Imagine that you are living your life on the rim of a spinning wheel. Round
and round it turns, faster and faster. Making headway is difficult, even in the
direction that your world is turning; trying to advance against
the spin takes a superhuman effort, and only a very few brave people attempt
this. At times, it is all one can do to just hang on for dear life.
One day you discover that as you move inward, away from the circumference of
the wheel and towards its center, the revolutions become calmer. You wonder
at this: physically, you're on the same piece of whirling matter; so why has the
world slowed down? But so it is. One day you reach the wheel's very center. You
are now at rest. This is the point on which the entire disk spins; yet it is
utterly motionless, an island of repose in a sea of turmoil.
That innermost point of our world -- say the Chassidic masters -- that axis upon which
our self, our soul and its outlying personas all turn, is Shabbat.
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