The Essence of Shabbat

It says in the Talmud that Shabbat is 1/60 of the world to come. The world to come is beyond anything we can imagine and yet Shabbat is a little taste of the world to come. The Ba’al Shem Tov taught that if you hold on to a part then you’re holding on to the whole. So by holding on to Shabbat it’s as if we’re holding on to the whole experience of the world to come. And that’s why when we talk about Shabbos we talk about what’s called “oneg Shabbos” the pleasure or the bliss of Shabbos. That Shabbos gives us the opportunity to contact the deepest level of our soul and cling to God. So there’s a beautiful understanding of how do we do that exactly, how do we cling to God, how we connect, plug in, to the bliss of Shabbos. So we’re told that on Shabbos we should see all our work as if it’s done. meaning after six days of work everyone is in the middle of all these projects, in the middle of work and school and relationships, but we’re told when we get to Shabbos we should see that all our work is done. In other words to cut loose of the past, and try to put the past out of our mind. Likewise we’re told that we’re not supposed to make plans on Shabbos for the future. So therefore we’re not thinking of what we’re doing after Shabbos or next week or next month or next year. So what does that leave us with, if we’re not talking about the past, and we’re not thinking about the future, so we’re plugging into what’s called the “eternal present” or “be here now”. We are plugging into what the essence of what Shabbos is, is the type of bliss that truthfully we could contact any time, but we’re usually too busy, too caught up in our lives to really plug in to that. So therefore there’s no past, as it were, there’s no future, there’s just the bliss of the present. And that’s one of the great secrets of Shabbat. Another beautiful allusion to the essence of Shabbos is that the numerical value of Shabbos is 702; every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also has a number, so the numerical value of the word Shabbat is 702. And in mathematics there is what’s called inverse numbers. In other words the opposite of 702 is 207. 207 is the numerical value of light. And it’s also the numerical value of the term in Hebrew for infinite Ein Sof. So we see a beautiful allusion here to the essence of Shabbat, is the light of God. The infinite light of God is shining through Shabbos. That’s why we begin every Shabbos with lighting candles. Special mitzvah, special commandment that women have to usher in the Shabbat by lighting lights. The closer you come to the speed of light the more time slows down. It’s an incredible phenomenon about light. When you get, according to physics, when you get to the speed of light, theoretically, time stops, time does not pass. So we see a beautiful insight here. Since the inverse of Shabbos, which equals 702 is light which is 207 we see, as it were, when we ride the light, the infinite light of God which is shining through Shabbos then truly there is no past and there is no future. We’re experiencing the eternal now. So Shabbos is like being on God’s beam of light. And when we experience that, that is the bliss of Shabbos and that is 1/60 of the world-to-come. And we should all be blessed to experience this.