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Heschel This Week -- More on Shabbat

There is a word seldom said, a word for a condition almost too deep to be expressed:  the love of the Sabbath.  The word is rarely found in our literature, yet for more than two thousand years the emotion filled our songs and moods.  It was as if a whole people were in love with the seventh day.

What is so luminous about a day?  What is so precious to captivate the hearts?  It is because the seventh day is a mine where spirit's precious metal can be found with which to construct the palace in time, a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine; a dimension in which man aspires to approach the likeness of the divine.

For where shall the likeness of God be found?  There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God.  There is not enough freedom on the top of the mountain; there is not enough glory in the silence of the sea.  Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise.

Bonus -- this isn't Heschel, but a beautiful sweet 90-second teaching about Shabbat from Rabbi Nehemia Polen

Heschel This Week on Shabbat

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The Sabbath as a day of abstaining from work is not a depreciation but an affirmation of labor, a divine exaltation of its dignity.  Thou shall abstain from labor on the seventh day is a sequel to the command:  Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work...The duty to work for six days is just as much a part of God's covenant with man as the duty to abstain from work on the seventh day.

In regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude--to have them and to be able to do without them.  On the Sabbath we live, as it were, independent of technical civilization:  we abstain primarily from any activity that aims at remaking or reshaping the things of space.  Man's royal privilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day...The Sabbath itself is a sanctuary which we build, a sanctuary in time.

The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.

--From The Sabbath (1951)