When the Outside World Invades Shabbat

Judaism’s central prayer, the amidah, consists of nineteen blessings, which break down into three sections: shevach/praise, bakashot/requests, and hodaya/thanksgiving.

Praise and thanksgiving account for the first and last three blessings, which means that the bulk of the prayer, thirteen blessings in total, are requests.

This fact has interesting implications, as it means that the central expression of Jewish spirituality has the tenor of a complaint—a cry for things to be different. Swaying back and forth, we beg God for a world that is better, healthier, safer, and more just. We ask for the righteous to be uplifted and the wicked to be brought low.

On Shabbat, however, we drop all these requests and replace them with a single blessing expressing the holiness of the day.

In truth, there are a few requests in the Shabbat amidah, but they are decidedly non-material. We ask for peace, for God to make his presence known in the land, and for God to be sanctified through our Shabbat rest.

Instead of praying for the kind of change that happens out there, we pray for the kind of change that happens right here. Instead of praying for the kind of change that one learns about in a news broadcast, we pray for the kind of change that one discovers in one’s own heart.

Other Shabbat practices—like the prohibitions on traveling and using technology—reinforce this way of being, keeping us in the here and now, rather than immersed in the wider world with all its troubles.

Sometimes, however, despite these efforts, the world and its troubles find us.

This was the case this last Friday, when a terrorist breached the sacred space of Shabbat in Jerusalem, spraying bullets into a crowd of people outside of a synagogue, leaving seven individuals dead and others injured.

It didn’t take long for this tragic news to make its way to me through the ether via a notification on my friend’s phone.

I wondered—what now? Should we return to the world—grabbing our phones and turning on the TV to see the news? Or should we continue to stay in the bounded locality of Shabbat?

To do the latter somehow felt like a farce—an absurd insistence that the show must go on when there’s a fire in the theater.

To do the former felt similarly inappropriate. These Jews had died observing Shabbat, after all.

In the end, I tried to navigate a middle path. I turned on my phone to notify my loved ones that I was ok, knowing that they would see the news. And then I put it back away.

The next day, as the sky darkened and the sun set on this Shabbat, I realized it was again time to pray. I grabbed my prayer book and faced east—in the direction, it occurred to me, of the massacre.

The weekday amidah can be frustrating. It is frustrating to pray for the same things three times a day and not to get them. It is frustrating to want a better world and not to have one.

The first weekday amidah after the end of Shabbat, however, has a different feeling. Somehow, after a day away from requests, it is both sweet and sorrowful to return to desire—to admit that we want more from God, and to send our prayers outward to those who need them.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.