The beginnings of a solution can be found in the recognition that the cessation of work advocated by Jewish tradition is not “rest” from toil, but a necessary, complementary part of the creative process. The “rest” which God undertakes on the seventh day was not meant for the purpose of recovery or revitalization.⁵¹ It should be seen, rather, as an aspect of the activity of Creation itself, a positive act of conclusion, signifying the completion of God’s creative enterprise. In a sense, it is God’s decision to rest that demonstrates that the project of Creation contained within itself the assumption of an endpoint. Without a clear end, Creation ceases to be an act of will, and instead takes on the features of an eternal, undifferentiated process. Consequently, Jewish tradition mandates the celebration of the Sabbath not primarily as a day of rest, but as the culmination of a prolonged creative process, a conclusion which is not followed by any further plan or action.

The rabbinic liturgy therefore calls the Sabbath “the end [Heb., tachlit] of the creation of heavens and earth.”⁵² Using the word tachlit, which (like the English “end”) means both “conclusion” and “goal,” the prayer affirms the sense in which cessation is inherent to the creative process, signifying both its completion in time and the achievement of its aims. This idea is expressed metaphorically in Genesis Rabba:

R. Yehuda Hanasi asked R. Ishmael the son of R. Yose: Did you ever learn from your father the meaning of the verse, “On the seventh day God finished the work which he had been doing”?⁵³… It is like the blacksmith who strikes the anvil with his hammer. So, too, did the Holy One lift the hammer on the sixth day, while it was still light, and then lower it on the Sabbath, once night had fallen.⁵⁴

By comparing the Sabbath to a hammer striking an anvil, the midrash is describing the Sabbath not as separate from or a reaction to the process of Creation, but as an integral part of it—even its climax. Just as the blacksmith’s effort is exerted in lifting the hammer, but the results are achieved when it is lowered, so too do the six days of divine effort achieve their purpose only on the seventh day. The Zohar emphasizes that “even though each of the actions was completed, the world as a whole was not perfect in its existence until the seventh day. On the seventh day, all the actions were completed, and with it the Holy One completed the world.”⁵⁵ Similarly, the midrash in Genesis Rabba posits that because God stopped his work on the Sabbath, it may be said that rest, tranquility, silence, and peace were created on that day.⁵⁶

The Sabbath is therefore not to be understood simply in negative terms. Its essence is positive, revealed through the cessation of labor. In the Creation story, the Sabbath is the moment of silence which imparts perfection and wholeness to what has come before. R. Judah Loew of Prague, the Maharal, describes the six days of Creation as “directed” toward their completion, which is realized only on the seventh day. “The Sabbath is the completion of Creation,” he writes, “and everything is directed to its completion, which is the core of the matter. Accordingly, the entire six days of Creation are directed to the Sabbath…. For this reason, the Sabbath is to be kept in mind all week long, so that everything will be directed toward the completion of Creation.”⁵⁷ Similarly, R. Elijah of Vilna, the Vilna Gaon,  concludes that a proper understanding of creative activity can be achieved only by refraining from it, “because the completion of an action is recognizable only afterwards, when there is nothing more to be done.”⁵⁸

The end of the creative process is the revelation of the product that has been added to the world, and only once the work is done can its fullness be recognized: “And God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”⁵⁹ Creativity is, therefore, not a continuity of action, but a dialogue between action and inaction, between something and nothing. The suspension of action, the halting of motion, the silencing of sound, are what give creative activity its force and meaning. T.S. Eliot captured this idea eloquently in his Four Quartets:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.⁶⁰

Eliot, in his quest for what he calls “the point of intersection of the timeless with time,”⁶¹ finds it in the silence and stillness that is not only the opposite of movement or speech, but their necessary complement.⁶²

There is, however, an important difference between the way this idea is applied in the divine and in the earthly spheres. The original Sabbath was a single, concluding event in the story of Creation. Once it is fixed in the temporal plane, however, it becomes part of a rhythm of human life. The recurring week replicates not only the divine rest which ended Creation, but also, as each new week emerges out of the stillness of the Sabbath, the emergence of Creation from the void on the first day. The result is a pattern of human creativity which imitates the entire process of Creation, a rhythm containing spiritual and esthetic wholeness. In order to imitate God, man must accept upon himself this rhythm, with his senses, his emotions and his thought. In this manner he discovers that inaction complements action, and that just as the Sabbath gives a sense of completion to the week that preceded it, it also bestows a kind of genetic beauty on that which follows.

The belief that creative effort should adapt itself to this fundamental rhythm is not merely a lesson in esthetics, however. It also contains a theological element, which emphasizes man’s longing to transcend the banality of endless, routine labor and direct himself to higher things. This element is represented in the revelatory character of the Sabbath experience, one example of which is the contrast between the commotion of the workweek and the quiet of the seventh day. In those communities where Sabbath observance is a public as well as a private matter, the effect is particularly intense: When, with the entrance of the Sabbath, the clamor of the street gives way to a calm that is at once alien and deeply familiar, when the pace of weekday life abruptly grinds to a halt, the psychic vacuum that results is filled by a spiritual elevation. This familiar sense of the sublime which accompanies the Sabbath is due not only to the fact that the day is cordoned off from the rest of the week, but primarily to the contrast between them. To illustrate the point, we may recall the biblical account of the prophet Elijah’s ascent to MountHoreb:

And [the Eternal] said, “Come out, and stand on the mountain before the Eternal.” And behold, the Eternal passed by: There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks before the Eternal—but the Eternal was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake—but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire—but the Eternal was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still, small voice.⁶³

A dynamic, intensifying continuity of wind, earth and fire is suddenly quelled; in the “still, small voice” which follows, the grandeur of the Eternal is revealed. If the great forces had not preceded this exalted moment, it would not have been charged with its unique power that is beyond the sensual. The silence that prevails after the hammer has struck is not simply a lack of sound. It has a positive, almost tangible presence.⁶⁴