Shabbat as Burning Bush

Explaining the Prohibition Against Kindling

A messenger of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. (Exodus 3:2)

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the fire and the knife; and the two walked off together. (Genesis 22:6)

The Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven (Genesis 19:24)

You shall kindle no fire throughout your settlements on the sabbath day. (Exodus 35:3)

In Genesis, fire is associated with sacrifice and destruction. Abraham ascends Moriah with fire and knife. God rains down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Fire consumes.

In Exodus, by contrast, the first time we see fire is at the burning bush. There, the fire burns but does not consume—we see a destructive force suspended. Perhaps the burning bush foreshadows the fact that although God destroys Egypt, the Israelites are spared. The death of the first born which is visited upon the unmarked homes but not the marked ones suggests the I Israelites are wearing a kind of fire-proof suit, as it were. The fire that does not consume is a sign of God’s mystery, but also God’s saving power. It contrasts with the fire that swallows up Nadav and Avihu. Sometimes the fire is merely spectacular, other times it burns—we can never know when beholding the fire if it will leap out at us.

The fire of the burning bush says “It may seem as if the world is on fire, but don’t worry, God is in the flames, and the world is not consumed by it.” Evil ravishes the world but cannot undo creation itself. When the people travel in the wilderness they are accompanied by a cloud pillar by day and a fire pillar by night (Exodus 13:21). The fire of God transforms from destructive to protective.

Against this symbolic backdrop, we can now interpret the commandment not to kindle a flame on Shabbat. Why single out this specific commandment? Here, I lean into conjecture. Shabbat is a time when the world, as it were, does not need God’s protective fire. Or said more poetically, Shabbat is the protective fire of God. Shabbat is a cessation from work. Thus, it mirrors death and destruction. An economy that shutdown would be catastrophic. But a day of shutdown in a week of activity parallels the flame that burns but does not consume. It parallels the flame that illuminates but does not destroy.

One of the great theological and psychological challenges is the understanding of evil. How and why does God allow evil? Or, could it be, as per William Blake and numerous mystics, that evil is somehow good? Shabbat is a time when we don’t try to change anything about the world, which means that if there is evil in the world, it is a time in which we either accept or tolerate evil, or a time in which we regard evil from a different perch and see that the world, in all its deviance and variance, is “very good.” We face the fire of the world but we are not charred by it. More deeply, perhaps, we even find that Shabbat provides an answer to the problem of evil. It says that we will not wait for the world to be perfect to enjoy a taste of the World to Come now.

The practical interpretation of the law against kindling is that one should prepare for Shabbat in advance. Thus, we light Shabbat Candles on Friday night, right before Shabbat, so as to show that although we refuse to eat in the dark, we also won’t change the dark into light on Shabbat. Should the light go out, and provided there is no danger, one must accept the darkness; one must illuminate it with the light of the day itself. Shabbat, then, becomes a spiritual practice of finding the presence of God even when it is non-obvious, non-blazing. Much like Moses who sees an ordinary shrub, we must find in the ordinariness of a day, a voice calling out to us. We “spend” our minutes, hours, days, weeks, immersed in activities. Our activities “consume” us. But the time of Shabbat burns without consumption. Our ancestors found God embodied in the physical world; we must seek God in the temporal one.