What Are We Doing When We Do Shabbat?

The Sacred in the Rainbow Sprinkles

When my first daughter, Naomi, turned one, my wife and I started sending her to a Jewish daycare in our Brooklyn neighborhood.

Now, I won’t claim this choice was entirely motivated by a desire to further her Jewish education.

Sure, I was glad she’d be spending her days immersed in whatever degree of Jewish learning is possible for a toddler, courtesy of the Hasidic women who ran the place. But also, the daycare was very conveniently located, and we’d heard good things about it. So, sure, why not?

One feature of the daycare was that every Friday, Naomi would return home from school with a little challah, always coated generously with sprinkles. The idea was that she and her little classmates had “baked” the challahs themselves. It was never clear to us how much of a role Naomi could have in this baking – she was a one-year-old, after all.

But then one week she came home with no challah, and when I asked her teacher what happened, she told me sadly, “The children burned their challahs this week.” So apparently the toddlers were in charge of setting the timer and getting the challahs out of the oven.

In any event, having a challah at home every Friday helped get our family in the habit of occasionally “doing” Shabbat: lighting candles and saying blessings over them, blessing grape juice, and blessing Naomi’s challah – which, you might even say miraculously, she’d succeeded in getting out of a 400-degree oven.

When Covid happened, the intermittent habit became fixed, something our family did every single Friday night. Against a backdrop of fear and instability, the consistency of this simple, intimate family ritual – prayers, candles, grape juice, challah – proved a comfort. A point of stillness and reliability in a world in flux.

Naomi is now ten. She has a little sister. And every Friday night, we all do Shabbat.

Of course, “doing” Shabbat can encompass far more than candles and staying home on Friday night. For the most committed Jews, Shabbat involves twenty-five hours of refraining from work of any kind – not driving, not watching television, not using a light switch. (In one of my favorite bits of Jewish trivia, a young Elvis Presley once lived downstairs from a rabbi, and would help out the upstairs neighbors by turning on their lights on Shabbat. So, Elvis, a friend to the Jews! There you go.)

Certainly, we could do more to celebrate Shabbat. But to me, the real question isn’t, Why aren’t we doing more? After all, we could all be doing more, in so many areas of our lives. I think the more interesting question is, Why are we doing what we’re doing?

What does observing Shabbat, in the way we observe it, mean to us?

I can’t speak for my wife and daughters — that’s a post for another Friday.

But for me, at least, Shabbat has an elegant spiritual logic.

I was recently speaking to Naomi’s classroom as part of Jewish Heritage Month (God knows how we ended up with May), and explained that Jews celebrate Shabbat to honor how in the Book of Genesis, God created the world in six days, and then rested on the seventh. One of her astute classmates asked me, if God is all-powerful, then why did God need to rest?

My answer was that God didn’t need to rest. God rested because God wanted to! I still haven’t cross-checked this ex tempore answer with a rabbi. But let’s go with it.

Resting when you don’t have to — isn’t that an example we modern people need more than ever? We have the tools at our fingertips to work every waking hour. Why take a minute away from Slack and email and texts, much less an entire day?

Shabbat reminds us how singular ordinary things are.

Shabbat acknowledges this human capacity, this human compulsion, to work nonstop. The holiday forces us to stop and redirect our attention to our families, to our loved ones, to the possibility of something higher.

I believe the ritual of lighting candles and saying blessings on a Friday is a microcosm that contains all of Shabbat. For a few moments, we step out of the flow of our lives – the endless distractions and obligations – and attend to more fundamental things: light, food, drink, one another.

Judith Shulevitz, in her brilliant book The Sabbath World, talks about how Shabbat “turns the ordinary into the singular.” I’d add my own gloss on that: Shabbat reminds us how singular ordinary things can be.

Could there be anything more ordinary than lighting candles, drinking some Kedem grape juice, and eating challah with the people you love?

And yet, is there anything more worth doing?