By Betzy Lynch in La Jolla, California
To My Shabbat Soul, I owe you an apology.
For years you stood at the corner of my week, softly waving, while I sprinted past with grocery lists, deadlines, and the mistaken confidence of someone who thought she was getting her steps in.
I thought we were playing tag. I thought if I ran fast enough all week long, you would chase me, call it cardio, call it productivity, call it a life well managed.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this was not exercise. It was an exercise in futility.
You were never running in search of me. You were waiting.
And I, with the spiritual grammar of a third grader, kept conjugating you incorrectly.
I assumed Shabbat was a noun, a day, a box on the calendar, something you observe with candlelight and delicious food while still answering emails.
How did I not know that Shabbat is a verb?
Something you enter. Something you practice. Something you become.
I kept looking for holiness in places, in sanctuaries, in programs, in productivity.
Meanwhile you were whispering: holiness begins in time… or perhaps in the absence of time.
I thought holiness required geography and clear boundaries. You were trying to show me its only limits are my awareness.
You were offering to be my partner for twenty-six hours, stretching my spiritual imagination.
And I kept telling you, “Maybe next week. I’m busy being a human doing.”
Please forgive me.
Forgive me for confusing motion with meaning, for believing exhaustion was evidence of importance, for assuming rest was laziness instead of entry into a higher frequency of reality.
How did I not recognize that during the week my consciousness shrinks, constricted, cramped, while you were waiting to take my hand so it could expand?
Each day I see a world fragmented and broken.
And you, in candle-reflected light, were guiding me toward a different vision: not a world shattered, but unified by holiness.
If I cannot feel accomplished without checking the boxes on my to-do list, how will I ever see that sacred time itself can become a meeting place between heaven and earth?
How did I overlook that the first thing G-d ever called holy was not a place but a moment in time?
Before Sinai. Before Jerusalem. Before anyone built anything impressive.
Holiness was always hiding in plain sight, waiting in the quiet, waiting for me to slow down enough so you could catch up. Or perhaps so I could.
I’m sorry for the years I treated you like an optional add-on instead of the upgrade. For lighting candles without lighting awareness. For blessing wine while my mind fermented elsewhere.
I understand now, at least a little:
Shabbat is not a place I go. It is a reality I create. It is not something I attend. It is something I become.
You were never asking me to stop living. You were asking me to start being.
To remember that when I slow my pace enough for you to walk beside me, I stop being a human doing and finally experience being a human being with myself, and with G-d.
So, this is my promise:
This week I will not make you chase me. I will soften my calendar. I will loosen my grip. I will practice better grammar. I will conjugate Shabbat correctly. I will let time hold me instead of trying to hold up the world.
And when you arrive, my patient, expanded, luminous soul, I will be standing still enough for you to find me.
With belated wisdom and a slightly humbled ego,
Yours,
Betzy
Thank you to the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the women from my At The Well circle for their wisdom to inspire this poem.
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Betzy Lynch is Chief Executive Officer of the Lawrence Family JCC.