Sublime

How might we make Shabbos even more radiant, more beautiful, more transformative? The answer surely has little to do with elegance of table settings or sumptuousness of cuisine, and everything to do with palpable blessing and sanctity, with welcoming smiles, with sweet melodies, with wise speech and even wiser silence.

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

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe (d. 2005)

not to reinvent Judaism, but to execute it a bit better than we had seen it done elsewhere.

This prayer-poem makes explicit that the ultimate aim of Shabbos is to refine and ennoble our inner dispositions, our orientation to the world, to other human beings, to God, and to ourselves.

the shift in the authority of Torah from corrosive coercion imposed to an offer of a wisdom that bubbles up, the Torah attracts attention and elicits observance because it is wise and beautiful and because it augments life.

Judaism is not about the truths we know, but about the truths we live.

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world m

In truth, when life is at stake, it is not a case of “permitted violation,” it is a mitzvah, a fulfillment of the purpose of Shabbat.