The Presence of a Day
What is it that these epithets are trying to celebrate? It is time, of all phenomena the least tangible, the least material. When we celebrate the Sabbath we adore precisely something we do not see. To name it queen, to call it bride is merely to allude to the fact that its spirit is a reality we meet rather than an empty span of time which we choose to set aside for comfort or recuperation.
Did the rabbis imagine that the Sabbath was an angel? a spiritual person? 1 Religious thought cannot afford to associate closely with the powers of fantasy. Yet the metaphoric concept of the Sabbath held no danger of deification of the seventh day, of conceiving it to be an angel or a spiritual person. Nothing stands between God and man, not even a day.
The idea of the Sabbath as a queen or a bride did not represent a mental image, something that could be imagined. There was no picture in the mind that corresponded to the metaphor. Nor was it ever crystallized as a definite concept, from which logical consequences could be drawn, or raised to a dogma, an object of belief. The same Rabbi Hanina who celebrated the Sabbath as a queen preferred on another occasion to compare the Sabbath with a king.2
It would be an oversimplification to assume that the ancient rabbis were trying to personify the Sabbath, to express an image which was in their minds. Between personifying time and calling it queen or bride the difference is as big as between presuming to count the exact sum of all beings and calling it universe. The rabbis did not believe that the seventh day was endowed with human features, with a figure or a face; their ideas did not result in either visible or verbal iconography. They rarely went beyond the venture of cherishing the endearing terms of queen or bride. This was not because of a dearth in imaginative power but because what they were eager to convey was more than what minds could visualize or words could say.
To most of us a person, a human being, seems to be a maximum of being, the ceiling of reality; we think that to personify is to glorify. Yet do not some of us realize at times that a person is no superlative, that to personify the spiritually real is to belittle it? A personification may be both a distortion and a depreciation. There are many persons in the world but only one Sabbath.
The idea of the Sabbath as a queen or a bride is not a personification of the Sabbath but an exemplification of a divine attribute, an illustration of God’s need for human love; it does not represent a substance but the presence of God, His relationship to man.
Such metaphorical exemplification does not state a fact; it expresses a value, putting into words the preciousness of the Sabbath as Sabbath. Observance of the seventh day is more than a technique of fulfilling a commandment. The Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man. It is possible for the soul to respond in affection, to enter into fellowship with the consecrated day.
The seventh day was full of both loveliness and majesty—an object of awe, attention and love. Friday eve, when the Sabbath is about to engross the world, the mind, the entire soul, and the tongue is tied with trembling and joy—what is there that one could say? To those who are not vulgarized, who guard their words from being tainted, queen, bride, signify majesty tempered with mercy and delicate innocence that is waiting for affection.
The idea of the Sabbath as a bride was retained by Israel; it is the theme of the hymn Lechah Dodi chanted in the synagogue. Even the sanctification over wine was explained with the idea that, just as the wedding ceremony is performed over a cup of wine, so Sabbath is “the bride that enters the hupah.” To this day the meal on Saturday night is called “the escort of the queen.”
“The reason why the people extend the observance of the Sabbath to a part of Saturday night is to thank and to show that they do not like to see the departure of the holy guest, that her parting evokes a deep feeling of regret. This is why they detain her, and in their great affection accompany her with song and praise … as it is said in a Midrash: This may be compared to a bride and queen who is escorted with song and praise.”3
The name of the Friday evening service is kabbalat Shabbat. What does the phrase mean? The term kabbalah denotes the act of taking an obligation upon oneself. The term in this sense has the connotation of strictness and restraint. Yet kabbalah in its verbal form means also: to receive, to welcome, to greet.4 In the first meaning, it is applied to a law; in the second, to a person. The question arises, in what meaning is the word kabbalah used when applied to the word Shabbat?
It has been said that in medieval literature the term kabbalat Shabbat is used exclusively in the first sense, denoting the act of taking upon oneself the obligation to rest,5 the moment of cessation from work. Yet it may be proved that in an even earlier period the term has been used in the sense of greeting or welcoming the Sabbath.6 What, then, does the phrase kabbalat Shabbat mean?
The answer is, it means both; it has both a legal and a spiritual meaning; they are inseparable from one another. The distinction of the Sabbath is reflected in the twin meanings of the phrase kabbalat Shabbat which means to accept the sovereignty as well as to welcome the presence of the day. The Sabbath is a queen as well as a bride.