Chapter 1 - Getting to know Shabbat

Chapter One - Getting to Know Shabbat

"More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews." - Ahad HaAm

What is the best way to begin one's Jewish journey? Why, by taking a day off, of course!

Shabbat, the Sabbath or day-of-rest, is so essential to the Jewish experience that I can think of no other starting point, and certainly no better one, from which to begin exploring Judaism.

How one goes about experiencing Shabbat, however, is not without some amount of controversy. But you will need to get used to that – you are, after all, dipping your toes into a tradition for which (polite) argument is practically a sacred act. Rule number one: if you know two Jews, you will get at least two opinions about the proper way to do something, and they may both be right. Judaism, at least in contemporary America, tries to make enough room under its tent for several different ways to uphold its many traditions.

I'm going to walk you through the Sabbath traditions as I have learned and experienced them, but keep in mind that your mileage – walking, of course, since it's Shabbat! – may vary.

Welcoming the Sabbath Bride

Shabbat, like all Jewish holidays, begins at sunset on one night and continues until roughly an hour after sunset the next day. This little Jewish quirk is said to have its origin in the way Genesis chapter 1 counts time: "and there was evening and there was morning, Day 1." From this, the rabbis of old concluded that a day begins in the evening – at sunset, to be precise – and continues until the following evening. 

It seems to have been something of an obsession for these sages, who set the rules of Judaism for all subsequent generations, to make certain that nobody misses the proper moment for a holy observance. Therefore, we light our Shabbat or Yom Tov (holiday) candles 18 minutes before sunset in order to ensure that we are not doing that act of work during the holy day, and we do not end the holy day until three small stars are visible in the night sky (or until 50 minutes have passed after the published sunset time, if you are stuck indoors or if outdoor conditions do not allow you to see stars in the sky) to make sure we do not return to our ordinary lives too quickly. But if, for some reason, you cannot time your Shabbat observance to start precisely in time with the sunset, go ahead and light your Shabbat candles when you can: your Shabbat observance is said to start at whatever moment you light your pair of neirot (candles). 

Then you get your family and/or friends together for a few songs and prayers and blessings, conclude with the kiddush and the motzi, and voila, you have welcomed the Sabbath. 

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you say – for those who are new to Judaism, this is all starting to sound a bit overwhelming. Can't you just attend Shabbat services at a synagogue somewhere and have them worry about all of the details for you? 

Answer: of course you can, but exactly how that will work depends on your synagogue. 

While it is considered entirely permissible to start the Sabbath around your own dinner table, and many Jews do (see Rule #1), you will almost certainly find a core group of Jews in some population center near you (you may have to expand your definition of “near” if you live in a rural area) for whom the high point of Shabbat observance is coming together with their fellow congregants to welcome the Sabbath bride. You are entirely welcome to join them, and especially if you are in the beginning stages of getting to know Judaism, you most certainly should!

Reform and Conservative synagogues ring in Shabbat with a roughly hour-long prayer service known alternately as Erev Shabbat (Sabbath evening) or Kabbalat Shabbat (translation?), though as with everything in "progressive" strains of Judaism, the exact details can vary widely. The Orthodox, on the other hand, will begin Shabbat in much the same way that they begin every evening, with a brief ma’ariv prayer service at their local shul; they will then hurry home (on foot, of course – no driving on Shabbat for these stalwarts!) for a festive meal and d’var torah discussion with family and possibly invited friends.

The Orthodox will time everything as precisely as possible around sunset, meaning that all of this celebration starts quite early in the winter and quite late in the summer months. The more practical Reform and Conservative synagogues will typically time their Shabbat services off of local work customs and traffic patterns instead, usually resulting in a set time for Erev Shabbat services year-round. I have seen start times for Erev Shabbat as early as 6:00pm and as late as 7:30pm. This means that in the winter it may already be dark when you sing in Shabbat, and in the summer the sun may not set until well after you have finished the entire hour-long prayer service!

Which of these diverse Jewish traditions should you choose to start your journey with? The easy answer is the one in which you already know someone who can help you fit in and follow all of the dance steps, so to speak. However, this answer will not work for everyone. To start with, not everyone has a good Jewish friend who they feel comfortable enough with to suggest tagging along to their weekly Shabbat observance. Even if you do have a good Jewish friend (as happened to my son), they might not be the sort who go to services every week (Rule #1 again). And if you try to go to shul with an opposite-gender friend of the Orthodox persuasion (as happened to my wife once), you will be separated from them at prayer time, which kind of nullifies the benefit of going to services with a friend.

And so, with all due respect to the many “streams” of Jewish tradition, I feel that the newcomer to Judaism should probably start by experiencing a Reform service, especially if you come from a background of experiencing worship in one of the many Christian traditions that pervade our American culture. 

Why? Reform Judaism began as an attempt to maintain the essential elements of Judaism while still holding the attention of Jews who had begun to live as members of the majority-Protestant surrounding cultures of America and central Europe. The early reformers saw a world in which Jews were being increasingly welcomed into (and tempted by) both secular and protestant surrounding cultures, and they believed that Judaism had two choices: retain centuries-old patterns and utterly lose the attention of the newest generations of youth and young adults, or update the way they do things to compete with Protestant worship and secular entertainments. They kept the Jewish order and style of prayers, but translated most of them from Hebrew into the local language (in recent years, the pendulum has swung back toward more Hebrew in the service, however). They kept the Jewish habit of singing many of the prayers, but updated many of the melodies to sound upbeat and contemporary. They moved the rabbi to the front of the room and placed him (and, in time, her) in the role of worship-leader and sermon-giver that Jews saw Protestant clergy fulfilling. They did their best to impose a sense of “decorum” on the Jewish prayer service, something the relatively chaotic Orthodox services were seen as lacking.

The result is that if you were raised on, or even occasionally visited, just about any Christian church in America, you will probably feel more comfortable with the words and melodies of a contemporary Reform prayer service than you will with any of the other branches of Judaism. Given that there is still plenty of new-ness to get used to – the order of service and style of prayers will be unlike anything you have ever experienced in a Christian congregation, there will still be plenty of Hebrew to wrap your mind and your tongue around, and there will be plenty of new melodies and “tropes” (chants) to absorb – this superficial familiarity is probably a good thing to start with. 

And while no Jewish prayer book I have seen is at all easy-to-navigate, especially to a newcomer, the Mishkan T’fillah prayer book currently in use by most Reform congregations is a good step easier to figure out than most. It includes transliterations (Hebrew words in English letters) of all the prayers to help newcomers pronounce those prayers that the congregation sings or chants in the original Hebrew, translations of each Hebrew prayer so that you will have some idea what you are saying, and original English-language content on facing pages to complement the sometimes cryptic Hebrew passages. 

Once you get used to the Reform service, you are of course welcomed – encouraged, even – to try some of the other “streams” of Judaism and see where you personally feel most comfortable.

Another nice idea, if you have children or sometimes feel like one yourself, would be to find a synagogue that offers (usually once a month in place of the normal prayer service) a “family Shabbat” that might take the time to break down and explain what is going on more, might follow a more kid-friendly pacing, and may use more easy-to-follow melodies and chants. Note that I say “might” – there seems to be no standard for these sorts of things. Also note that I say a “family Shabbat” and not a “Tot Shabbat” – the latter is a distilled-to-the-very-basics mini-service aimed at drawing the very youngest kids in to doing Sabbath at synagogue, and will not be at all suitable for introducing an adult to the rhythm of Shabbat prayers.

So as you can perhaps tell, I homed in pretty quickly on wanting to attend a Reform service, at least at first. Now that I had decided which branch of Judaism to investigate, I had the problem of finding a synagogue. While you can just type “synagogue” into Google maps, the listing you get will only be partially helpful. Unlike Protestants, Jewish congregations do not typically spell out which of the various Jewish movements they belong to in their name, which is usually some combination of Hebrew words anyway. So how do you find a Reform (or Conservative, for that matter) synagogue near you? 

One helpful website, reformjudaism.org, featured both a find-a-congregation feature (for Union for Reform Judaism affiliated synagogues only) and some helpful beginners guides to attending Shabbat prayer services, covering both basic etiquette and the basic ingredients of a Shabbat prayer service (again, both from a decidedly Reform point of view). If you want to steep yourself in a bit more Jewish tradition from the get-go, you can try the Find a Synagogue link on the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism website, uscj.org. For a half-way point between these two traditions, you could also try Reconstructionist Judaism, though there are very few of these congregations relative to the other two “progressive” movements (only two, for example, in my entire home state of Texas). 

Oh - and while we are sidetracked, let me offer two notes on terminology.

First, what do you call the place where you attend prayer services? People who are not Jewish almost universally call the place Jews meet a “synagogue”, and Jews also often use this term when speaking to the outside world. But "synagogue" is a Greek word meaning a place where people come together. First, there is nothing specifically Jewish, or even religious, about the word. Second, there is some dissatisfaction among Jews with using a Greek word for their place of gathering, when we have so many languages of our own to draw from! 

As a result, there are a multiplicity of words used within the Jewish community for our places of gathering. Some (mostly on the Orthodox side of center) use the Yiddish word shul, which technically means "school" -- a place to study your religion. Others (mostly on the Reform side) refer to the place we come together as a Temple to emphasize that this place should be a center of our lives in much the same way that The Temple in Jerusalem was central to pre-diaspora Judaism. The word "Temple" is controversial, however, because to the Orthodox there is only one possible Temple, in Jerusalem, and it will be rebuilt someday when Messiah comes. 

How about a Hebrew word, then? In Hebrew, there is no agreement on a single name for the place: it could be a beth t'fillah (house of prayer) or a beth midrash (house of study) or any of a few other house-of constructs. Others don't even like naming the building, but prefer naming the group who meet there, as in "Congregation Shaar HaShalom" or "Meyerland Minyan" (a minyan being the minimum number of Jews necessary to constitute formal group prayer: 10 adult males in an Orthodox setting, 10 adults of any gender in a more progressive setting).

Second, what are you going to do when you get there? Protestant Christians typically refer to their Sunday morning services as "worship", while those of you coming from a Catholic or High Episcopal background think of it as "mass." Throw both of those terms out the window. You are going to your synagogue (shul, Temple, etc) for a "prayer service," which may also include a "Torah service." 

Whew. Tired? And you haven't even started learning any Hebrew, yet!  

Catch your breath, then come along and join me on my first Erev Shabbat...

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It turned out that there was a small Reform congregation in my area, known as Temple Beth Tikvah ("House of Hope"), that held Shabbat services every Friday night. After reading enough internet pages to convince me that I might possibly be welcomed there, I made preparations to go and experience my first Shabbat service.

I agonized over what to wear: business dress would be too much for a Friday night, but on the other hand I didn't want to insult anyone by appearing too casual. I did a "preflight" drive the night before to make sure I wouldn't arrive late.

I needn't have worried about either point, as it turns out. 

While larger synagogues seem to have people coming and going and events happening throughout a typical weekday, smaller ones such as TBT tend to be shuttered most of the week. So when I drove up fifteen minutes prior to the official start time for Erev Shabbat services – fully expecting to need that time to navigate the maze of greeters who would helpfully stuff my hands full of material, ask me for the short version of my life story, and then somehow manage to get me to my seat on time – I found myself in an empty parking lot next to a building that was locked up tight. 

Minutes passed, seeming like hours. Had I come to the right place? Would I stick out as a stranger even more because of my early arrival? Would it offend anyone if I got out of my car and explored the grounds?

Answers: yes, sorta, and no idea. I was just thinking about getting out and walking around when a congregant drove up and, also finding that the building was locked, went back to wait in her car. It wasn't actually that long before someone with a key to the building turned up and let us in, so I never got to find out about exploring the place on my own. 

If I was expecting something marvelously different than a Christian worship space, I was disappointed. Actually, considering how much else was different about this religious experience, it was nice that the building resembled in most respects a lot of the small churches I have known. There was a small entry foyer displaying several odd and expensive-looking Jewish tchotchkes, such as hanukkiyot and seder plates made of glass and stone from Jerusalem, which it turns out were for sale – or would have been, if this wasn't Shabbat. (Side note: living as we do in a land where you would be hard-pressed to find a local shop that stocks Jewish paraphernalia, these "sisterhood shops," found in most congregations, are as much a service to the local Jewish community as they are a fund-raiser)

From the entryway, I could see the Rabbi's office to one side, a small prep kitchen to the other, and straight ahead a central large meeting space in which services would be held (Jews even call this space a "sanctuary," so that's a bit of terminology I didn't have to re-learn). There was a library that doubled as a social hall in the back of the room and a hallway full of classrooms on the far side. While not exactly identical to any church I had ever been in, it had enough of the same elements for me to feel comfortably at home.

But that is where the familiarity ended. Having picked a seat close enough to center that I wouldn't miss anything but far enough back that nobody would notice me if I did anything wrong, I started looking around. I noticed stained glass windows ringing the room, but they featured stars-of-David amidst geometric designs rather than the biblical scenes one would expect to see in a Christian church. Where the altar/table and large, central cross would have been in a standard Christian church was a gigantic reading table (picture a podium with a broad, slightly sloped lectern, then multiply the size of the lectern by three or four times) and behind that a large wooden box with doors.

I later learned that the table is called a bimah, and it is where the Torah scrolls are rolled out on those occasions when they are read. In this congregation – though not in all, it turns out – the bimah doubles as the place from which prayers and songs are led. 

And yes, Jews still read from the Torah in scroll form, at least for ceremonial purposes, and the Torah scrolls we read from – hand-lettered in Hebrew calligraphy, sans vowels, in an unbroken chain of faithful hand-copying that goes back more than two thousand years – are among the most sacred and valuable objects that a synagogue will have. For everyday use, much more user-friendly books of the Torah (with vowelized Hebrew, English translations, and running commentaries, in most cases) are typically available somewhere in the building. 

The box behind the bimah, where the Torah scrolls are stored, is called the aron kodesh, or holy ark, though everyone just refers to it as "the ark." There is something mystical about opening the ark, and whenever the ark is open you are supposed to stand out of respect. 

Above the ark and bimah area hangs a lamp known as the ner tamid, or eternal light, a reminder of an oil lamp that was kept burning at all hours in the Temple of old. I don't honestly know if most modern-day synagogues keep their ner tamid glowing non-stop or not, but they are certainly always lit during services. The temple I was visiting this day had a lovely ner tamid shaped to look like giant handprints forming the wings of a dove: reminders of the value Jews place on shalom (peace and wholeness) and on healing the world through the work of our hands. 

Right in front of the bimah stood a small, unassuming table with two candles in ornate candle holders. These are special candles, designed to glow without flickering for about three hours, and it is the lighting of these candles that formally begins Shabbat (since lighting of flames is one of the forms of work prohibited on Shabbat, the lighting of the candles must always be the first thing done). 

As I was taking all of this in, the room started to fill with other people. And again, if I was hoping to make it through this process without attracting attention to myself as a newcomer, I was disappointed. People all seemed to know instinctively that this was my first time at TBT, but nobody once guessed that it was my first time in a synagogue at all. Some wanted to know where I was from, and when they found I had lived in their neighborhood for years, well then why hadn't I been to their Temple before now? Which other synagogues had I tried out? One lovely woman apologized for TBT being such a small Temple, but then stressed that that could be a good thing, too. And one man in a Hawaiian shirt was only interested if I had ever been to New York. When I told him that I had once lived Upstate, he quickly noted that he meant the real New York, the City, namely Brooklyn, apparently the epicenter of American Jewry. 

One by one they introduced themselves to me, and then one by one they moved on to pick up old conversations with the people they knew. So I picked up the only thing there was to fiddle with: the prayer book, or siddur.

And here was something completely different. I was delighted! The book opened right-to-left, like the Hebrew Bible I had been trained on back in my seminary days. Each right-hand page contained a Hebrew prayer on the upper right quadrant, with transliteration (Hebrew approximated using English letters) facing it on its left, and a semi-paraphrased translation below it on the bottom of the right page. Each left-hand page contained one or more English poems or prose prayers that expressed modern sensibilities while reflecting the theme of the prayer on its right. 

I struggled (and failed) to remember enough of my Hebrew vocabulary to make it through even one prayer. Foreign languages are something of a use-it-or-lose-it thing for me, and I like to joke that I have forgotten more Hebrew than most people ever learn. Ah, well – it was still a joy to me to revisit the language that had made me fall in love with the Bible all over again six or seven years earlier. I could have pages through that book for hours and not run out of things to wonder at. 

I was woken from my Hebrew-induced reverie by a noise among the small crowd who had gathered – the Rabbi was here, back from a summer trip to Israel, accompanied by a large portion of her travel group. She quickly made the rounds of those people she hadn't seen in a while, briefly got my name and introduced herself to me, and then proceeded to start the Shabbat service by leading the congregation in a song I didn't know. 

And I mean completely didn't know: I did not know the melody (Jewish prayer books, unlike Christian hymnals, do not have musical notes printed in them), I had never heard the words before, and as previously noted I could not recall more than a bare minimum of the language the words were in. At first I felt left out. But as the song repeated, I caught the basic melody, I was able to hum along singing nonsense syllables, and I began to feel like part of the community just by doing so. 

One nice thing about Jewish prayer services: you can kind of hum along with the melodies if you don't know the words, and tradition says that as long as you say "amen" at the right points in each prayer, you get credit for the whole thing.

For the rest of the songs and prayers, the rabbi called out page numbers so I was able to read the words, and I soon got pretty good at catching the tune and singing along.

I still didn't know exactly what I was singing, but the truth is that I found that experience to be oddly liberating. 

They say that Unitarian Universalists have trouble singing hymns because they want to make sure they agree with every word before they sing it. Jews, it seems, are comfortable singing words they largely don't know (Hebrew literacy among Reform adults seems to reach a peak at B'nai Mitzvah age and slowly decline after that, so if you are tempted to worry that you will know less Hebrew than the born-Jews at whatever synagogue you visit, don't), and in fact a whole category of songs made up of nonsense syllables – called niggun – exists as it's own art form in Jewish music. 

So I had lived a lot of my adult life the UU way, stressing out about whether or not to skip words I didn't agree with in Christian hymns of one sort or another. And here I was singing along with words in a language I didn't really know, words whose meanings I had no way to fathom, and I was loving it. Letting go of the meanings, it turns out, can turn an experience of religious dogma into one of meditative ecstasy. 

It did help that there were English translations to scan, which put my mind more at ease that the service was not asking me to affirm any potentially objectionable beliefs. As far as I could tell, we welcomed the Sabbath bride in song form, then sang/prayed about the origins of Shabbat and about the greatness of God and his good deeds for our ancestors, asked for healing of body and spirit and for peace, on the Sabbath and always. The only time I was asked to state (or sing, rather) any sort of belief was the sh'ma: "Hear, O Israel, Adonai our God, Adonai is One." Relatively brief, compared to the other prayers and songs, and yet one of the most enthusiastic and heartfelt moments of the service. This belief, the one-ness of God, is what unites Jews of all stripes (I would hazard a guess that even those Jews who question the existence of God would not question the one-ness of the God they are having doubts about). Since the idea of the one-ness of God was one of the things that drew me to Judaism in the first place, this was not really an obstacle for me. 

One thing that did throw me off a bit was the fluidity of song and prayer. Where Christian services have a firm division of time into distinct moments of prayer, reading, song, and spoken refelection, all of these elements blend together in a Jewish service. Prayers are frequently sung in Jewish services, as are affirmations, short passages of Torah, psalms, and even occasional pieces originally written as songs. Other prayers or passages are chanted in Hebrew, there are spoken readings and reflections in English, and I have frequently been to Jewish services that had question-and-answer sessions (in both directions). And none of this is precisely regimented in the Protestant "we are going to read our call to prayer, and then we will sing a hymn" fashion I was used to. Actually, now that I think of it, Jews sing our call to prayer, too. 

Add to this the fact that nowhere is the complete order-of-service written out for you, as it often is in Protestant worship bulletins, and I found the service quite difficult to follow the first few times I went. 

In Protestant worship, whether one thinks about it or not, there are several movements that guide the flow of worship: from confessing sin to receiving absolution (in the form of the eucharist, for example), from questioning to receiving revelation (in the form of bible readings and the all-important sermon), from expressing needs to receiving blessings. Each prayer or song or reading or meditation is placed to further one of these movements along. Jewish prayer services have a quite different rhythm -- expressing more thanks than desire, for example -- but they also lack any of these simple movements. The service is built around several significant moments: the aforementioned sh'ma, an extended series of blessings called the amidah, the healing mi shebeirach, a couple of different versions of the kaddish, and a final moment of praise and hope for the future called the aleinu. Scattered among these are reminders of why we keep the Sabbath, but to be honest I haven't detected any single thread that runs through the whole service.

I think, in retrospect, that was part of the charm for me. Protestant worship is utterly predictable. Jewish prayer, at least for the novice, seems new and utterly mysterious. 

Another interesting difference between a Jewish service and a Protestant one is the way the sermon is the focal point of the latter, which builds through readings and songs to the minister's central message, where any sermonizing by the rabbi in a Jewish service becomes part of that fluid mix of elements that really don't have a central focal point. In that first Erev Shabbat, for example, the rabbi wove several short reflections into the service instead of giving one long sermon at one particular point. I've since seen plenty of Jewish services that follow the "one long sermon" model, but the sermon has much less of a focal-point feel even in these cases. It is just one element among many. 

And the mood created by all of these elements? Joy, to be finally at the end of another hard week. Gratitude, for the gift of the Sabbath, for the opportunity to be together once again, for the gifts of life and freedom and Jewishness. Wonder, at the mysterious ways of God and life. But undergirding it all was a mood of profound peace. Shalom rav, great peace, we asked God for – but it was actually in the act of asking that the peace was conveyed, for me at least. 

The service ended with the blessing of bread and of wine -- something eerily familiar to this former Episcopalian -- but again in purely a mood of thankfulness and joy. None of that Protestant rehearsal of our sins and guilt and God's sacrifice of His own son to save us from them. How refreshing!  

And then we adjourned to the back room for the oneg Shabbat, joy of the Sabbath. Spread out in the social-hall-meets-library at the back of the room was a buffet of snack and light dinner foods such as I had never seen at a UU or UCC coffee hour (the closest thing I can think of to an oneg in my previous religious life). Bagels and lox were laid out next to dinner foods and dessert foods aplenty.

But I barely had time to eat the smiling I fit on my plate: every person who had not introduced themselves before wanted to meet me now; those who had introduced themselves before wanted to know how I had liked the service; and the rabbi wanted to make an appointment to speak to me one-on-one sometime soon if I was still interested in this whole Jewish business. I stayed an entire hour after the service (my wife was beginning to wonder about me) and never lacked for someone to talk to. I'm not sure that's typical, but it does seem true that Jews take the commandment to welcome the stranger quite seriously. 

And so then I got back in my car, ready to engage in a Sabbath of rest and joy and peace, and went back home to a family who was not at all primed for any of those things. And that is where the work of Shabbat would have to begin. 

The Rest of Shabbat

In retrospect, after that one blissfully-awesome, impression-making Erev Shabbat service, I still had no idea what I was getting into. I just knew that I wanted to jump into it with both feet, or perhaps even to do a big splashy cannonball into the deep end of the Jewish tradition.

My family, not so much. To be fair, they hadn't just attended an hour of prayers to get them all centered and peace-filled and ready for a day of letting the world go and focusing - where? in-ward? family-ward? God-ward?

But I had, and when I came home and found the rest of the family ready for an ordinary Friday night of tussling and arguing, followed by an ordinary Saturday of shopping and errand-running and (in my wife's case) catching up on work...well, my head didn't exactly explode from the cognitive dissonance, but it came close on a couple of occasions.

Recipe for a bad Sabbath: "I promised the kids a trip to Target..."

It was here that I discovered just how much effort a day of rest can require: effort, for example, to plan the rest of your week so that you don't end up requiring Saturday shopping trips, Saturday yard work, Saturday catch-up-on-what-I-couldn't-do-at-the-office work, Saturday helping-the-kids-with-their-homework work, or even Saturday laundry or cooking or dishwasher-ing. But also effort to abstain from those temptations and, at least in my case, well-formed habits of sneaking in a bit of work on a Saturday afternoon, or a bit of social media in the midst of a family activity, or whatever your anti-rest may be.

You see, when I first envisioned Shabbat as a day-of-rest, I thought it was sort of a laissez-faire, anything goes as long as you refrain from paid work or major shopping sort of day. But for Jews, the day of rest is more than that.

For traditionally-observant Jews, it is a list of 39 major categories of acts to avoid. The biggest prohibition seems to be against lighting fires, which has been extended in the modern era to prohibit driving a car (which clearly involves lighting thousands of tiny fires within the car's engine) or initiating any sort of electrical or electronic activity (sparks of electricity being seen as tiny fires, I suppose), to the point where traditionally-observant Jews have invented all kinds of ingenious ways of getting around our modern world on Shabbat without using a single switch or button. Also prohibited, though, are any form of writing, any act of moving or carrying outside your household, and any acts of creation or destruction. Yard work of most kinds is prohibited, and while minor housework like setting and clearing the table is allowed, you cannot either start or finish a major project on the Sabbath. The list is actually pretty intense (I need a side-bar or something here).

Among more "progressive" Jews – who tend to modify or just outright break the traditional rules when they don't seem to serve a higher purpose, or when they actively interfere with what feels like the "spirit of Shabbat" – there is still a subset of us who try to be somewhat Sabbath-observant even if no Orthodox Jew would ever declare us "shomer Shabbos" (keeping or guarding the Sabbath). For us, the idea of Shabbat is to abstain, for 25 hours, from dealings with the workaday world, from pursuits that drain rather than give life, from anything that distracts us from the three things that matter most: our inner life, our family life, and our religious life.

For example, these days my family will drive a car on Shabbat, but only to synagogue and back, to a park or other family outing and back, or to the inevitable Saturday soccer games a half dozen times each season. We will do what we need to prep food for breakfast and lunch, but if we want a major meal we try to cook it in advance.

My wife and I will put our electronic distraction devices away at sundown on Saturday, and ask our kids to do the same. How well any of us do at making it 25 hours without our particular electronic vices varies widely from week to week, but we at least start our Shabbat "unplugged," and this frees up an amazing amount of time for the things people used to do together, like hang out and talk or play card or board games, for Torah study, or for personal down-time.

I have learned to arrange my week to avoid school-work or yard-work or even most forms of house-work on Friday nights and Saturdays, and I tell my students to expect me to be out of communication during this time.

We tell our kids we will not even talk about money or shopping on Shabbat, again with differing levels of success, but at least we try. We do go out for bagels or donuts on occasion, when the benefit of a family breakfast together seems to outweigh the sin of exchanging money on the Sabbath. I suppose the idea of a Sabbath brunch out on the town is one of those ideas from my Christian life that I've had the hardest time shaking. Mea culpa, I suppose.

But Shabbat is not only about things to avoid. There are positive commandments for Shabbat as well: to say (well, sing, really) certain Sabbath prayers, among whatever community you can make it to or put together at home; to light at least a pair of candles just before Shabbat begins and to celebrate with loved ones as long as they continue to burn; to drink a glass of wine to remember that Shabbat is a joyful and relaxing thing; to study the week's passage of Torah, again with whatever community you can assemble for that task; to make love with your spouse, if you are lucky enough to have one; and after you have done all that, to rest!

Two years into this project, we try to attend Erev Shabbat services every other week or so, especially when a "family-friendly shabbat" is held at one of our synagogues, and on other weeks we hold our own Shabbat evenings at home. I sometimes attend Saturday-morning Torah service at our Conservative synagogue, but so far the prospect of two and a half hours at prayer is too daunting for any of my children to come with me. So we hold our own Torah study at home each week and we keep trying.

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But getting to this point was neither a simple nor a straightforward process.

As I mentioned before, my first attempt at convincing my family to join me in a day of rest was not altogether – okay, at all – successful. I recall great conflicts arising (so much for "Shabbat Shalom") over my desires to refrain from certain activities, ending in a shopping trip over, well, over my dead Sabbath, I suppose. 

It quickly became apparent that becoming Jewish was not something I could do on my own: I was going to need to get the full buy-in and cooperation of my wife and kids in order for this to work.

It was the first inkling of a deeper truth about my new religion: Judaism will only work its full magic for you – and on you – if you let it permeate every corner of your life. Does that mean you have to go don a long black coat and furry hat (or a long dress and a bonnet)? Of course not, though I'm sure the Chabad folks would be thrilled if you did. What it does mean is that, in order for Judaism to "work" for me, I needed to let it apply to my work life, and how I treat those whom I work with and for; to how I wake up in the morning and how I go to bed at night; to at least some of what I read and watch and listen to in those moments of spare time I manage to grab; to what I eat and how I "bless" my food; to where and how I give my time and treasure. I needed to let it illumine every choice I made and shine through every moment I experienced. But even more so, it had to apply to how I interact with my wife and my children – and how they interact with me.

For example, I have largely stopped giving my children what I now think of as "Christian-informed" discipline: do something wrong, get an arbitrary punishment; say you're sorry, get easy forgiveness. Instead, I work with my children to earn an "apology accepted" by following the Jewish tradition of teshuvah: working with the person you have harmed to make things right in some way.

And if I were truly to accept Judaism into my family life in this way, then I couldn't very well go taking a Sabbath without the active cooperation of the rest of my family. And I didn't think it would work to simply tell the family that we were now going to keep Shabbat, in some fashion or another. No, I needed to introduce them the only way I knew how, the way I had been introduced: by dragging the whole family through the wonders of a Shabbat service. 

The first willing victim of my newfound Jewish proselytization scheme was my oldest son. You may recall from Chapter Zero that this particular boy was currently convinced of his utter worthlessness as a human being due to having listened a bit too closely to the Calvinist teachings of his youth group leader. I figure that if anybody in our family needed the fresh air of Judaism, it was him. 

And I have to give my son kudos for jumping enthusiastically into his first ever Shabbat service. Knowing very little about Judaism – and not a word of Hebrew – he nonetheless quite happily sang along with songs he didn't know and read along with unison prayers for what seemed like a pleasant hour. His only apparent disappointment came when, after blessing the challah and wine, he did not get to charge the bimah and dip his chunk of bread in the cup of wine!

I was thrilled, because I had been quite nervous. This was, after all, only my second tentative step into what had quickly become "my new religion" (at least in my private mind), and this step depended almost entirely on someone else. And parental fantasies to the contrary, someone else's reaction to something is always out of my control!

During the oneg, the Rabbi's teenage daughter and a few other children were happy to include Ryan in their circle of conversation, and Ryan left that night seeming quite happy about the prospect of trying out Judaism. 

Irony of ironies, we had already signed him up for a Christian music camp the next week themed "The Amazing Grace Race." He later told me that he felt awkward many times during that week, as if they were trying to indoctrinate him back into Christianity just after he had discovered a new religion. What can I say, for some people this is powerful stuff. 

Now, another important difference between Protestant-style worship services and Jewish prayer services is that the Jewish version does not come with built-in child care. So we quickly learned to pack a "busy bag" for the children to play with, consisting usually of cheap building toys and activity books (though, caveat emptor: you can't have your kids write in an activity book on Shabbat at a more-observant synagogue). 

In summary, getting my family to accept Shabbat has been a rocky process, and we still have riots sometimes when a major shopping day or other commercial event falls on Shabbat. I still have to remind myself to ignore repeated texts from my students, and I occasionally remind my wife that she can in fact take one day a week off from lesson-planning or essay-grading or otherwise stressing about her career. But Jewish life is like climbing a ladder...you have to start on the rung you can reach, and then you just try to keep going up from there.