Cycles of Seven

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of teaching at Limmud Baltimore, one of 60 communities world-wide to sponsor "open-source" Jewish learning days in their home towns.

I spoke about the recurring cycles of seven in Judaism: one day in seven is Shabbat; one year in seven is a sabbatical; one sabbatical in seven is The Jubilee.

Stacking up all these cycles, or better, seeing them embedded one in the other, it seemed to me that these represent so much more than the work/rest or work/release lessons we most often glean from them.

Judaism is a religion that seeks to balance the messy, joyous, frustrating realities of life with a vision of achievement and perfection, of Eden, the World to Come, the realization of Tikkun Olam.

The question is how do we keep motivated, how do we keep hope alive, how do we keep laboring for that ultimate good in the face of so little progress, so much failure, such grand disillusionment?

Judaism's answer, or so it seems to me, is to give us periodic tastes of arrival, regular tastes of accomplishment, in the midst of our daily lives. We work six days a week and then arrive at, not just rest on, the seventh day. At sunset on Friday, we enter a different time and a different place. The world may look the same but it is temporarily transformed into an outpost, an embassy, a suite of time and place that alters who we are and how we behave.

One little known midrash plays on this vision. In 18th century Italy, Jewish women would light the Shabbat candles and say the following prayer: "God of Israel, may  it be Your will to radiate light, joy, happiness, honor, goodness, mercy, prosperity, blessing and peace upon those in heaven and those here below... and may you extend graciousness through the concealed light, the light of all life..."

The "concealed light", ha'or ha'ganuz, is, according to this midrash, the light of the first day of creation. On Day One, in Genesis, God created Light. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. Those came on Day Four.  But Day One saw the birth of Light, the primordial, generative light that feeds all life.

This light (unlike the solar light we are familiar with) was so powerful it lit up the universe from one end to the other. It was so powerful it would have incinerated material life should it remain loose in the world.

So, to create the world, God gathered this primordial light of perfection and tucked it away under the divine throne to be kept safe and sound for the End of Days and the World to Come.

It is, however, released once a week, when the Shabbat candles are lit. Those two flames are emissaries of this primordial light, and portals to the world of perfection they promise.

Judaism tells us that the six days, years, cycles we work are not separate from the goal we strive for. They are the path that will get us there. And lest we despair, and give in to frustration, or believe that what we do matters not, we are gifted each week (each seventh year, each Jubilee) with increasing levels of Arrival, of a taste of being there.

The cycles, then, are much more than work and rest. They are pursuit and destination, achievement and arrival. They are what drives our work and gives us a blessedly recurring, and reliable, taste of our dreams.

(More on the differences between Shabbat, Shemittah (the seventh year), and the Jubilee (the seventh seventh year) in posts to come.