Shabbat is the most sacred and holy day of the week and is so revered it is often compared to a queen or bride. In the presence of royalty we should put our best foot forward and likewise on Shabbat we should present our best selves. Someone like me, who struggles to find time to shower let alone put my best foot forward the other 6 days of the week, should make a real effort to be clean and put together for Shabbat. We should make an effort to be better to be kinder to be on our best behavior.
Now, I’m several long steps away from being an observant Jew, but I enjoy learning about it and inching closer to being, if not super observant, at least knowledgable enough to make an educated decision about which parts to follow and which to let slide a bit. We don’t “keep the Sabbath” in the sense of really anything except for having Shabbat dinner on Friday nights. Maybe one day we can observe Shabbat the way it was meant to be observed – as a day of rest. We may forgo driving or riding in a car, writing, tearing, business transactions, shopping, using the phone, using electricity, cooking, doing laundry (okay – not so difficult to forgo that one…). We may go to services Saturday morning. We may skip birthday parties and brunch and save our Target runs for another day.
For now we have our Friday night dinners. The one night of the week I can guarantee we will all be together. The one night of the week the kids actively want to help – by setting out the plates and cups, by putting a prayer book and kippah by each plate, by taking out the candles and challah cover. They sing the blessings with us, gleefully accept the blessing bestowed on them by their dad, and they participate in a custom that has been practiced by their ancestors for millennia and that is practiced all over the world. They’ve even created their own special customs like dipping their second helping of challah into their second helping of juice and putting extra “sprinkles” (flakes of kosher salt) on their challah. Sometimes when we’re lucky and have time we make the challah together at home. The kids know the ingredients and the steps, they love helping with the egg wash and sprinkling the poppy seeds. Normally I get so frustrated baking with the kids because it’s so messy and things don’t turn out exactly the way I want them to but making the challah I try to be calmer and more lenient when, for instance, all the flour doesn’t quite make it into the bowl or when the egg wash is puddled so deeply in the crevices of the dough I know it will turn into an omelette in the oven.
Our Shabbat – our Friday night dinners – serve as weekly reminders that there is something bigger than us in the universe, that we should be grateful for every moment we have to be alive and with each other, and that on this most special day of the week we should love each other even more, treat each other with even more kindness, and simply do our best.
Mama Mader at Home 