Shabbat, song and prayer and light

This has been a long week. Lately, they all seem long.

The days push and pull at me, demanding my attention, my devotion, my energy.  At the end of the day, when darkness gathers in small corners and the noise of the day skitters at the edge of consciousness, I lay, exhausted but wired, willing my mind to calm, to rest, to slow down (please God! let it slow down) so I can sleep. But I don't.  I court sleep like a coy lover.  It is elusive, teasing me with a promise of rest, only to flee at the last possible second, leaving me tangled in sweat-dampened sheets.

Again and again, I repeat this dance, and eventually I sleep. For a couple of hours, I am at rest.  But the alarm rings too early, its shrill buzz shattering the morning quiet. I am awake, even as my cramped fingers scritch across my nightstand in search of the snooze button on my alarm, which screeches, incessant and raucous and deafening.  I am awake, mostly.  I drift on a sea of not-quite: not morning quite yet, but no longer night; neither asleep nor awake, but aware.  I just need a few more minutes, hours, days.  Please.

And just as suddenly as the days tumble and race through the week, barreling (seemingly) into one another, it is Shabbat: timeless and in-between, outside and separate.  Suddenly, I can breathe. I am at rest.

I love this time of year. I sit in the sanctuary on Friday night, my skin still buzzing with the noise of the week, my head in a million different places everywhere at once, and I watch the light outside the window as it ushers in Shabbat.  I cannot see the sun, only the light as it changes, mellows and deepens. The wild grasses are tipped in gold and a single tree, dusty green and brown, gathers shadows under a darkening sky, a slow study in purple and grey and black.  The sky goes from the pale blue of a summer day to a luminous cerulean blue.

Shabbat is here at last, the beautiful bride, dancing in from the fields just as surely as the Kabbalists rejoiced a few hundred years ago.  It is a celebration, a promise in song and prayer and light.  Is it the light of creation?  Some have argued it is, that the light of Shabbat is so pure, so perfect, it is the remembrance of creation that shines on us for a brief and timeless time.  I don't know; I would like to believe it, and so I do.  

My heart is not as calcified, as protected as it once was, when I was angry with God and my only prayer was a quick "forget you." I declared my disbelief in God to any who would listen, and to many who wouldn't.  What I didn't share was my secret belief that it was God who didn't believe in me.  It has softened, my heart; it is not quite so protected these days.  God and I are pretty tight, I think.  And so, with all my weary heart, I take comfort that Shabbat is a gift, a promise from God: we can rest, we can breathe.  We step outside of time, to celebrate, to study, to renew, to listen, to love, to find the sacred, remember the holy.

And for this brief and timeless time, I find rest, I find God, I find peace.

Shabbat Shalom.