I learned something fascinating over Shabbos that I cannot get out of my head.
Rav Moshe David Vali writes1 that every person comes into this world with a particular spiritual task to complete. Sometimes completing that task means being placed in situations of darkness and struggle because there is something that person is meant to accomplish there.
He then takes the idea much further.
He writes that if a person completes the spiritual task assigned to him, even sins he fell into along the way can be forgiven, particularly when the very circumstances in which he was placed contributed to those failures.
His example is Shlomo HaMelech. When Chazal considered counting Shlomo among the kings who had no share in the World to Come, a heavenly voice intervened. Rav Vali explains that Shlomo’s primary task was to build the Beis HaMikdash. He completed that task, and the sins he committed along the way were therefore forgiven.
That idea has changed the way I look at something I keep seeing on social media.
People who grew up deeply religious, often very Charedi, have left that life and are now living completely secular lives, until Shabbos comes.
They get together, make Kiddush, light candles, and sing zemiros. Sometimes they record it and post it on Shabbos itself. You see a guy on Ben Yehuda in a wife beater and jeans, guitar in hand, his girlfriend sitting next to him, singing Kah Echsof with that unmistakable Yiddish cadence still in their voices. The yearning is impossible to miss.
They are clearly not keeping Shabbos in the way I understand keeping Shabbos. The fact that I am watching the video proves that. Yet there is something so awake in them at that moment, something reaching for Shabbos with an intensity that is hard to describe.
It’s beautiful and sad and wonderful and painful all at once. It makes me wonder what really remains when someone sheds almost everything they once identified with and what it means when something they seemed to have left behind refuses to be left behind.
I don’t have the answers. I just find it incredibly moving to watch a neshama shine through.
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Mishlei, Tinyana, end of chapter 22