KABBALAT SHABBAT / WELCOMING SHABBAT Already in Talmudic times Shabbat was seen as a bride, and the day itself as a wedding. “Rabbi Ḥanina robed himself and stood on the eve of Shabbat at sunset and said, ‘Come, let us go and welcome Shabbat the queen.’ Rabbi Yannai donned his robes and said, ‘Come O bride, come O bride’ ” (Shabbat 119a). In the late sixteenth century, this idea was developed with fresh intensity by a remarkable group of Jewish mystics in Safed. They included Rabbi Moses Cordovero who developed the custom of saying special psalms to greet the incoming Shabbat; his brother-in-law Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, composer of the song Lekha Dodi (“Come, my Beloved”); Rabbi Elazar Azikri, author of Yedid Nefesh (“Beloved of the Soul”); and Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the “Ari” or “Arizal”), greatest of the Safed mystics, whose thought brought new depth to our understanding of prayer and observance of Shabbat as acts that help heal the spiritual fractures of the world. By the twelfth century, the custom existed to say Psalm 92 as a song of welcome to Shabbat. The Safed kabbalists did more. Dressed in white, they would go out into the fields as the sun set, singing psalms and songs to the Shabbat bride. That is the origin of the custom (first mentioned by Rabbi Moshe ben Yehuda Makhir, Seder HaYom) to recite the six extra psalms (95–99, 29) prior to Lekha Dodi. A further reminder of the original custom is our practice of turning round to face west at the last verse of the song, facing, as they did, the setting sun, to welcome the incoming bride. To emphasize the non-statutory character of Kabbalat Shabbat, the custom in some synagogues is for the Leader to recite it from the bima rather than the amud (lectern) at the front of the synagogue. The six psalms said before Lekha Dodi represent the six days of the week. The first five appear sequentially in the book of Psalms (95–99). They speak of the song creation sings to its Creator. These are followed by Psalm 29, understood by some as a description of the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Lekha Dodi looks forward to future redemption, and Psalms 92 and 93 envision the end of days. Thus the entire sequence is structured around the movement from creation to revelation to redemption*.*

לְכוּ נְרַנְּנָה Psalm 95. Come, let us sing for joy: The Psalmist calls on the people to serve God with joy, redeeming the sin of their ancestors who, though they had been rescued by God from slavery, were ungrateful and argumentative. Massah and Meribah (literally, “testing and quarreling”), were the names given to the place where, after crossing the Reed Sea, the Israelites complained of their lack of water (Ex. 17:1–7). אַרְבָּעִים שָׁנָה For forty years (next page): A reference to the episode of the spies (Num. chapters 13–14), when the people, demoralized by their report, rebelled. Their fate was to spend forty years in the desert. The Psalmist urges the people to do the opposite: to sing to God with joy.

שִֽׁירוּ לַיהוה Psalm 96. Sing to the LORD a new song: One of the most difficult ideas for modern minds to grasp is that the universe might sing for joy at the coming of judgment and justice. Yet we believe not only in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, but also in the inseparable connection between cosmos and ethos, the world-that-is and the world-that-ought-to-be. God not only created the universe but also “saw that it was good.” From the outset, the universe had an objective moral structure. As the natural world is governed by scientific law, so the human world is governed by moral law. Hence creation rejoices that He is coming to judge the earth כִּי בָא לִשְׁפֹּט הָאָֽרֶץ*,* that the world is governed by the rule of right rather than the rule of force.

יהוה מָלָךְ Psalm 97. The LORD reigns, let the earth be glad: God, Maker of the Universe, is the ultimate Sovereign. Therefore, all earthly rule and exercise of power is subject to His overarching authority: “The LORD reigns.” History is not destined to be an endless story of the victory of might over right, the powerful over the powerless. At the heart of reality is a force that makes for justice, giving strength to the weak, and courage to the oppressed. “Light is sown for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.”

מִזְמוֹר Psalm 98. A Psalm. Sing a new song to the Lord: In this celebratory song, the Psalmist describes redemption in the vivid image of a royal arrival. The King who is also Judge and Deliverer is about to come. The trumpets sound a clarion to announce His entrance. A roar is heard, not just from the assembled people but from the universe itself: the sea, the earth, rivers and mountains. All herald His coming with joy, for they know that when He sits in judgment He will resolve all disputes with equity.

יהוה מָלָךְ Psalm 99. The Lord reigns, let the peoples tremble: Having declared God’s sovereignty, the Psalmist now speaks of His holiness. The three sections of the psalm each end on this theme. The first two – about God’s enthronement and His justice, end with the declaration, “He is holy.” The third ends with a double use of the word: “Bow at His holy mountain, for the LORD our God is holy.” Moses, Aaron, Samuel. Respectively they represent the three “crowns” of leadership: prophecy, priesthood and kingship. Moses was the greatest of the prophets, Aaron the first High Priest, and Samuel the man who anointed Israel’s first kings, Saul and David.

מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד Psalm 29. A psalm of David. Render to the LORD: This psalm, powerful in both imagery and language, breaks the sequence of the previous psalms (95–99). Many interpret it as a poetic description of the giving of the Torah. The Talmud Yerushalmi (Berakhot 4:3) relates its seven mentions of the word kol, “voice,” to the seven blessings of the Shabbat Amida. Its mood is significant. It describes an earth-shattering storm which subsides, so that the last word of the psalm is “peace.” So will the storm of human history one day be transfigured into peace. Redemption stands to history as does Shabbat to the six days of creation.

אָנָּא, בְּכֹֽחַ Please, by the power: A hymn in seven lines, each of six words, whose initial letters spell out a mystical 42-letter name of God. It is attributed to Rabbi Neḥunya ben haKanah (second half of the first century CE).

לְכָה דוֹדִי Come, my Beloved: This song – the one original composition introduced into this service by the Safed kabbalists – was written by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz. It is a work of surpassing beauty, speaking in turn of Shabbat, Jerusalem, the Jewish people, and the Messiah, before returning in its last verse to the Shabbat again. Artfully woven from biblical quotations, many of them drawn from Isaiah’s prophecies of consolation, together with Talmudic and midrashic ideas, its first eight verses form an acrostic, spelling out the name of its author, Shlomo HaLevi.

שָׁמוֹר וְזָכוֹר בְּדִבּוּר אֶחָד “Observe” and “Remember” in one act of speech: This refers to two versions of the Ten Commandments. In the first (Ex. 20:8), Israel was commanded to “Remember” the Sabbath; in the second (Deut. 5:12), to “observe” it. According to the sages, both were uttered at the same time. “Observe” refers to the negative commandment of Shabbat, the prohibition against work, while “Remember” refers to the positive commandment, to sanctify it in word and deed. The idea that both were spoken simultaneously teaches that the negative and positive aspects of holy time are inseparable. The prohibition against work creates space for rest and joy.

מִקְדַּשׁ מֶֽלֶךְ עִיר מְלוּכָה Sanctuary of the King, royal city: In this and the next four verses, the poet speaks of the desolate condition of Jerusalem and the Jewish people in his day. Using language drawn from Isaiah, he turns first to Jerusalem, then to the Jewish people, then to the land of Israel itself, summoning them to shake off their grief and rouse themselves to new glory. These verses radiate the hope born of faith, the victory of joy over despair.

בּֽוֹאִי בְשָׁלוֹם Come in peace: At this point our custom is to turn around to greet the Shabbat bride, as did the mystics in the fields of Safed.

מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר לְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת A Psalm. A song for the Sabbath day: This psalm, sung by the Levites on Shabbat, was already understood by the sages as “a song for the time to come, for the day that will be all Shabbat and rest in life everlasting.” Shabbat is not merely a day of rest, it is a rehearsal, within time, for the age beyond time when humanity, guided by the call of God, moves beyond strife, evil and oppression, to create a world of harmony, respecting the integrity of creation as God’s work, and the human person as God’s image. At that time, people looking back at history will see that though evil flourished “like grass,” it was short-lived, while the righteous grow slowly but stand tall “like the cedar of Lebanon.” Because our time perspective is short, we seem to inhabit a world in which evil prevails. Were we able to see history as a whole, we would know that good wins the final victory; in the long run justice prevails.

בַּמֶּה מַדְלִיקִין With what wicks may we light? This, the second chapter of the Mishna tractate Shabbat, was also added to prolong the service for the benefit of latecomers. Its recitation, however, is also related to an ancient controversy between those who accepted the Oral Law and those (Sadducees, and later, Karaites) who denied it. The latter held that the commandment, “Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day” (Ex. 35:3), precluded the use of any light; the former held that it excluded only the act of kindling itself, and not the use of a light that had been lit before Shabbat. Hence the study of the section of the Mishna, part of the Oral Law, that deals with Shabbat lights (Sefer HaIttim).