Our Supersized Shabbat Souls
Mishpatim 5780 / 26 February 2020
By Rabbi Annie Lewis
It is a mild, winter Sunday and I am driving with my kids to New Jersey to visit my parents. As we turn into Bubbie and Zeyde’s neighborhood, five year old Zohar, says, “Mom, I need your phone.”
“Sorry, Zozo,” I say, “I’m driving right now and I can’t get it to you.”
“But I need it.”
“Why do you need it?”
“I need to ask Siri something. Siri knows everything.”
“First of all – Siri doesn’t know everything. She’s a robot or an algorithm or a something…What is it that you want to ask Siri?”
“I want to ask Siri who made God?”
Wow. That is a great question. Not what I was expecting. I can assure you that I did not learn the answer to that one in rabbinical school. I tell Zohar that I’m pretty sure Siri doesn’t know the answer either.
Zohar responds, “I guess only God knows who made God.”
Then she asks, “How did you and Daddy and God work together to make me?”
Conveniently, right at that moment, we pull into my parent’s driveway.
We unload the car.
Zohar and Shir give hugs and kisses to their grandparents and then they greet Alexa, my parents’ friendly smart speaker that is maybe Siri’s cousin, a fellow robot or an algorithm or possibly, a corporate spy.
When I pause to think about the world that we live in, I am astounded. We have so much information at our fingertips. Words speed through cyberspace. Screens yank at our attention wherever we turn. One can send emails now, even on airplanes.
So many times, in a moment of waiting on line, I catch myself going online, like a reflex, scrolling through Facebook with its endless newsfeed. I forget to look up – towards the skyscrapers, towards the sky, towards the faces of neighbors and strangers.
There was an article published by a team of researchers at the University of Michigan in 2010 that reported a decline in empathy among college students. This was correlated with an uptick in texting. When researchers observed students, they found that almost always, when students were with each other, at least a few of them were texting.There was no space for the conversation to go deeper, no chance for folks to feel safe enough to express vulnerability. Often, we are tracking so many channels at once that we lose the ability to tune into our own inner lives and to truly hear and see the people who are with us.
Sarah Hurwitz worked as a speechwriter in the White House from 2009-2017. After a tough break-up at thirty-six years old, she was inspired to reconnect to her Jewish heritage. She published a book recently about this journey called Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality and a Deeper Connection to Life in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look there). In her book, Sarah Hurwitz describes how she experimented with the practice of Shabbat. She let her colleagues at the White House know she would be unplugging for a twenty-five hour period each week. At first, it was hard for Sarah to quiet her devices and her mind.
Then, she reflected, “It turns out that when time isn’t carved up into tiny slices for meetings and calls, or constantly interrupted by tweets and texts, it takes on a different texture. When I slowed down, time seemed to slow down as well, languidly stretching itself out ahead of me.”
Sarah Hurwitz continues, “But this shift didn’t just happen on its own. Like God in the Torah, we have to create Shabbat…This is no easy task, especially today, when the workday world is so determined to intrude on our time – and so adept at doing so. The more technologically advanced we become – going from immovable desktop computers, to portable laptops, to smartphones that fit in our pockets – the harder it is to rope off Shabbat.”
Nestled among the list of laws in our Parsha this week, Mishpatim, we are given the instruction of marking off Shabbat.
שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים תַּעֲשֶׂה מַעֲשֶׂיךָ, וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי תִּשְׁבֹּת–לְמַעַן יָנוּחַ, שׁוֹרְךָ וַחֲמֹרֶךָ, וְיִנָּפֵשׁ בֶּן-אֲמָתְךָ, וְהַגֵּר
“Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease from labor, in order that your ox and your donkey may rest, and that your servant and the stranger may be refreshed.” (Exodus 23:12)
In Parashat Mishpatim, we stand at the foot of Mount Sinai, on the heels of coming out of slavery in Egypt. Some of the laws may be understood as correctives to injustices we experienced in Mitzrayim. Max spoke earlier about the commandment to “love the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt.” In Mitzrayim, when we served the Pharaoh, the work was relentless. We had to make more and more bricks with less and less straw. Shabbat, as described in Parashat Mishpatim, is meant to protect the most vulnerable members of the society, who must be guaranteed time off from their labor. Animals must be treated humanely. The previous verse describes how the whole earth, too, must be given shabbat, a rest, in the seventh year. Mitzrayim means the narrow place. The practice of shabbat is the promise of spaciousness for all living beings.
In the Torah, we’re told that God, too, takes the time to recharge. As it says, “Shavat Vayinafash.” (Exodus 31:17) After six days of making the heavens and the earth, God pauses and it is restorative. God made shabbat and it was life-giving for God. I may not know who made God, but I am so grateful that God made Shabbat.
There is a wonderful midrash about this phrase “Shavat Vayinafash” in the Talmud (Beitzah 16a).
“Reish Lakish taught: The Holy One of Blessing gives a person a Neshama Yeterah on Erev Shabbat, an additional soul on Shabbat eve. At the conclusion of shabbat, God removes this from him as it is stated, ‘Shavat Vayinafash.’” Reish Lakish – takes this word Vayinafash (often understood to mean, “to be refreshed”) and he breaks it down into two parts – Vai and Nefesh.
Vai means “Oy vey Zmir!” As in “Vai Vai Vai!” or “Woe is me!”
Nefesh is the soul; the part of us that is a piece of the infinite,
that touches our Divine source.
Vayinafash can be interpreted to mean “Oy -my soul!”
When Shabbat concludes and the neshamah yeterah, the additional soul departs, the person says, “Vai! Nefesh! Woe is me for my extra soul that is lost!”
I find this idea extraordinarily powerful – that on shabbat we are gifted with a neshamah yeterah – an extra soul. Some say that on shabbes, our souls and hearts expand. We are given a burst of holy energy. The kabbalists teach that our souls are supersized so that we can delight in shabbat, so that we can eat and drink and bask in the joy of shabbat. And they teach that it is our job to care for our neshama yeterah – our additional soul. How do we do this? We care for our supersized souls by eating and celebrating and tapping into total joy on shabbat. When we protect and nourish our souls in this way, not only do we increase our own joy – we also give joy to God.
For twenty-five hours, we are invited to delight in what is.
To stop refreshing our inbox and instead, to refresh our spirits.
To live like redemption has arrived.
To rehearse for living in the world as it could be.
And when we give ourselves and others permission to nourish our souls in this way,
it changes our souls;
it changes the fabric of our community;
it changes the texture of time.
When we look around the world as it is, there are many things that can make our souls – cry – Vai, Vai, Vai! We may have moments of despair about the enormity of the work that is demanded of us to bring about a more just and compassionate world. And for many of us, there are days when we don’t know how we will get through the day, or how we will get everyone out of the house in the morning, or how we will get out of bed. Life is not simple. And it is full and it is fragile and it is finite.
“We have no time to rush.”
Our tradition teaches us that in this life, we are all worthy of joy and deserving of rest. One of the Hebrew words for soul, Neshama, is also the word for breath. One way we can connect with our neshama yeterah, our extra soul space, on shabbat, is by taking an extra breath. And so – I want to invite us here, now, where we are, as we are, together, to breathe.
To take three nourishing breaths.
To welcome in expansiveness into our lives and into our world.
It is my prayer for you, Max, as you reach this new time in your life,
and my prayer for all of us –
that we will take the time this shabbat,
to pause,
to rejoice,
to be present with our supersized souls and with one another,
that we will keep breathing,
and that we will keep coming back to this practice of shabbat,
again and again on our journeys.
Shabbat Shalom!
