NotePad

« Knowledge | Main | More Than Meets The Eye (1) »

September 04, 2003

Shabbos

In our society, messed up as it is, Shabbos is one thing that has a lot of “weight”. Even people whose yiddishkeit is not rooted deeply in their hearts, keep Shabbos to it's utmost, or at least try to. It is considered a “milestone” (if in the wrong direction,) when someone who is officially frum is mechalel Shabbos. Here's a Definition of melacha that all of us should have been taught along with the basics, such as “don't turn on a light on Shabbos.”

How is the Shabbos to become such a symbol? How is it to become an education and a sanctification for our true task in life? “The seventh day is to be a Shabbos to G-d your G-d.” How? “On it you shall not do any kind of work.” This is much more than a mere day of rest. It is an all-embracing symbolic statement. How does man show his domination over the earth? By fashioning all the things in his environment to suit his own purposes, the earth for his habitation, plants and animals for his food and clothing, metals and plastics for his industry, coal and oil and the atom itself for his energy. With his science and his technology he can transform everything into an instrument for his own service. How wonderful this is! What tremendous power resides in the mind of man! But wherever we see a great concentration of power, we must ask: how is this power regulated? Uncontrolled power leads to disaster. As we have learnt while studying other mitzvos, the control envisaged by the Torah is a self-imposed control. In consists in replacing selfish, materialist goals by unselfish, spiritual goals, revealed to us by the world's creator. This ensures that the way we administer the world will be beneficent rather than disastrous. It is our task as Jews to keep this option open. We do it by maintaining the symbol of the Shabbos. On this day, at the behest of the Torah, we are to refrain from all productive activity. For this one day we relinquish our domination over the world and its resources. This is why the Hebrew name of this day is Shabbat, which does not mean “rest” but “cessation of activity.” On this day we, so to speak, restore the world to G-d, and thus proclaim, to ourselves and to others, that our life in this world has higher, spiritual aims.

Refraining from work on Shabbos is thus a “sign”, as the Torah puts it: an expressive symbol for all time. The bearer of the symbol, the “work” that we refrain from on Shabbos, is very carefully circumscribed in Jewish law. Melacha, as this type of work is called, certainly does not mean physical exertion. It refers to carrying out an intelligent purpose by practical skill, production, creation, transport, transforming an object for human purposes; all, as we saw, activities which bespeak man's domination of the physical world. A person can have tired himself out the whole day, but so long as he has not produced something of significance, or effected some magnificent change in an object, he has not done a melacha. On the other hand if one has brought about such a change, without the slightest exertion, then he has desecrated the Shabbos. In fact the less exertion needed, the more the act proclaims man's successful domination of his environment, and this is just the type of act that we have to relinquish on Shabbos to G-d.
The laws concerning the prohibition of melacha on Shabbos, which are the realization in practice of the above concept, have as their scope practically all the productive activities of man. To qualify as melacha an act must be deliberate, it must aim at, and achieve, some significant, constructive purpose, and be done with reasonable skill. It is an important principle of the Shabbos laws that an act done in an unusual manner or for purely destructive purposes is not a melacha. A little reflection will show how all these principles fit into the concept of prohibition of melacha which we developed above.

From MASTERPLAN 41:3-4, by Rav Aryeh Carmell

Posted by notepad at September 4, 2003 12:40 AM

Comments

Post a comment