Jumping on the Shabbat Bandwagon

But not without a lot of hand-wringing over my reasons and motives and approach

🎨 by Stephanie Davidson, ⌨️ by Rae Katz

As so often happens, I have done the cliche thing. I had a baby, and now suddenly I am drawn to my severed religious roots. I waltzed out of my Bat Mitzvah at age thirteen into a world free of Friday night requirements. I bounded happily religion-free through two decades and then returned to wondering about Judaism at age thirty-four after seeing my first child in front of his first Christmas tree. Maybe there is something else I would like to offer him? This is a familiar story. Full are the halls of modern young parents who have returned to a lost religious past for the sake of someone else.

My husband and I chose a distinctly Jewish middle name for our son. There’s a trace of wistfulness there, some hoping baked into that name, something, it feels to me, not yet earned. So it was with a spark of excitement that I thought, “Shabbat!” Shabbat seems a perfect little way to bring Judaism back in. Not, obviously, true Shabbat—twenty-four hours each week with no lights, no electronics, no cars, no housework, and so on—but a version that would work for us. Lighting candles, perhaps, and putting our phones upstairs. My son’s aforementioned middle name, Ori, means “my light,” derived from my middle own name, Leora, which means “I have light.” On Shabbat we light candles and sing a blessing for the light. The idea was poetic. I suggested it to my (not Jewish) husband. He liked it too.

As it turns out the idea was also, well, basic. Basic in the sense that no sooner had I thought of it than I realized everyone else had too. Also basic in the sense that the Shabbat I had conceived of was literally basic—it didn’t require much, and it was unclear whether it captured the essential parts of Shabbat at all.

This first dawned on me when, shortly after I thought of my brilliant and original idea, Ezra Klein did a podcast episode on Shabbat. (This is particularly funny because we have a joke in our house that any opinion we hold, if you dig deep enough, originates from an Ezra Klein podcast.) I find Klein’s podcast smart and interesting, but it is also highly mainstream and the themes tend to capture major cultural trends. The Shabbat episode does just that. It quickly became clear to me that everyone around me was also thinking about Shabbat: Jews, non-Jews, tech bros doing digital Shabbat, young families doing digital Shabbat (ah-hem)…I was in fact quite late to the party.

My Shabbat idea was DOA. Too trendy. Not cool. Not original. But the idea took up residence and, as certain ideas do, it started collecting scraps like a lint brush. The idea started to offer an armature for quotes to hang on, things I read seemed related to it, other ideas arose and connected to the central theme, it started to have structure and heft. Witnessing that process is at the core of why I love writing. So what has emerged so far?

Shabbat alone is not Shabbat

First, it became clear to me from Klein’s podcast that the power of Shabbat depends on how many people around you are doing it. It depends on how deep you roll, Shabbat-wise. On that podcast, Klein’s guest Judith Shulevitz puts it this way:

“I can’t do [Shabbat] until I become part of a community that does it, that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive…you just can’t do this by yourself…it’s like a mutual noncompete clause. If other people are running around you being crazy, there’s nothing restful about that. You need the atmosphere of repose.”

This seems quintessentially true, not just about Shabbat, but about modern living. There is something about logging off over Christmas that feels different and more releasing than logging off during your random vacation in March when emails are still piling up to deluge you upon your return like a punishment for taking a vacation. I could very well see how the practice of Shabbat would only be powerful within a community of practitioners, or as one Orthodox author Kelsey Osgood wrote in her excellent takedown of secular Shabbat: “Many Jews refer to Shabbat as an ‘island in time,’ …but if you do Shabbat alone, your island is a deserted one.”

This reminded me of a quote from bell hooks, essayist and activist, from her book All About Love, which takes the criticism of individualized religious practices further:

I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community. Packaged as a commodity, spirituality becomes no different from an exercise program.”

Re-reading the last line stopped me in my tracks. I fancy myself as someone who is deeply committed to community building, and who has invested a large amount of time in the endeavor. And yet I see that I came to the question of Shabbat more from an exercise program posture. I am looking to build the muscle of slowing down, let’s say. I am interested in creating a habit of reflection. I am compelled by the idea of practicing time without phones. This exercise framing is so easy for me, so natural, so built-in, so well-worn. And I do think these are worthy goals. But I am compelled by the arguments that these are not Shabbat.

It’s all about scene-setting

The aspect of Shabbat that initially sparked my re-interest was the lighting of the candles. I love candles; I always have them around, though only the jar kind, not the long, skinny Shabbat kind. I light them because they evoke a mood—they help me transition into a state of increased calm, or they delineate a certain shower as mostly about relaxation as opposed to cleansing. I read recently, (and I can’t for the life of me remember where), that lighting a candle at one’s desk can be a simple way to transition into a period of creative work, signaling to the brain that it’s time to go deep. The practices of Shabbat, including the candles, but also more broadly the cooking and eating and extensive refraining, are designed to create a holy mood. Shulevitz describes all the activities of Shabbat as a frame: “the frame gives a special gloss [to Shabbat] the way it does a work of art and says, this space here, it’s meaning. Make sense of it.”

A friend of mine has a general belief that anyone can create magic. I remember once he told me: imagine it’s a full moon. So what. Now imagine that at the full moon you go outside and sit with a stick and wave it in a certain way while you close your eyes and breath deeply. Suddenly the full moon is imbued with a new energy, a magic of sorts. It’s now meaningful. Choosing to assign a ritual and choosing to put together some mood-setting environmental elements really can change how we feel and what we perceive as special. It is why lovers across time have lit candles and dimmed lights and strewn rose petals. It is why mushroom trip-goers talk about “set and setting” and go to great lengths to arrange pillows and select music and choose the perfect patch of grass in the park. Minds are particularly suggest-able on mushrooms, but they are also suggest-able at all other times.

So the practice of lighting candles and singing in unison on Shabbat is a suggestion to the mind that Friday evening is special. You could say holy, you could say an island in time, you could say a little magical. This, I like very much.

Those so-called roots

There is some built-in guilt in trying to reclaim lost religious roots, at least for me. I didn’t care enough to maintain a connection to Judaism for twenty years. I don’t, frankly, know all that much about it. It’s actually strange to call Judaism my “roots,” given my distance from it. Why should I be able to waltz back in and just take a little here and a little there? It seems kind of lame. Does it border on appropriative? It’s certainly not the way a conscientious, educated progressive would behave.

I have almost no logical reason to argue this, but reaching back for a little glimpse of one’s roots just feels like it’s ok, if not outright good. Even if it’s done with partial knowledge. Even if it’s done haphazardly and at a cliché time in life. Because the alternative, in my case, is to not feel connected to ancestral roots at all, and that doesn’t seem obviously better. There must be some quintessentially human reason why the general arc of being a modern secular American so often includes reconnecting with spirituality in one’s thirties and becoming an ancestry.com enthusiast in one’s sixties.

I am tempted to dig into the philosophical reasons that humans yearn for roots; I’m tempted to head over to The Internet and really weigh the many arguments that surely exist there about how engaging in a merely superficial connection to my born religion would make me a deeply shitty person. But actually, let me try out something that I haven’t historically been particularly good at: doing what just feels right and thinking less about the many reasons why it might not be.

So here’s where I’ve landed: I still want to buy two tall candlesticks and light them on Friday nights. Because of the power of scene-setting, and because of the draw towards roots that I don’t really know much about and haven’t bothered to look into. I would like to call it Shabbat, though I’m not yet sure if that offends the true practice. I think there is an opportunity to make a little magic, to use my friend’s way of talking about it, and to make that bit of magic using some words and actions pulled from hundreds of years of my family history. I am aware that I will be missing something by not also locating my Shabbat within a community of practitioners. I do not believe my Shabbat will do anything towards curing my phone addiction, even if I put away my phone for the evening.

When put that way, well, I think I can get behind it.

There are always more ways I could try and discredit my new idea. You have witnessed a solid attempt here. I’d still like to try my Shabbat idea anyway.

—Rae

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Have you been thinking about Shabbat-like topics? Have you found meaningful ways to reconnect with roots that you had grown away from? Are you a genuine practitioner of Shabbat? I would love to hear from you!

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