Prayers, Poems, and Piyyutim  ☞  ☼ Prayers for the weekday, shabbat, and season  ☞  Shabbat  ☞  Motsei Shabbat  ☞  הבדלה | Distinctions (Havdalah) for the end of Shabbat, by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

הבדלה | Distinctions (Havdalah) for the end of Shabbat, by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

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Motsei Shabbat
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Contribute a Translation English

In the end we’re like children:
we thrive on distinctions
between me and you, us and them.
Made in Your image
we separate light from darkness,
family from stranger, weekday
from that fleeting taste of Paradise.

Wax drips from the braided candle.
Cinnamon tingles the nose
to keep us from fainting
as the extra soul departs.
Stop now. Notice this hinge
between Shabbat
and what’s next.

Plunge the candle into the wine
but don’t cry: even without a flame
our light still shines. This
is our inheritance, better than rubies.
And now it’s Saturday night, the cusp
of a new beginning, another day.
This week, may our hearts be whole.

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“הבדלה | Distinctions (Havdalah) for the end of Shabbat, by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat” is shared by Rachel Barenblat with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
Rachel Barenblat

Rachel Barenblat

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (a/k/a Velveteen Rabbi) serves Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, MA. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of five volumes of poetry, among them 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia, 2011) and Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018). A leader in Jewish Renewal (former co-chair of ALEPH, now a senior builder at Bayit: Your Jewish Home) she resides in western Massachusetts. She has blogged as the Velveteen Rabbi since 2003.

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established."–Psalms 90:17

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