Intuitions of Eternity
That the Sabbath and eternity are one—or of the same essence—is an ancient idea.1 A legend relates that “at the time when God was giving the Torah to Israel, He said to them: My children! If you accept the Torah and observe my mitzvot, I will give you for all eternity a thing most precious that I have in my possession.
—And what, asked Israel, is that precious thing which Thou wilt give us if we obey Thy Torah?
—The world to come.
—Show us in this world an example of the world to come.
—The Sabbath is an example of the world to come.“2
An ancient tradition declares: “The world to come is characterized by the kind of holiness possessed by the Sabbath in this world … The Sabbath possesses a holiness like that of the world to come.”3
Rabbi Akiba, the teacher of Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai, gave expression to the same idea. “There was a special song for every day of the week which the Levites used to sing in the Temple at Jerusalem. On the first day they sang The Earth is the Lord’s; on the second day they sang Great is the Lord, and so on. On the Sabbath they sang A Psalm: a Song for the Sabbath Day; a Psalm, a song for the time that is to come, for the day which will be all Sabbath and rest in the life eternal.”4
What is the nature of the day that is all Sabbath? It is a time in which “there is neither eating nor drinking nor worldly transactions; but the righteous sit enthroned, their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the luster of the Shechinah.”5
According to the Talmud, the Sabbath is me’en ‘olam ha-ba, which means: somewhat like eternity or the world to come. This idea that a seventh part of our lives may be experienced as paradise is a scandal to the pagans and a revelation to the Jews. And yet to Rabbi Hayim of Krasne the Sabbath contains more than a morsel of eternity. To him the Sabbath is the fountainhead (ma’yan) of eternity, the well from which heaven or the life in the world to come takes its source.
Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come. Sad is the lot of him who arrives inexperienced and when led to heaven has no power to perceive the beauty of the Sabbath … .6
While Jewish tradition offers us no definition of the concept of eternity, it tells us how to experience the taste of eternity or eternal life within time. Eternal life does not grow away from us; it is “planted within us,”7 growing beyond us. The world to come is therefore not only a posthumous condition, dawning upon the soul on the morrow after its departure from the body. The essence of the world to come is Sabbath eternal, and the seventh day in time is an example of eternity. 8 The seventh day has the flavor of the seventh heaven and was given as a foretaste of the world to come; ot hi le-’olam, a token of eternity.9
A story is told about a rabbi who once entered heaven in his dream. He was permitted to approach the temple in Paradise where the great sages of the Talmud, the Tannaim, were spending their eternal lives. He saw that they were just sitting around tables studying the Talmud. The disappointed rabbi wondered, “Is this all there is to Paradise?” But suddenly he heard a voice: “You are mistaken. The Tannaim are not in Paradise. Paradise is in the Tannaim.”
There is much that philosophy could learn from the Bible. To the philosopher the idea of the good is the most exalted idea. But to the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The good is the base, the holy is the summit. Things created in six days He considered good, the seventh day He made holy.
To Jewish piety the ultimate human dichotomy is not that of mind and matter but that of the sacred and the profane. We have known profanity too long and have become accustomed to think that the soul is an automaton. The law of the Sabbath tries to direct the body and the mind to the dimension of the holy. It tries to teach us that man stands not only in a relation to nature but in a relation also to the creator of nature.
What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time, to raise the good to the level of the holy, to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity.
Spirit in the form of time, eternity, is, indeed, an absurdity to all those who think that the spirit is but an idea in the mind of man or that God is a thing among other things. Yet those who realize that God is at least as great as the known universe, that the spirit is an endless process of which we humbly partake, will understand and experience what it means that the spirit is disclosed at certain moments of time. One must be overawed by the marvel of time to be ready to perceive the presence of eternity in a single moment. One must live and act as if the fate of all of time would depend on a single moment.
We usually think that the earth is our mother, that time is money and profit our mate. The seventh day is a reminder that God is our father, that time is life and the spirit our mate.
There is a world of things and a world of spirit. Sabbath is a microcosm of spirit, as if combining in itself all the elements of the macrocosm of spirit.
Just as the physical world does not owe its existence to the power of man—it is simply there—so does the spirit not owe its existence to the mind of man. The Sabbath is not holy by the grace of man. It was God who sanctified the seventh day.
In the language of the Bible the world was brought into being in the six days of creation, yet its survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day. Great are the laws that govern the processes of nature. Yet without holiness there would be neither greatness nor nature.