Emor, אֱמֹר  "Speak!"  Leviticus 21:1-24:23

Sabbath Home

Poetic notes on Parashat Emor* 5783

Hashem created Adam from His garden soil  

He breathed into Adam’s nostrils and he became a praying spirit

Hashem gave Adam a charge,

to work with Him,

to bring all variety and manner of created beings close,

to bring them into the intimacy of Adam and Hashem,

the intimacy of the breath that God breathed into Adam’s nostrils

If you are careless and become selfish,

God said to Adam,

or if you become proud and depend on your own wisdom,

instead of intimacy you will bring all creation to nothing

Adam did not listen

Then God said, because you have done this…

You will become homeless,

you and everything that depends on you

To be homeless or not to be homeless ...,

here is the most heartfelt and existential question

Yet no homeless person is without a hope of home

Every soul of Adam began at home

But now they have lost their home

and search for home,

new or old home,

They try to call the present home,

even if it is just a little bit of home

And no one is without Shabbat

Though the world, for the most part,

is lost from Shabbat,

and searches for it,

searches even for a little bit of Shabbat

like the homeless who search for a place to camp,

God knows where the Sabbath is

God knows where creation’s home can be found

Only God defines the boundaries and borders of Shabbat

Only God knows, only God shows the secret of its boundaries

to whom He will

The whole eruv of Shabbat is hidden in God’s treasure chest

The world is homeless

The world is a damaged soul wandering on the street

The world is a pagan without Shabbat

Still Shabbat has been kept

and is the whole world’s, the whole creation’s, lost home

Shabbat has been kept as a secret in plain sight

by the children of Israel

Shabbat has been kept as a warm home for the lost world

It has been kept in the beating heart of Israel's suffering,

in the place of kind and gracious concealment*

Rectify Our Prayer, oh Hashem

We have prayed with the sun

and recited psalms with the moon

and have never yet moved our lips with Your light,

as Moshe moved his lips with the light of Mashiach,

praying for Your forgiveness toward Israel

Rectify our prayers!

Your Sabbath is Your wind with many wings

For it is in the face of kindness

and gentle revelation

It is the Sabbath in the eyes

of the righteous smile of the Jew

It is there that the Sabbath home is kept for you, Egypt, 

It is kept there for you also, Babylon, Persia,

Germany, Russia, Rome, Greece,

and for all of you, all you islands and continents of the earth

It is kept there in the secret of Israel’s scattered unity,

from one soulful week to the next

There in the bright and shining secret

of the hidden Jewish soul is the Sabbath home

There in the Jewish soul is the Sabbath’s own soul of luminous love,

a luminous love and a radiant joy, a shared joy,

shared with you by the creative power of the eternally concealed One, 

who reveals himself in love by creating a world in joy

Before the foundation of the world,

he prepared private rooms for all creation

in Israel’s Sabbath home

For when the eternal Artist began to be a Creator,

no universe existed already to see it

No light revealed it

No world composed a song to sing about it

So the Creator himself responded to this sadness

He responded with great understanding, 

compassion and wisdom,

and he sang, “Let there be light!’”

The eternal Artist’s song was like a Sabbath candle

glowing as a soul lit just before the Sabbath evening,

the soul of the beginning,

the soul of time,

time for a world to be conceived,

for Adam to be conceived,

just before the evening became the morning

and Sabbath Israel was born