To Connect to the Natural World.
The origin story for Shabbat is found in Genesis 1-2 in which God creates the world in six days and then surveys the results—“God saw all that God had made, and found it very good”— before resting on the seventh. It doesn’t make sense to all later commentators that an all-powerful deity would need to rest at all, even after so enormous a task as creating the world, and God’s choice to step back to and marvel at the wonder of it all is thought to be a divine example for human beings. We, too, rest once per week, and take an opportunity to marvel at the wonder of the world. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow put it, Shabbat is “a time to live in harmony rather than achieve dominion” over nature. After all, if God was impressed by creation, how much more so should we be awed by it?