Introduction
During Magen Avos on Shabbos we say the following:
מְקַדֵּשׁ הַשַּׁבָּת וּמְבָרֵךְ שְּׁבִיעִי
He sanctifies the Shabbos and blesses the seventh day.
What is the meaning of the word sanctifies and blesses such that God sanctifies Shabbos and blesses the seventh day? Why doesn’t He sanctify the seventh day and bless the Shabbos? Or better yet, why doesn’t He sanctify and bless both? Is Shabbos not blessed? Is the seventh day not set apart? In any case, don’t they mean the same thing?
Right, so let’s try to break this down.
What do these words mean?
- Sanctify - to set something apart for some particular reason or function.
- Bless - to endow something with increased goodness or abundance, or to provide it with the ability to confer blessing upon other things.
The First Dimension
With those descriptions in mind let’s try to plug them in to our verse:
He sets apart the Shabbos and endows the seventh day with goodness.
Now that may explain why the Shabbos is set apart and the seventh day is not. Indeed, the word Shabbos is different than the name for the rest of the days of the week. What in English is “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday” etc, is in Hebrew “the first day, the second day, the third day,” etc. The next day in the chronology is “the seventh day,” but it is called Shabbos instead. In other words, its name does not express its place in the sequence, but it expresses its primary attribute, which is of desisting. It falls within the sequence, but it is not part of the sequence.
The Second Dimension
Okay, so let’s move on to “blesses the seventh day.”
If the unique name of Shabbos sets it apart from the sequence, the term “seventh day” indicates that it is very much a part of that sequence. However, the term “blesses,” as we said, endows something with increased goodness or abundance (the manna given in Exodus 16:5, 22). Therefore, the goodness we experience on the seventh day is a reference to the pleasure that we can experience on that day. God blesses every day of the week, which is why it known as “the seventh day.” It is still part of the sequence, but has an added measure.
In other words, it may be said that Shabbos and the seventh day respectively refer to the spiritual and physical attributes of this entity called Shabbos. The spiritual attributes refer to the extra holiness that is present during that time, such as increased time praying and learning Torah. The physical attributes refer to our partaking and increasing in bodily and emotional pleasures, such as eating tasty foods, spending time with family and friends, singing songs, and let’s not forget taking a big ‘ol fat nap!
Both of these elements are experienced in unison, as the Torah says “Guard it and remember it in one utterance.” Both characteristics of Shabbos are inextricably fused within each other so that to experience one means to experience the other. In fact, isolating them from each other, i.e., to focus only on the spiritual or the physical aspects of Shabbos is to miss it. It is not a monastic retreat, nor is it a day of carnal indulgence.
The Third Dimension
This is all-and-good, but the text of the siddur quotes a verse from Genesis that complicates our nice little model of the spiritual and physical aspects of Shabbos:
וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ אֹת֑וֹ כִּ֣י ב֤וֹ שָׁבַת֙ מִכָּל־מְלַאכְתּ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת
And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it… (Genesis 2:3)
In contrast to our model it seems that God blessed and sanctified the Shabbos. The verse above does not associate the verbs with each of the different descriptions of Shabbos, indicating that our analysis does not flow naturally from the verse in the Torah.
However, the same verse that complicated the matter in the first place seems to provide us with the answer. Notice that the verse above contains two verbs describing what God did to the Shabbos (וַיְבָ֤רֶךְ and וַיְקַדֵּ֖שׁ). The verse contains a third verb that explains how He did both things. That verb is שָׁבַת֙, desisted. To conclude, the act of basing Shabbos on both elements was achieved simultaneously by a single act, therefore preserving both of them.
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