 Traditionally, Shabbat is concluded with a service called Havdalah, which means the separation. We separate between the Shabbat and the weekdays. And one of the parts of the Havdalah service is that we take, actually not candles, but really candles that are made into a larger torch. We begin Shabbat with two separate candles, and then Shabbat ends by taking really a torch that has the candles intertwined. It's really a way of showing that whatever separateness and disparities that existed before Shabbat, Shabbat brings things together, we unite. And one of the reasons that we have this taking of a candle and fire after Shabbat is because one of the major sources of creativity, we have this fire, we use fire for creativity. It's really the symbol, even in ancient literature, of man's creative capacity. And so while in Shabbat we were told not to create, not to make new things, not to exercise our intelligent mastery over the world, Shabbat is a day where we really sit back and we acknowledge the fact that God is the only real creative force in the world. But after Shabbat, we now enter into the weekdays, and so one of the things that we do to symbolize the fact that now we are again in creative mode is we light a fire. It's interesting that people notice that sometimes at this service, this practice of having this Havdallah ceremony, people often raise their hands in front of the fire and they open and close their fingers. And I've often been asked, why do we do that? Why is that a practice? One answer that was given is that on Shabbat our hands are so to speak closed. We don't operate in the world, we don't create, we don't make things, we don't really do things creatively and now to show that we are again now operating in the world we open our hands as if to say now we're back in operational mode, creative mode during the rest of the week. But I saw a beautiful explanation that is based on a passage in the book of Lamentations, the third chapter, which speaks about raising up our hands to our hearts. And there's a lot of wisdom that we can learn from our hands themselves. One of the things that happens when we go through this motion of opening and closing our hands, and you could try this at home, is that when you close your hands, you bring your fingers into the hand itself, you'll notice that all of the fingers are at the same level, they're all equal. When you extend your fingers outward, every single finger is at a different height, they're at different sizes. And one of the things that we learn on Shabbat is that Shabbat is a day in which we don't work, we're not out there trying to conquer the world and to gain and move forward in our lives where it's a day, Shabbat, where we really retreat into an island, a sanctuary and time to really have this intimacy with ourselves, with our souls, with our families, with our community, with God. And so on Shabbat we gain a certain clarity in terms of our station in the world. On Shabbat we begin to learn something very important. When we go out into the world and we're in a very competitive world, we're going out, we extend ourselves, we experience a world where we're not all equal, we feel different from each other, people certainly don't feel equal to each other, it's a world where there's plenty of tension and competition. On Shabbat we come, we retreat into ourselves, we begin to realize with the clarity of the spiritual day of Shabbat, ultimately we are all equal, Shabbat is a day where we remember that God created every person in the world, we're all children of God, we're all equal and it's an incredibly important lesson that our fingers themselves are able to teach our hearts.