Shabbat - On The Way Out

As with each of the three Shabbat meals, it is the custom to begin the Melaveh Malka with a salutation acknowledging the spiritual presence in whose honor the meal is held. Our guest at this fourth meal is King David; the three Patriarchs, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yakov, join him.


Prepare the feast of perfect faith, the joy of the Holy King.
Prepare the feast of the King.
This is the feast of David, the anointed king.
Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov
Come to feast with him.


Although Shabbat has departed, our Shabbat odyssey is not yet complete. We must carry the holiness of Shabbat into the weekdays and raise the everyday mentality of our lives with the higher awareness we gain on the seventh day.

With the appearance of the first stars on Saturday night, the Shabbat Queen, who has graced our homes and our spirits, departs. Unless we can return to the world of the marketplace armed with the heightened awareness of Shabbat, we will be hard-pressed to remain focused throughout the week on the subtler, spiritual aspects of life. Unless we can draw spirituality into the physical dimension, we will be hard-pressed to free ourselves of the enticements and demands of the material world, which begin to resurface with the inevitable reappearance of the weekdays.

For most of us, investing our day-to-day lives with higher levels of consciousness is a fierce battle. Inspiring our harried, workaday mind-set with Shabbat tranquility, transporting the seventh day’s unique holiness into the mundanity of everyday reality, requires all the motivation, energy and skill we can muster.

No one was more effective at this than King David, the quintessential spiritual warrior. In all his battles, whether personal or military, David saw the deeper struggles of the spirit. His most dreaded foes were those who sought the destruction not of his body but of his soul. These were the primary forces that would undermine his spiritual standing, that would keep him from sanctifying the secular, from infusing the mundane with holiness – which is what David had in mind when he composed the psalms, pleading for God’s salvation from the machinations of his enemies.

The Kabbalah teaches that David, king of Israel, is the personification of Malkhut, the sefirah (Divine emanation) through which God’s Sovereignty is disseminated in the universe. Malkhut’s function is to serve as the receptacle that brings the Light of the Divine Essence into the world of physical form.

Malkhut, which mediates between the earthly realm and the Divine, transmutes the Light into form, enabling it expression on earth. And while this is the purpose for which God created the Divine emanations, Malkhut in particular, worldly expression and transformation into earthly manifestation constitutes a descent into the realm of the physical, with all its attendant dangers. Hence David, as the embodiment of Malkhut, could be nothing less than the consummate spiritual warrior, for it was his task to transmit the light of heightened spiritual awareness into the everyday struggles of life.

The Zohar (I:248b) states:
The Chariot of God consisted of three wheels – Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. The Holy One then added King David as the fourth wheel, and the Divine Chariot was complete.

In the Zohar’s metaphor, the Chariot symbolizes the vehicle through which God’s Glory is “transported” from His hidden abode – His natural circumstance where He is absolutely unknowable and unconceivable – into the realm where He allows Himself to be visualized by those who are worthy. Because the three Patriarchs had made themselves into the vehicles for revealing God in the world, they came to personify the three “wheels” of His Chariot. Yet it was not until God included King David, as the fourth “wheel,” that the vehicle for transporting the Light of the Divine Essence into this world was complete.

Each of the three Shabbat meals is associated with one of the Patriarchs, whose specific, outstanding qualities lend each meal its distinct ambiance. The compelling influence of Yitzchak graces the Friday night meal; he brings to it his traits of containment and receptivity and the introspective mode in which he relates to the world. The aura of Avraham surrounds the Shabbat morning meal; his trait of reaching out stirs the atmosphere with his active-expansive mode. Yaakov’s energies enhance the Shabbat afternoon meal; he instills it with his quality of balance and the integrative mode through which can be discovered the oneness in all of life.

The fourth meal of Shabbat is Melaveh Malka, the meal we eat to escort the departing Shabbat Queen. Melaveh Malka is also the first meal of the new week. It is therefore fitting that this fourth meal is the feast of King David. Joined by Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, David completes the Chariot that transports God to man, that transmits the holiness of Shabbat to the weekdays, that extends the higher awareness we gain on the seventh day into the everyday of our lives.

When we sit down to the fourth Shabbat meal, we recite a salutation acknowledging King David as the channel for drawing the spiritual into the physical dimension and as the spiritual presence in whose honor the meal of Melaveh Malka is held: “Prepare the feast of perfect faith…This is the feast of David, the anointed king.”

Breslov Research Institute is pleased to present this weekly excerpt from our publication, "7th Heaven -- Shabbat with Rebbe Nachman," to help you experience that taste of Shabbos during the week. Have a "good Shabbos"!