I am trying to find out what is allowed on Shabbat ? I don’t fully understand why somethings are allowed and others aren’t . Thank you for the help .
For the most part, God asks of us two things on Shabbat:
- Create positive spiritual energy through special prayers, festive meals, lighting candles etc.
- Refrain from any activity that distracts us from entering this spiritual realm.
Activities that are deemed by the Torah to prevent us from engaging in true and all-encompassing spirituality are primarily thirty-nine categories of “PHYSICALLY creative activity.”
Examples of this are: “cooking, sewing, lighting a fire [included in this is turning on a light or driving a car], writing, building, planting etc.
To give you a rough analogy, think of a cellphone or any other electric gadget with a rechargeable battery. If you can recharge the battery in four hours while using it, it’ll probably take an hour to recharge if it’s turned off. Similarly, if you try to recharge your spiritual battery while still engaging in mundane physical activities, it’ll prove almost impossible to accomplish that in the span of one day. By refraining from excessive physical engagements on Shabbat, we are thus able to spiritually recharge our batteries through our prayers etc.
For a more complete list of the thirty-nine categories of forbidden activities, you may visit this link which has plenty of info. For a more complete article along the lines of what I’ve provided you with here, you can go here.
I must caution you that should you desire to indeed incorporate these ideas into your life, you must seek guidance from a competent rabbi who can assist you in implementing these changes in a healthy manner.