my intellect to determine what I’m going to say, how I’m going to say it, the relationship between ideas, what words to use, where to put the commas, semicolons and periods … Yes, I know you’re impressed. I also invest my emotions. I can’t write sincerely or convincingly if I don’t love what I’m writing about. Above all, I must delight in my work. Without taking pleasure in the completed piece as I imagine it, I have no reason to channel my mind and heart into the writing.
Now while I’m doing the actual writing I can’t deploy the full force of my intellectual and emotional powers. As I channel my knowledge of Chassidic teachings on Shabbat into these sentences, I can’t access my understanding of the law of two who grab the same tallis or Rashi’s commentary on why Abraham told the Egyptians Sarah was his sister. By the same token, the love I feel for this essay must be limited to the present topic to the exclusion of my passion for, say, Matzah or Baal Shem Tov stories.
Above all, I can’t delight in my vision of the finished story while I’m occupied with writing it. In the midst of expressing my ideas and emotions, gazing at the computer screen and furrowing my brow, no one can see the pleasure with which I anticipate the final keystroke. Only when the job is done, when my intellectual and emotional faculties become disengaged from the work and return to me, will I delight.
G-d intended a satisfying conclusion to His work, the Six Days of Creation. But while He was engaged in the job, employing the supernal powers of intellect and emotion to construct the universe, the original vision G-d delighted in was not yet realized. Delighting at that point was irrelevant. Once G-d completed His work, allowing His powers to return from their labor to rest in their essence – once the Creation was at hand – G-d delighted. That pleasure is elicited anew every Shabbat.
G-d, then, had good reason to make resting a commandment. Besides its physical benefits, Shabbat recharges our spiritual batteries. In fact the Shabbat rest is a whole package deal, healing body, mind and soul, with tranquil rest and pleasure.
What about G-d, though? We need a good Shabbat to complete what we lack during the week. But G-d is perfect. He shouldn’t have had to rest after the inaugural workweek. Truth be told, He didn’t have to. He did it for us.
G-d created the world in a way that we can emulate, using creative powers in six days with a seventh day of rest. He did so because He wanted us to be His partner in perfecting Creation. To strengthen our resolve to complete the work, He gave us Shabbat, a time to renew our senses and a foretaste of the perfect world to come.
The culmination of our refinement of the world, week by week, Shabbat after Shabbat, will be the Era of Moshiach. The Talmud calls that time, our reward after 5,770 years on the job, the “day that is entirely Shabbat and rest for eternal life.” May we soon enjoy the fruits of our labor.

I Am My Father

As the year of mourning for my father draws to a close, I find comfort in remembering him and the times we shared: my father standing in line to buy us tickets to baseball’s all-star game the year it was played in Kansas City, even though he wasn’t a sports fan, because he knew how much going meant to me; the way he would soothe me with a talk and walk around the block; the pride he felt in the Sukkah he built for us when I came home too late to make one myself; or just watching TV with him and laughing because he was laughing so hard at a funny line in “The Odd Couple” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Memories aside, my father consoles me simply because he is my father. The love between father and son, as I happened to learn in a Chassidic discourse shortly before he died, expresses a stronger bond than any other love.

Chassidic philosophy speaks of two kinds of love: emotional and essential. Love, as the other emotions, is self-interested. Completely absorbed in the Self, to become aroused love must feel itself.

When I drive my car, I feel the cold steering wheel touching my hands. But I’m really not feeling the steering wheel or even the cold on it. I’m feeling the sensation in my hands. Similarly, when I’m loving someone, I don’t feel the loveable qualities of my friend; I experience my own sensations of love within me and the recognition – transmitted to my emotions from my brain – that my friend’s decency and caring are good for me.

Essential love, in contrast, does not need to sense any virtue or act of kindness from the loved one to become aroused. Essential love exists whenever two people – a father and son – are connected to each other’s essence. I long for my father because I want his essence and being, my essence and being.

To generate feelings of love for my friend I must think about his warm smile and the dinner he bought me on my birthday. I love my father because when I bow my head, close my eyes and think for a moment about who I am, my father is there. To want my father I just have to be his son.

Love does not stop when one life ends. We remain connected, and because of that bond I say Kaddish for 11 months. The recitation of Kaddish, blessing G-d’s name in public to which the minyan answers “Amen,” eases the soul’s transition from this world to the next. Three time a day, before reciting the final “Kaddish d’Rabbanan,” I say to myself, as the Rebbe did when he mourned for his wife, a line from the first Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Tanya, which expresses the soul’s intrinsic bond with G-d: “The second, uniquely Jewish, soul is truly ‘a part of G-d above.’”

Like the son, who derives his essence from his father, the soul’s essence always stays bound to its source, G-d above. And like the son, who is connected to the father even before he is born, the soul at the outset of its journey back to G-d is already one with its Father.