Shabbat Across America and Beyond

In his book, The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschl retells the legend that “at the time when God was giving the Torah to Israel, God 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 You will give us if we obey Your 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.” Our sages, dating back even before the Talmud was written, said that Shabbat is a taste of eternity, a small island in which we sample the World to Come. On Shabbat we allow ourselves to experience rest and peace, joy and harmony; setting aside the labor of the week, allowing ourselves to stop creating and just be.
On the day of Shabbat we can contemplate the possibility of the messianic age, the time when people will be reconciled with each other. We can imagine a world in which there is no war, one in which people are so spiritually advanced that conflict melts away in the face of our love for each other and our recognition that our Divine souls link us to one another and to God. This vision of a future time, a better time, is one in which there is true cooperation and interdependence. In which what is good for you is also good for me. This is the way the world is supposed to work. I create blessing for you and me. You create blessing for me and you. No one prevents the Divine flow of blessings from coming to themselves or others. Rather than each ego pitted against every other ego, there is a recognition that there is enough for all: a human family working together, as this week’s Torah portion , Pekudei describes: each person bringing a freewill offering; each person contributing labor, materials, or talent to the efforts of the community in building the Holy Tabernacle.
The National Jewish Outreach Program, by creating Shabbat across America has created a holy tabernacle that spreads the shelter of Sabbath peace over all the Jewish people of North America. It has made one small gesture in harmonizing our Jewish family; helping us to recognize that, whatever our different perspectives, we are all playing a part in coming together tonight to celebrate Shabbat. For one evening, we are one in purpose, tasting the harmony and peace of the world to come. A cynic can say this is too small a gesture to really matter. But, in truth, each instance of loving co-existence is real: it is its own island of harmony, and creates its own energies of blessing, giving us hope when we realize how much good we are capable of bringing forth. Creating harmony starts small. It comes from each of our hearts and proceeds outward in larger and larger concentric circles of goodwill. This is what we come here to remember: that if there is the possibility of a messianic time of peace, surely God and we have dreamed it together and will create it together.