How Tefilat Shabbat Illuminates the Meaning of Vayechulu and Veshamru

Two of the best known pieces of Biblical text that deal with the idea of Shabbat are the “Vayechulu” passage in Breishit, and the “Veshamru” passage in Exodus. We say them every week as part of the texts of Kiddush Friday night and Shabbat day. And yet a great many puzzles haunt us about these texts. Why would an all powerful God need to rest? If God finished creating everything at the end of the Sixth Day, why does Vayechulu also tell us that He ‘finished’ on the Seventh Day? ~~In this talk, Rabbi David Fohrman makes the case that the amidah of the Sabbath prayers contains text that is designed as a commentary on these two crucial texts - and that this ‘prayer-commentary’ opens up our understanding of both Shabbat, and the Biblical texts that describe it, in profound ways.