The Three Meals That Feed the Hidden Faces of God at Twilight

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The Light Failed and a Second Soul Came Down

The sun slid low behind the hills, and the last of the gold drained out of the room where Rabbi Shimon sat among the companions who never left his side. No lamp had been lit. The week still clung to the walls, heavy with the labor and the reckoning of six days. Then the edge of the light thinned, the way a thread thins before it parts, and in that narrow seam of twilight between the week and the rest something arrived that had not been in the room a breath before. Each man felt it settle over him, a second self folding down onto the first, quiet as falling ash. Their shoulders loosened. The strain went out of their faces. Shabbat had entered, and with it the soul it always carries in, the guest of joy that comes only once the working light has died.

He had long taught the companions that delight is bounty poured like light into a vessel, and that the width of the vessel decides how much a soul can hold. On the other six days a man is a small cup, and the overflowing abundance that streams from the divine essence finds little room in him. At this hour a wider vessel had been set over each of them. What had been a narrow cup all week was now a deep goblet, and the light could rise in it to the very brim.

Rabbi Shimon Set the Queen's Table

He rose and laid the table himself, three settings of intention, three meals he called the meals of faith. The first belonged to the night. He named it the table of the Queen, for at this hour the Shekhinah reigns, the divine presence that the mystics count as Malchut, the Kingdom, ruling the dark. To welcome her was to welcome the whole of faith into the house, since faith entire, he said, is folded inside these three tables.

He looked around at the men gathered close and made them his witnesses. "I call all of you here to testify for me," he said, "that I have never once let these three meals pass me by, and for their sake I have never had to fast upon the Sabbath." His well-being, his long life, the very fact that he had never needed to deny himself on this day, all of it he laid at the feet of the three tables. Whoever attains them, he told the companions, is worthy of the whole of faith, in this world and in the world that is coming.

The Hidden Faces Turned Toward One Another

While they ate the Queen's meal, a change moved through the concealed heights that the eye cannot follow. The faces of God, held apart and turned away through all the working week, began to turn toward one another. The mercies that the mystics name the Hassidim, the loving-kindnesses, swelled and doubled where they stood. Portions of kindness rose upward into Chochmah, Wisdom, and portions of strength rose into Binah, Understanding, and what was shared between them climbed higher still. Two kings, the old teaching went, came at last to wear a single crown. What was sealed and withheld on every other night now flowed without measure, for the countenances had come into union, and mercy passed between them like breath.

At Dawn the Ancient One Shone Through Father and Mother

When the morning came they set the second table. This meal belonged to the most hidden face of all, Atika Kadisha, the Ancient Holy One, the oldest and most concealed root from which every other thing pours down. In the morning light the Ancient One shone through the highest Father and the highest Mother, and their radiance came to rest upon the King, so that he drank his illumination from the primordial source through them. The companions tasted their bread and did not see the halls above, yet the light that widened their vessels at dusk had climbed, by morning, all the way back to the wellspring from which it first fell.

The Forehead Rose at the Mincha Hour

The hard hour was the afternoon. At the time of the Mincha prayer on any weekday the left side stirs, the side of severity, and Wisdom wakes on that side with a sharp edge, so that judgment gathers and the balance of the world tips toward strictness. It is the hour when wrath would ordinarily rise. Rabbi Shimon set the third table into the teeth of that hour. This meal belonged to the King, to Zeir Anpin, the lesser countenance, for at Mincha on the Sabbath the King himself ascends to the Ancient One and receives his light.

And as he rose, the forehead of Arich Anpin, the Vast Countenance, the most primordial face, was uncovered. Upon that forehead lies a single will, and when it is revealed it asks for one thing only, the flowing of loving-kindness through every world. Where the weekday would have answered the awakened severity with punishment, the uncovered will answered it with favor. Every judgment was subdued and hidden in its chains. The fires of Gehinnom (the place of punishment after death) sank low, and the wicked within them were given rest. No sentence was passed above or below. Even the sharpened edge of the afternoon, which any other week would have cut, was met and turned aside by mercy.

So the three tables stood, the Queen fed at night, the Ancient One at dawn, the King at the failing of the day, and over the men who kept them the second soul lay easy and unhurried. It would stay with them until the light returned and the week reached again for its walls, and only then would it lift away, leaving each of them a small cup once more until the next thinning of the thread.