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Shabbat Prayers: Blessings of Shemah: Rabbi Samson R Hirsch: God Who Ascended



The 9th of Iyar is the Yahrtzeit of Rav Yitzchak Bernays (Barneis) (1792-1849), teacher of Rav Shamshon Rafael Hirsch. “To God, Who rested from all His works, Who on the Seventh Day, ascended to sit upon the throne of His honor.” The Seventh Day marked the advent of the Sabates of Creation. Since then, no new form of creation has been fashioned. Instead, God now ascended above the visible world which He had created, up to His invisible abode in the high places, where He took His seat upon the throne of His sovereignty, in order to guide and to rule over the world which He had made.

 

The world, now completed, became His glory. It hides its Creator from the physical organ of sight, but it clearly reveals His greatness to the eye of the perceptive mind.

God ordained the Shabbat to be a delight also for men. Even as man should have spent his six working days in the faithful service of God in moral and spiritual Godliness, so he should refrain from all labor on the Seventh Day, to contemplate in retrospect that which he has accomplished for God, to rejoice in his achievements of the week just past and to find in them the glorification of His Maker.

For, “Such is the true praise of the Shabbat.”

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