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The following is an important article that was recently published on the societal impact of observing a day of rest. If you or somebody you know would like to experience such pause, please contact me or visit www.shabbatsociety.org for more information.

How the Sabbath keeps the Jewish people
By Judith Shulevitz, The Forward

To love Judaism is to know how much the Sabbath matters. But neither knowledge nor love is quite enough to move many Jews, perhaps most Jews, to observance, or even to the level of observance they feel, deep in their hearts, commanded to achieve.

This state of cognitive dissonance prevails even in Israel, where the non-enforcement of the many Sabbath laws on the books has the effect of deepening the divide, every Saturday, between observant Jews and everyone else.

There are many secular Israelis who look back with a fierce nostalgia at the quiet, commerce-free Shabbat of their youth, and mourn the fact that the day of rest appears to have become the exclusive province of the Orthodox.

"The Israeli Shabbat nowadays is either a religious one in synagogues or spent in shopping centers," the writer Amos Oz remarked recently. "I regret that."

How can we make Sabbath keep-able for all of us, not just for the highly religious?

That we need something like the Sabbath in our lives makes obvious, intuitive sense. Both Israel and the United States are places where the economic engine of high technology makes us richer and smarter but also revs us up into a state of endless, inescapable on-ness.

Dutiful in our electronic consumption, fulsomely confessional in our blogging and tweeting, obsessive in our quest for total connectedness, we divide and subdivide our time and attention ever more finely and continuously among professional and domestic tasks and games and gizmos with adorable names (Blackberry, iPod, Google, Twitter).

Sometimes you just gotta start over.

For the past few days I found myself toiling over my pre-Passover (Pesach) greetings. I had a theme for the email set, but when I put pen to paper it came out clunky, awkward, and utterly non-compelling. I thought I knew what I wanted to say and exactly how to communicate it. And I did! But that was the problem. I thought I was in control; I had an idea that I was stuck on and I was stuck on it.

I’d start a paragraph and jump to another. Cut from one place and paste to another. My words were losing cadence and life. Try as I might, I couldn’t revive the splintered and now overweight email.

The theme was to be about the ego and how its riddance is the first step toward personal transcendence. But instead of communicating the message, I was exercising its opposite intent. I was so caught up in communicating every sentence, every word, indeed every letter, with such precision and relevance that I lost the plot. My ego wouldn’t let me let go. I was holding on to a steering wheel that was never mine.

So instead, now I’m trying to practice not my crafty words, but the message I wanted them to convey: That in order to be free we must first be free of self. True self-expression can only come when we get out of our own way. So I hit Control+N and began anew - a fresh page, white space with infinite potential.

Generally, though, it’s not that easy. Change can be an arduous journey with seemingly insurmountable obstacles – pitfalls and pit-bulls.

So we employ strategy: I’ll add this; get rid of that. I’ll cut here; paste there. This for today; that for tomorrow. But for all our reckoning, we end as shreds on our own cutting floor – overanalyzed and deconstructed; therapy leaving us not just broke, but broken.

Welcoming Shabbat with Notik
The Yediot Achronot
By Gil Shefler
February, 12, 2010

The young rabbi promised not to save our souls, so we came to a fascinating Shabbat dinner in Crown Heights

Rabbi Saadya Notik is the poster-boy for what Chabad wants to project to the secular world. On the one hand he is an ordained rabbi who travels the world to attract young Jews to Jewish tradition. On the other he is a 26-year-old guy who speaks in Brooklyn street slang and can quote not only from the Talmud but from hip-hop songs as well. As the young face of Chabad he managed to appear many times in the media. Last year, for example, Notik was the focus of a New York Times' article about the "Party Bus" that Chabad organized for Purim. When he's not traveling between Chabad Houses around the world or organizing parties on wheels, Notik likes to invite friends to Friday night dinners by friends in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Usually, I don't respond to invitations of this nature, for all sorts of reasons, but it's hard to say no to Notik. My friend Gadi met him at a bar, and after Notik persuaded him, he persuaded me to come along to the meal. "You know who he looks like? Matisyahu. He really reminds me of Matisyahu."

Gadi was right. The young 26-year-old rabbi resembles Matisyahu. Not only because both of them are tall, slender, wear a long black beard and dress in Chasidic garb, but also because Notik is gifted with the unique combination of charisma and calm, just like the famous Chasidic singer. "I started organizing these Shabbat dinners a year ago," he told me, "and since then we've been doing it once a month. Our aim is simple: To bring Jews together to meet one another and bond. That's it." And so it happened that I found myself making my way over to the Chabad enclave to welcome in the Shabbat together with another 32 invited guests.

The Shabbat Society is an invite-only Friday night dinner group.

The Shabbat Society’s authentic Shabbat dinner experience is a potent mix of mouth-watering food, endless toasting, and spontaneous self-introductions by New York City’s least affiliated and most talented young Jews.

The dinners are socially stimulating, meaningful and fun.

If you are interested in joining us for a Friday night dinner please visit us at www.shabbatsociety.org or contact Saadya.

Every year for the past 3,000 years, in times of persecution as in times of calm, Jews have gathered together to celebrate the holiday of Passover, in which we commemorate the miracles G-d performed in emancipating us from centuries of mind-numbing Egyptian slavery and oppression.

Tonight, Wednesday April 8th, Jews the world over will begin celebrating the eight day festival of Pesach by eating matzah as our ancestors had; recounting the story of our liberation to our children through texts and song; drinking four cups of wine, one for each aspect of freedom; eating bitter herbs as a reminder of the bitterness and tears of bondage; and reclining in royalty.

This is not a theatrical commemoration of an antiquated event, but a timeless and potent step-by-step guide to self-liberation. Our sages teach that in each and every generation every individual must view himself as though he just made his grand exit from Egypt. The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is rooted in the word meitzar meaning boundaries, constraints and limitations.

No matter our mobility or autonomy, a part of us remains subjugated to our own inner “task master” – the slave driver within that restricts us to habit, shackles us to our fears, and relegates us to personal bias. Pharaoh’s Egypt we’ve long escaped; it’s our own individual boundaries that we must transcend daily.

Unlike when we left Egypt, personal breakthroughs rarely come through revealed sea-splitting intervention. It will be through determination and perseverance that we split our own seas and cross through on dry land.

Here are just three steps, each a tool, pulled from the 15 steps of the Passover guide, to briefly illustrate the relevance and potential of the Passover experience and assist you in your personal exodus.

Leggo your ego

Dearest brother, dearest sister,

Happy birthday!

This past Rosh Hashana was 5,769 years to the day on which, on that
sixth day of creation, the first human being was created. And so it is
the birthday of all of humanity.

Only on the sixth day of creation, after creating the heavens and the
earth, the land and the sea, and all mineral, plant and animal life,
did G-d create Adam and Chava (as one originally and then later
separated). The whole universe was created in all its intelligence and
glory to be the theater in which G-d's sole actor, the human being,
would take center stage.

Why did G-d initially create just one human being? Surely the Creator
of the universe could have populated the earth, as He wishes it to be,
by creating many men and women at once? Or at the very least He could
have created Adam and Chava as two separate individuals? So why, then,
did G-d create the sum total of humanity as one singular being?

This, our sages teach, is to emphasize the supreme importance of a
singular life. To G-d it would have been worthwhile to create the
entire world if even for one single human being.

As Maimonides put it: "A person must see himself and the world as
equally balanced on two ends of the scale; by doing one good deed, he
tips the scale and brings for himself and the entire world redemption
and salvation." (Maimonides, Laws of Repentance, 3:4).

And in the words of the Mishne: "A person is responsible to say that
the entire world was created for me; when you save a life you save the
universe." (Sanhedrin 37a).

This emphasizes the Divine responsibility and indispensability that
each and every one of us has here on planet Earth. Each of us has
something wholly unique to contribute that no other human being can.

On a personal note, not only do each of you make up my world, but you
mean the world to me. You've taught me invaluable lessons, by deed and