Shabbat dinner

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I will throw in a quick story from the first week in Jerusalem.

The weekend in Jerusalem is much different than the States. The 2 day weekend actually varies depending on religion and culture, and there are many religions and cultures here. Generally in Jerusalem the weekend is Friday and Saturday, with the work week being Sunday-Thursday and this is the schedule that I follow. The Muslim holy day is Friday and the Jewish holy day is Saturday, and the Mormons observe the Sabbath on Saturday to keep with the customs of the area. 

I live in an area of Jerusalem that is almost exclusively Israeli Jews, and the Jewish “Shabbat” (Sabbath) starts at sundown on Friday and goes until sundown on Saturday. There is a huge variety of Jews here, from very secular to ultra-Orthodox, but regardless of the variety of religiosity, EVERYTHING shuts down from Friday afternoon (to give everyone time to go home before Shabbat starts) until Sunday.  There are no buses that run, no stores that are open, and it makes living in Jerusalem extremely inconvenient on weekends because you have only Thursday night and Friday morning/early afternoon to do things and get errands done. But everyone goes home on Friday and has Shabbat dinner with their family.

Anyways, this last Friday I was invited to participate in Shabbat dinner with a fairly orthodox Jewish family along with several of the other former-BYU students that I’ve met here.  The father of the family was a very large man, maybe 6 ft 4in, from Canada and wearing “Sunday clothes” and a kippah (also called yarmulke, the head covering), the mother was from Brooklyn. They had lived in Israel for over 20 years and had several daughters, all dressed up in Sunday clothes, that spoke English with Hebrew accents and were all extremely talkative and friendly with us. Several other friends of this family were there, all Jewish except for our small Mormon group of 4. 

After everyone got there, we gathered around and the father started singing in Hebrew as a type of opening prayer.  We would join in every once in a while with a “lachaim”.  We then passed around a wine cup (grape juice for us) and everyone had a sip and there was silence until bread was broken and passed out (much like the sacrament on Sunday) and eaten and then the silence was broken and the meal commenced.  There was wonderful bread, hummus, salad, cauliflower, beans, tofu curry, chicken, and potatoes, a huge meal and the company was hilarious, very loud and talkative and welcoming.  The family was extremely gracious, inviting us to come every Friday night for dinner.

We sang one more song and that was the end of my first Shabbat dinner.