BEFORE THE SERVICE BEGINS Some thoughts to help prepare for the Shabbat Evening Service ‘You have six days to labour and do all your work, but the seventh shall be a Shabbat for the Eternal your God’ (Exodus 20:9). We are invited to conduct our lives within God’s time. Six days are available to work for our needs, one day is set aside for God. What was once a revolutionary event in the world is now a convention. So we need to rediscover the power and value of Shabbat in every generation, match our lives to this unchanging rhythm. At Erev Shabbat we mark the transition, as we separate ourselves from the week that is past and shed its burdens and achievements. It is not easy to set them aside. Their demands and their energy still hold us in thrall. Letting go needs time and space and commitment. The stages of our service are there to help us leave one world behind so as to enter into another. On this journey we join with others. The Opening Prayers belong to our own particular tradition of prayer, study and song. Shared words and voices, familiar and unfamiliar faces, replace the outer world of our individual lives with the inner life of our community. To help put aside the six days we are leaving behind, we begin with six psalms that open Kabbalat Shabbat , the welcoming of the Shabbat. In sequence they convey their own story, drawing us into the world and values of Shabbat. But on another level, each offers a space within which to think back on the days of the week that is past, to relive them for a moment and then consciously put them aside. On yet another level we move the centre of our attention from ourselves to outside ourselves, from the ordinary to the sacred, from the mundane to the holy, however we understand it.
1 Ex 20:9.
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