Many of us are driven to lives of ceaseless activity by a deep fear of stillness and the intimation of the great stillness at the end of life it carries with it. Shabbat enables us to befriend this stillness, to see that it doesn’t threaten us after all, but is simply part of the natural rhythm of our lives.

Practicing in community keeps us going because we don’t want to let the other members of the community down. We feel that they need us, that we are indispensable to them, and this will keep us going for a long time.

If one is willing to relax one’s grip at such times and let one’s consciousness blur a little bit, intimations of God-light creep in through the screen of nature.

The central imperative of Judaism, I believe, is to recognize and manifest the sacred in everything we do and encounter in the world.

An immense shaft of sunlight was beaming in through one of those windows, and there were dust motes swirling around in the sunbeam like spiral nebulae. Nurses glided noiselessly around the ward like angels. We were in a perfect, radiant world. Maury held my hand in an iron grip. “This is religion,” he said. And I suppose what he meant in part was t

all these things—fullness, decline, destruction, renewal, tearing down, rebuilding—are actually part of the same process, points on a single continuum, consecutive segments of a never-ending circle.

Yet something in us aspires to heaven, something in us is always reaching beyond the limits of our earthliness, and we only ignore this heavenward impulse at our peril.

This, according to the Sefat Emet, is why we empty our house of chametz—of leavened grains and by extension all grain products—in the days preceding Passover. This emptying—this letting go of the flour that has become stale—is a tangible representation of the spiritual liberation we hope to achieve. We

Torah is trying to communicate to us that leave-taking itself is extremely significant. It is the prerequisite to any encounter with God.