Books Of Judaism

Judaism / Rediscovering the Shabbat prayers

Mimkha Eilekha - Sefer Hashabbat (From You to You - Prayer Book for Shabbat with Readings for Mind and Heart ), edited by Yonadav Kaploun. Yedioth Ahronoth Books (Hebrew ), 437 pages, NIS 118

From the perspective of Orthodox Judaism, the Sabbath means taking an unambiguous stance. It is with reason that the term "shomer Shabbat" - "Sabbath-observant" - is one of the most crucial markers of a Jewish individual's identity with respect to his faith. The effort to attribute sanctity to time within the vanities of our lives and in the midst of all the weighty tasks incumbent on us is renewed every week. Creation itself has been refined into the Sabbath, and the individual, ordinary Jew tries to absorb renewed strength from it.

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Poet Yonadav Kaploun came to the task of presenting the concept of the Sabbath in its various aspects after compiling similar prayer books for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur - with the traditional liturgy, and relevant excerpts from commentary and other sources - for a series entitled Mimkha Eilekha. Then he, together with others, spent six years preparing a siddur for Shabbat. In it, he tries to reconcile two seemingly contradictory ways of understanding the Sabbath. One stresses the principled and existential immanence of the Sabbath as something present in its own right, and the other stresses man's place in keeping and shaping the day as something given to individuals to bring into their personal worlds.

Kaploun draws from a fascinating variety of sources: the Talmud and rabbinical law, Aggadah (homily ) and Midrash (exegesis ), books of philosophers and Hasidim, responsa literature, and modern Hebrew poetry and prose.

Take an example from the section on se'uda shlishit, the third and final Sabbath meal. First the prayer book gives us the ruling in the Shulhan Arukh, the 16th-century Code of Jewish Law, on the requirement to eat this meal. Then there is an extract from the 13th-century mystical text the Zohar, translated in the book from the original Aramaic into Hebrew, which expresses the special spiritual and mystical status of Sabbath afternoon, when the meal is consumed. And there's also the liturgical poem Atkinu Se'udata ("Prepare the Meal" ) by the kabbalist rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572 ), in addition to traditional songs for the third meal.

Other people may be more interested in the stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov (Israel Ben-Eliezer, considered the founder of Hasidic Judaism, 1678-1760 ), from "Sippurei Hasidim" (Stories of the Hasidim ), by Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin (1888-1978 ), which appears in the same section. The volume also offers poems by Ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021-1058 ), Rabbi Shalom Shabazi (1619-1720 ) and Lea Goldberg (1911-1970 ), a piece by writer Shalom Asch (1880-1957 ) and a description of the Sabbath experiences of a member of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet.

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