Shabbat as Completion of Creation
(1) The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array. (2) On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. (3) And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done.
The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (p.13-14)
"He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self...The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
[Heschel, A.J. The Sabbath. Canada: Harper Collins Publishers Canada Ltd., 1979, pp.13-14, 16, 18, 28.]
Shabbat as a Taste of the World to Come
The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays, Rabbi Irving Greenberg
"...According to the Genesis account, this world originally was and is still meant to be a paradise. But only when there is peace, with abundant resources and an untrammeled right to live, will the world be structured to sustain the infinite value of the human being. This is the heart of Judaism, the dream. Jewish existence without the dream is almost inconceivable. The drawing power of the vision has kept Jews faithful to their mission over several millennia. Expulsion, persecution, and destruction have assaulted but never obliterated the dream. Jews have repeatedly given everything, including their very lives, to keep it alive. And when catastrophe shattered the vision, Jews spent their lives renewing it. The question is: From where can these people draw the strength to renew their dream again and again? The answer of Jewish tradition is: Give people just a foretaste of the fulfillment, and they will never give it up. The Shabbat is that taste...The world of the Shabbat is totally different than the weekday universe: There is no work to do, no deprivation. On Shabbat, there is neither anxiety nor bad news. Since such a world does not yet exist in space, it is first created in time, on the seventh day of the week. Jews travel through time in order to enter a perfect world for a night and a day. The goal is to create a reality so complete and absorbing that these time travelers are caught up in its values and renewed. The Shabbat is the foretaste of the messianic redemption."
Shabbat as Sacred Time
(13) If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, From pursuing your affairs on My holy day; If you call the sabbath “delight,” The LORD’s holy day “honored”; And if you honor it and go not your ways Nor look to your affairs, nor strike bargains— (14) Then you can seek the favor of the LORD. I will set you astride the heights of the earth, And let you enjoy the heritage of your father Jacob— For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
The Sabbath, by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (p.18)
“The seventh day ... is a truce in all conflicts, personal and social; peace between humans, humans and nature, peace within humans.” “To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of ... independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshiping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with [other people] and the forces of nature--is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for [humanity]'s progress than the Sabbath?”
Shabbat as Stability
"Shabbat and Zionism," Achad Ha'am 1898
"There is no need to be overly concerned with mitzvot in order to know the value of Shabbat. Whoever feels in their heart a true connection with the life of the [Jewish] Nation in all generations, cannot in any way imagine a reality for the people of Israel without Shabbat. One could say, without any exaggeration, that more than Israel has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept Israel, and if it hadn't returned to them their souls and renewed the lives of their spirit each week, all the sufferings of the "days of creation" would drag us farther and farther downward, until they would eventually descend to the bottom floor of materialism, and ethical and intellectual baseness."