What a gift that the Absolute desires to enter into relationship, to be open to entreaty in prayer!

When God “blesses” the seventh day, God is bestowing personhood on Shabbos, affirming that this day has a personality that deserves to be recognized, honored, and cherished.

Tosafot explains that going to sleep at night is an act of trust; we deposit our ruaĥ, our breath-spirit, with God, confident that we will awake in the morning refreshed, released from the previous day’s weariness.

Shabbos calls a halt to business as usual.

Once every week, Shabbos provides an opportunity to rediscover our embodied selves and the blessing of being in one place at one time. Shabbos invites us to commit to our feet and the range that they afford us.

Shabbos is best understood as a day of heightened awareness and keen attention, not a day of sedate inactivity. I translate menuĥa as “tranquility,” rather than “rest.”

He urges his readers not to squander Shabbos’s opportunity for release from burden and worry.

Shabbos permits us to live in spacious, expansive time, not in a static eternity but in a mindfully unfolding landscape that welcomes broadly smiling human faces.

This understanding of Shabbos as the gift of place