blogs/brentspodek

For many folks, Shabbat (Sabbath), is the site of much of our spiritual longing and searching, as well it should be. In a traditional Jewish mind, there are few things more precious than Shabbat.

In our modern world, Shabbat can be seen as a relic, the word musty in our mouths, like grandma's fancy dinner plates that haven't been dusted off since the last holiday. But like a beautiful sunrise, Shabbat can be trite when it is represented, but sublime when it is experienced.

Sixty years ago, R. Heschel warned of how the modern world invites us to "embezzle our own souls" and never has that been more true.

This past week I was talking with a few of our members about how they are thinking about and celebrating Shabbat.

For some of us, Sabbath was a nascent practice, for others, it had been part of our lives for years. All of us identified similar joys and aspirations for Shabbat - it lifted up and celebrated the best parts of ourselves, it became the heartbeat of our lives, it was a chance for us and our partners and our children to be truly present, even if just for a moment.

We also shared some similar challenges - football practices and friends who can't make plans in advance, a social taboo on showing up at someone's house uninvited, the endless pressure of Things To Do - doctors visits and grocery shopping and those errands that never seem to get done during the week.

The fact is, the traditional Jewish shabbat imagines a world very different from the world that most of us inhabit. For better and for worse, most of us don't live walking distance from our closest friends, most of us don't build our lives around the rhythms of gathering at synagogue, most of us don't have regular times to make music with our friends. Many of us are not fundamentally literate in our own tradition. Our lives are scattered, stretched, segmented. Some of us are actively trying to change that, and even so, our changes are usually marginal and the world doesn't always change with us.

So, does Shabbat have a place here and now, in the Hudson Valley, in 2015?

I hope so. I know I need it, and I think others need it as well. I know also that for Shabbat to thrive as a practice and a resource it needs to be an indigenous creation, crafted from our own complicated lives here. Our Shabbat will not be the Shabbat of the Upper West Side or Skokie or Jerusalem. It will not be the Sabbath of the Satmars or the Lubavitchers. It will be our Shabbat.

We will build our own Shabbat, or we risk embezzling our souls in teaspoon-sized measurements - a little bit for swim lessons, a little bit for Home Depot, a little bit for Facebook. So I ask question - how do you Shabbat? or if you prefer, #howdoyoushabbat?

Do you have a regular practice of giving your soul space to expand? Do you make kiddush, make art, make love? Will you bless your children, bless the dawn, bless your soul? Do you pray, do you learn, do you meditate? If you do - or if you hope to - I hope you'll share your thoughts on line. (As a technical note, just write a regular Facebook status and be sure to include the phrase #howdoyoushabbat to be added to the conversation.)

We have souls and we do them a disservice when we say simply, "I'm not religious." The question isn't if we observe our grandmother's shabbat, or our neighbor's or our rabbi's. The question is, can we, will we, give our souls the space they so desperately need?