Synder, Blake, Energy, Eternal Delight, Shabbat…
Home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Cornish, New Hampshire
I finally finished reading Gary Snyder's Turtle Island, which has been sitting on my bedside shelf for quite a while. Snyder closes the 1974 volume of his poetry with some environmental meditations. He quotes William Blake's line, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," that "Energy is eternal delight."
This leads him to provide an anti-industrial consumption, anti-fossil fuel definition of delight:
Delight is the innocent joy arising
with the perception and realization of
the wonderful, empty, intricate,
inter-penetrating,
mutually-embracing, shining,
single world beyond all discrimination
or opposites.
Snyder's idea of delight strongly parallels the kabbalistic understanding of shabbat.
According to the Zohar, the Book of Radiance:
"Call shabbat a delight" (Isaiah 58:13): a delight unto both the body and the soul, a delight unto the celestial and lower realms.
The upper and lower worlds are in union.
The secret of shabbat [...] United in the secret of one to draw down onto itself the secret of one.
On shabbat [...] all judgments are subdued and mercy prevails throughout the realms [...] Hence there is no judgment on shabbat, neither above nor below.
A pleasing radiance issues from the world-that-is-coming, from which all light streams forth, radiating in every direction [...] It brings joy and gladness, light and freedom.
Other kabbalistic sources offer further dimensions:
Shabbat is the perfection of male and female [...] the mystery of one [...] on shabbat all is one entity (Moses de Leon, Sefer HaRimmon)
"when darkness and light shall be the same" (Psalms 139:12) and "the moon's light will be equal to that of the sun" (Isa. 30:26)(Ma'arekhet HaElohut)
Shabbat [...] is the mystery of the unification of all the sefirot (Joseph Gikatilla, Sha'arei Orah)
On the sabbath one must attain tranquility in one's speech, action and thoughts (Joseph Gikatilla, Sodot)
For those who understand the mystery of the true union, even thoughts are forbidden (Me'irat Einayim)
May the delight of your sabbath days give you endlessly-renewable energy for your holy work of all your other days!
Jonathan Schorsch
(Most of the above passages adapted from Elliot K. Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah.)
