Shabbat...Again? - Tehila Gimpel (Parsha Ki Tisa & Vayakhel): The Land of Israel Fellowship

hi everybody I want to discuss something that's sort of at the intersection between last week's portion of kitisa and this upcoming portion of vayakil which we're going to read together with a portion of pikude you know we get so wrapped up in the golden calf because it's like this nightmare unfolding in the midst of our honeymoon of Revelation with you know Revelation from Hashem at Sinai and then it's interrupted with this horrible event it's so gripping that I think the rest of the story a lot of times gets you know kind of lost in the shuffle um because around the story of the golden calf there are two bookends that are essentially the same subject kitisa we have these two stories folding unfolding parallel Moshe is up on the mountain with Hashem for 40 days on the last day we have the golden calf unfolding but there's this you know final kind of conversation between Moshe and Hashem and we know that there's no prophecy that ever came close to this kind of Prophecy that Moshe is having where you know someone spoke to Hashem like directly in that kind of way and now right before motion goes back from this Revelation to the Earthly reality Hashem has you know Hashem tells them about building the Tabernacle and there's one kind of last message now what would you guess that last message would be maybe a blessing uh and Leadership advice but no Hashem tells Moshe about Shabbat well that's weird we've heard about Shabbat so many times already we heard about Shabbat in Genesis and Bracey when the world was created then we hear about it in the Mana when Hashem says don't take extra you know don't take mana on Shabbat you have to take extra on Friday and I'll give you you know enough that'll last you for Shabbat then we see it again in the Ten Commandments and you know there are two versions of Ten Commandments in Exodus and in uh Deuteronomy and you know in one version we hear shamura one version we hear zahor the sages teach us that uh these words you know is the horror to commemorate the Shabbat and shamura to um to guard the Shabbat uh were spoken by Hashem at the same time a lot of people understand that as symbolizing the positive and the negative Commandments the things that you must want Shabbat and the things that you mustn't do on Shabbat um so we get all of that in the Ten Commandments then we hear about Shabbat again in the Torah portion of mishpatim where we hear about the social kind of perspective we have to let your servants rest and your animals rest so if it seems like we've just come at this from every possible angle why is Hashem bringing up Shabbat again and why is that the very last thing that Moshe needs to hear in his Revelation let's look together at the verses in verse 12 it says and you speak to the children of Israel and say only keep my sabbaths for it is a sign between me and you for your generations to know that I the Lord Make You holy therefore keep the Shabbat for it is a sacred thing for you those who desecrate it shall be put to death for whoever performs work on it that soul will be cut off in the midst of its people and it doesn't stop there it keeps on going it says six days work may be done but on the seventh day it is a day of Shabbat of complete rest holy to the Lord whoever performs work on the Shabbat day shall be put to death thus thou shall the children of Israel observe the Shabbat to make the Shabbat throughout their Generations as an Everlasting Covenant between me and the children of Israel it is forever a sign that in six days the Lord created the Heaven and the Earth and on the seventh day he ceased and rested what are we seeing here what is being added it's a good question right and then again you would think that was enough the sin of the calf and right before commanding the people about the Tabernacle Moshe goes back into it this coming Parsha of vayakal starts with Moshe again telling the people about Shabbat the Torah could have just said well Moshe spoke to the people all that Hashem commanded but then Moshe tells them about this again it's really marvelous why are these two stories of Shabbat being told again and why are they being told right after the Revelation they're interrupted by the golden calf but it would seem that had not you know had it not been for the golden calf the sort of development of the story would have been that Moshe finishes the Revelation 40 days up at Sinai and then Hashem talks to him about Siobhan and then he conveys that to the people it's interrupted by the calf story but it seems like Shabbat here is actually meant to be the main conversation that follows Revelation so here are the questions what is different here what are we getting new why do we need to hear more about Shabbat and why is this the message that we need now so I want to look more closely at those verses I just read because there are a few new Concepts that we meet here that we haven't met before up until now Shabbat was a commandment and it was a commemoration of God's creation and God resting and so you know if God rested we rest we have to let our servants rest but here we meet for the first time that the Shabbat is Holy it says in verse 13 keep the Shabbat for I and the Lord who makes you holy and if you desecrate the Shabbat you will be punished meaning the term descrate obviously it could only be used regarding something that's holy because you're making something Unholy that's what desecrating means you can't desecrate something that's not right that's not holy to begin with so that's interesting for you and I we kind of take that as a given that's obvious of course about is a holy day but put yourself in the shoes of the Israelites up until now they've just been told what to do on Shabbat no one ever told them that it's holy don't work rest don't take Mana don't let your servants work what's holy about that it's just stuff that you're allowed to do and not allowed to do it's like we keep kosher but it doesn't mean that everything we eat is specifically holy right it's just like the the the pre-seat holy food but right we could just eat regular food as long as we're keeping it kosher right there there are many Commandments like that if you wear clothing that doesn't have you know mixtures of wool and linen you're following amitsa but it doesn't it doesn't mean that the clothes that you're wearing are of any kind of specific Holiness they're just you're just not breaking the rules so here we have so here we have excuse me here we have this idea of Holiness appearing for the first time then the verse is keep going and we meet a new verb regarding Shabbat that we haven't seen before either it says in verse 16 thus sells the children of is thus shall the children of Israel observe the Shabbat to make the Shabbat throughout their Generations is an Everlasting Covenant make the Shabbat is a new term as I said before we've seen zahor which is to remember the Shabbat and we've seen shamur which is to guard the Shabbat what does it even mean to make the Shabbat and he rewards like to do something to make something how do you make Shabbat isn't Shabbat just a fact it's just a day I don't make a day how do I make a day the day just exists and the third term that we meet here for the first time is the Shabbat is a covenant you know there are 613 Commandments in the Torah not so many of them are covenants we have circumcision I can't really think of any other Commandments besides for that that are covenants there's Shabbat here and up until now we would have just thought that Shabbat is a commandment we didn't know that that was some kind of special Covenant some sort of covenantal relationship that we have with Hashem through this commandment so now when we look at it and put it all together what's new here we have a whole new perspective on shabbats being given over that wasn't given before we have Holiness that's hashem's job Hashem plants that there yashem plants Holiness like a spark of potential buried in the fabric of time itself and then there's the lasso to make to do that's the verb of what we're supposed to do to make Shabbat and in the meeting place of the potential that Hashem plants and something that we're supposed to do that meeting place creates Covenant now I know I spoke about this before but it just reminds me and so I want to mention again there are three types of water sources in Israel there's the spring the well and the cistern and a lot of Israel you have Springs you don't do anything you're just walking in the desert and they pop up we went out with the scr partner to the desert on Friday and you just took us through the desert up and down the mountains and we're driving through and he turns left at some ditch and then there was a spring right there and then you have sister and sisters or something that people dig there are holes that people dig in the ground to collect rain water you don't you it's just that's all you right but it's interesting that all the marriages the big famous marriages in Genesis and all with the Patriarchs are doing all around Wells right we hear so much about Wells why is it well important because the well is interesting it's like a combination of those two things there's the effort that you put into digging the well but unlike a cistern the well is not going to work unless Hashem planted water there to begin with that's why Wells are so special because it's the meeting place between our effort and the potential that Hashem put there and that's like we haven't shown what we haven't shabbana shim plants Holiness in the day but you don't tap into the Holiness unless you dig you have to make Shabbat to do Shabbat and Hashem uses this verb here that's different than the verb he uses regarding keeping the Commandments there's some sort of digging into the inherent Holiness of the day that something Beyond keeping the laws because Hashem used a different word to talk about keeping the laws it's something you make of Shabbat that's a meeting between the Holiness and something that you do it hits the spot and creates an Everlasting Covenant that's beyond keeping the law so I'm scratching my hand what does that mean how do we make Shabbat well there's another place in the Bible that we see these words again of lasso to make in the context of Shabbat Allah of Shabbat alongside the word kodesh holy but it's in an opposite meaning if you look in Isaiah 58 13 it says she it says if you restrain your foot because of the Sabbath from performing your Affairs on my holy day you call the shabbata Delight the holy of the Lord honored and you honor it by not doing your wanted Ways by not pursuing your Affairs and speaking words so here we have this combination again of what we do it says La sod right to do the things that you would normally do and you're not supposed to do those things on hashem's holy day so as Isaiah is telling us what not to do not to perform your normal Affairs on Shabbat because it's a holy day don't pursue pursue your normal activities don't speak your normal words he tells us so by the inverse we can understand what you do do on Shabbat you do Shabbat you make Shabbat by doing the opposite of your normal Affairs this is really important because you can technically keep Shabbat and not really experienced a lot at all you can surely make sure not to turn on electricity not to carry things outside not to light a fire but you could just be talking about the ball game have a timer that switches on your TV to watch the news you can keep every law in the book and you didn't even touch the Covenant side of Shabbat that Hashem is talking about here now it's also really important because a lot of people say well wait what is Shabbat for me if I'm not Jewish for example you know maybe I'm not required to keep all the details of the laws and not turn on the lights and not carry so do I not have Shabbat Hashem is giving here a whole other perspective a whole other aspect about Shabbat beyond the guarding of Shabbat of guarding the laws he says there's a whole other element that's the covenantal element something else that's the meeting between the inherent Holiness that Hashem hid in time and can go completely undetected if you don't dig if you don't dig that well and that means setting aside Shabbat and making Shabbat you make it Shabbat to make Shabbat by not doing what you would normally do and focusing on the spirit focusing on Holiness on Torah not your normal activities and that is what Hashem calls an Everlasting Covenant and that can look different for different people but you know it you know it when you feel it it's like you have to experience it to know that you've gotten there and you know it's sometimes a struggle for me like on Shabbat of course we keep Shabbat we keep the rules but as a mom there are lots of things to just feel like you know day-to-day stuff that keep on ticking I have to feed the kids so instead of you know making new food I feed them the food I made yesterday but it's not like always totally different I can sometimes keep the laws and just not really feel like I'm in the Shabbat Spirit right and so you know if I'm reading a book all week long I can keep on reading that book on Shabbat there's no rule against it nothing technically preventing me from doing that I can chat about my work and talk about the news but then when I realized this reading that there's this whole new aspect of Shabbat it really changed my past Shabbat yesterday and you know every moment of the day I kept thinking how can I not do normal and do something special so for me like you know that really like for everybody could be something different but for me that inspired me I invited the families of the farm over after prayers I said okay I'll provide the food but I want everybody to come and share a Torah idea and we all sat together and every person was just sharing a different you know idea that spoke to them from the Torah portion and in the afternoon that meant like learning Torah rather than just reading the newspaper and you know so for every person that can be different but there's something Beyond guarding the Shabbat and turning it into a covenant that I think is the special message of this portion but then the question is why is that so important specifically now as the last thing that Hashem says to Moshe in sort of the return to normal life after Revelation and this I learned from Rabbi Foreman this week um you know the Revelation is when we heard Hashem speaking to us directly and then Moshe like unbelievably goes up to Sinai and it's this moment in history that will probably you know that can really never be recreated it's like this actual meeting with Hashem but it's our job to recreate it to the best of our ability and to maintain the memory of that so you know Robert Forman says that the Revelation was this Transcendence beyond space and time Moshe went up for 40 days says he didn't eat or drink meaning he transcended time he didn't feel time passing in the way that we think about it and he went up into the cloud what is the cloud the cloud is symbolic hashem's presence so it's like he went past physical space into hashem's space as it were and so we can't do that you know simultaneously we can't always have Revelation where we transcend space and time but maybe we can do those things separately we can have space that transcends space that's the Tabernacle it's like a space that's in this world but we are able to connect from there to Hashem space and then we have Space in Time where we're able to transcend regular time and connect with Hashem Beyond time and that you know it doesn't say about the Tabernacle or the temple that they're an Everlasting Covenant because they can be destroyed they're physical but Shabbat can never be destroyed and that's why it's an everlasting Covenant because it recreates the Covenant that the Revelation that we had with Hashem at Sinai that relationship that was forged we maintain it by this space that we create in time on Shabbat and it's like you know it's like at the end of the Revelation and going back into normal life as it were Hashem is like comforting motion comforting the people and saying yes we had this Revelation and yes we're going back into regular life but it's not the end because I'm creating for you I'm planting a little bit of this Revelation every week in Shabbat so you can tap into it you'll have it forever this is an Everlasting Covenant because as long as there is time there will always be the ability to have our Sinai moment with Hashem in this time that's so special and Transcendent but it depends on us making it so I hope that that lights up your shabbats the way it lit up my Shabbat and with that I wish everybody a beautiful week bye guys