We know that Shabbos has an official start time, which is nightfall on Friday night, and a definitive end, when 3 stars come out. One of the mitzvos in the Torah is to be mosef m’chol el hakodesh, to make an extension of Shabbos both before and after the official times of Shabbos. Everyone agrees that when you accept Shabbos early, or extend Shabbos late, you are required to keep the laws of Shabbos during these extended times; however, there is a dispute among the Rishonim about the nature of this mitzvah. Some say the mitzvah is quite literally to extend Shabbos in this way, while others say that one is not required to do any of that, but rather the mitzvah is just to avoid doing melacha for a few minutes before Shabbos starts and a few minutes after Shabbos ends. The reason for this is to safeguard Shabbos, as there is a risk one will miscalculate, even by a few seconds, and violate Shabbos; therefore, we set up a buffer zone by avoiding melacha right before and right after Shabbos, so that one would not inadvertently begin Shabbos while violating it.
From the perspective of pnimius Hatorah, each side in any halachic dispute is always complimenting the other and both are coming from the same inner point. How do these two opinions merge and become one, and what do they tell us about our service of Hashem? There is a paradoxical principle that we find in the writings of the Maharal: in order for something to have the potential to grow, by its very definition, it must have the potential to break and become smaller. Only something that has the potential to become damaged has the potential to become complete. If it cannot become damaged it cannot grow and develop. Only someone that can go down can go up, and only someone that can go up can go down. So there are two possibilities: either something stays stuck and rigid in its place, without being able to increase in its greatness or decrease in greatness, or it has the ability to move forward, but by its very definition therefore it has the possibility to move backwards as well.
There are two sides to Shabbos. There is the Shabbos that G-d gave us, which is specific and set. It is ‘stuck’ in its boundaries from nightfall on Friday night to nightfall on Saturday night. But Hashem wants us to give back to Him a Shabbos that is greater: a Shabbos that is deeper and beyond its borders.
By definition, philosophically and spiritually, the only way for something to have the potential for growth is if it has the potential to become smaller. The more a person fails, the more they need to recognize their potential for greatness! The greater a person is, the more they have to recognize their potential to make mistakes.
This is the secret of the mitzvah of adding on to Shabbos. One opinion is that we are required to extend the actual Shabbos, to take the actual Shabbos that Hashem gave us and extend it earlier and later and return a bigger, greater, grander, Shabbos. The second opinion says that we don’t need to extend the actual Shabbos, we just need to set up a buffer zone around it to make sure we don’t come to break it. Ironically, the first opinion expresses the unbelievable potential for the greatness of Shabbos and its ability to expand and to become more than how it started. The other opinion actually reminds us of the potential for Shabbos to become shorter and decreased: the potential for Shabbos to become broken and desecrated.
One opinion describes the potential for Shabbos to grow and take itself to the next level, and the other describes the potential for Shabbos to become damaged and shrunken and decreased. These two opinions are not a contradiction in any way: they complement each other. Only someone that is able to grow is able to fail, and only the person who can fail can grow. Because Shabbos can become greater, it can become desecrated. This is how these two opinions merge as one idea.
We learn a fundamental principle from this. Any deficiency we have in our life certainly has to be dealt with and repaired, but in the back of one’s mind, one should always remember that potential failure, or maybe even actual failure, has to be seen as an indication of how great the person can, will, and must become! Only the person that is capable of failure is the person that is capable of growth.
Hashem should bless us that we should always be able to use the gifts Hashem has given us for growth, to go higher and higher, and that we should merit to experience the light of Shabbos in its fullest sense, with the coming of Moshiach, B’vias go’el tzedek berachamim, bimihaira biyamainu, Amen!
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 8.
Harav Yussie Zakutinsky Shlita
