Saturday, December 10, 2016

Shabbat is about friends and family not fancy feasts

http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/79088/shabbat-is-about-friends-and-family-not-fancy-feasts/

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Holiness of Shabbat

Holiness of Shabbat:

The holiness of Shabbat illuminates and elevates the entire world. The woman of the house ensures that light and harmony prevail in her home by welcoming the Shabbat through lighting the Shabbat candles and prayer.


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Sunday, September 11, 2016

Welcoming the Shabbat queen

Welcoming the Shabbat queen:

Debra Band’s book combines illumination, beauty, art, and science

Kabbalah Shabbat is a celebration of beauty.  It’s many other things as well, of course. It’s the introductory service that ushers in Shabbat and so it marks the beginning of that paradoxical day that exists outside of time, even as its passage is marked by the appearance of stars, and the sun’s passage across the sky, and lengthening shadows, and then more stars.

Debra Band’s new book, “Kabbalat Shabbat: The Grand Unification,” illuminates and explicates and glories in Kabbalat Shabbat. She’s an illustrator and a writer; her lushly art-filled book, with its intricate designs, deeply symbolic but also surface-level lovely, go through the entire Friday night experience, both at shul and at home. She knows and writes about midrash and kabbalah. And because her late husband, David Band, was an astrophysicist, and because she discovered, to her great surprise, that all those disciplines come together in some ways, all have made their way into her book. It is, in fact, a grand unification.

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Friday, September 9, 2016

Shabbat, The Foundation Of Our Heritage

Shabbat, The Foundation Of Our Heritage:

The term for Shabbat as an “Oasis in Time” belongs to Abraham J. Hershel. While describing the Shabbat and its beauty he suggested that the Shabbat is an oasis in time. For a brief moment, as we usher in the Shabbat, time, as we know it, stands still. All our unpaid bills, office hassles, and professional aggravations are put on hold as we dedicate one day to God.

For six days prior, we pretend to believe that we are in control of our lives and our destiny. We think we have the power to make choices and to effect change in this world – that we are in control of our own destiny. Shabbat comes along and sobers us up. It literally becomes a reality check. No, we are not in control. In reality, we can only affect a very small portion of our lives.

When I describe the central theme of Shabbat to my students, I always focus on that point: that Shabbat is a time when the Jewish People recognize their mortality and in essence declare that G-d is in control of the universe.

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Monday, September 5, 2016

Being Religious About Shabbat Means Connecting With God

Being Religious About Shabbat Means Connecting With God https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/09/05/being-religious-about-shabbat-means-connecting-with-god/

Many people today sneer at keeping Shabbat. To them, Shabbat observance smacks of everything that’s wrong with religion.  As someone who started keeping the Sabbath so my new Torah-observant friends would eat in my house, I was dragged into Shabbat observance kicking and screaming.
...
Until you care about every tiny detail in your relationship with God, Shabbat is just a bunch of annoying restrictions. It’s religion. And in those early years, the only thing harder was that Fridays had to be spent in the kitchen the entire day — winter, spring, summer, fall.
...
I can tell you unequivocally that now, so many years later, Shabbat actually feels different. Maybe it’s that I don’t have to entertain all those kids anymore. Maybe it’s the pleasure I have in knowing that I hung in there for Him, even though it was so hard for me.
Or maybe it’s that I appreciate that Shabbat is God’s favorite day of the week. It’s the day that’s closest to the way life will be for us in the Messianic era, when we will perceive Godliness effortlessly.
That’s why I’m trying lately to light my candles early, even before sundown. Some people say it’s a mitzvah to do this. It’s also my way of showing God that, finally, I want more Shabbat in my life, not less.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Two words that echo the message of Shabbat


It can be suggested that zakhor is a direction to the mind; to remember the Shabbat. Shamor on the other hand, means to observe through action. Here, the Torah may be suggesting that it is important to translate thinking and contemplating Shabbat into doing Shabbat.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Sharing my Shabbat Table

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/the-torch/sharing-my-shabbat-table/

Hosting Shabbat meals has transformed my Shabbat experience from the passive role of being a guest and recipient to an active role of being a host, being a leader. It has allowed me to feel like an equal part of the meal and not feel like I am “still a child” because I do not have my own family. It has allowed me to connect more meaningfully with Shabbat and the rituals, especially when it is a meal with all women and I have the opportunity to recite Kiddush (prayer over wine) and Hamotzi (prayer over challah) for those around me.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Shabbat is the Answer to Every Question

Shabbat is the Answer to Every Question - The New Spirituality – Forward.com:

“Shabbat is the answer to every question.” This mantra is one of my favorite teaching and organizing tools in Jewish life. Here’s how it works: ask everyone in the room what questions they have. I’m not talking about things you can Google or ask an expert - real questions that you’re struggling with. Almost without fail, the majority of questions boil down to one of the following:
• How can I have more meaningful experiences with family and friends outside of work (though sometimes this question is simply “how can my work be more meaningful”)?
• How can I balance taking care of myself & family while also working toward fixing this broken world?
• How can I unplug from my technology addiction?


Read more: http://forward.com/the-new-spirituality/343438/shabbat-is-the-answer-to-every-question/#ixzz4CX0iuM55


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Friday, May 20, 2016

Vatican Official: We Need to Learn More From Jews on Role of Shabbat, Family

Vatican Official: We Need to Learn More From Jews on Role of Shabbat, Family  https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/05/19/vatican-official-we-need-to-learn-more-from-jews-on-role-of-shabbat-family/

“The most important thing we can learn from the Jewish people is first of all it’s a religion not of the synagogue but of the home, the family,” Cardinal Kurt Koch told the publication during a two-day symposium with leading theologians from both faiths.

The Cardinal, who is President of the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews, said he is positive that Jewish survival is “rooted in the family” and the “clear tradition of Shabbat.” He also noted that “family and Shabbat are two main challenges for Christianity,” and that the Sunday “culture in Christianity is very weak.”

Friday, May 13, 2016

Shabbat Is a Gift From God

http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/05/12/shabbat-is-a-gift-from-god/

We are spiritual beings but we are also physical beings. We cannot be spiritual, close to God, all the time. That is why there is secular time as well as holy time. But one day in seven, we stop working and enter the presence of the God of creation. On certain days of the year, the festivals, we celebrate the God of history. The holiness of Shabbat is determined by God alone because He alone created the universe. The holiness of the festivals is partially determined by us (i.e. by the fixing of the calendar), because history is a partnership between us and God. But in two respects they are the same. They are both times of meeting (mo’ed), and they are both times when we feel ourselves called, summoned, invited as God’s guests (mikra kodesh).

We can’t always be spiritual. God has given us a material world with which to engage. But on the seventh day of the week, and (originally) seven days in the year, God gives us dedicated time in which we feel the closeness of the Shekhinah and are bathed in the radiance of God’s love.

The Shabbat Table: Eating the Bible

http://www.cjnews.com/food/shabbat-table-eating-bible

Good Shabbos, Shabbat Shalom! Are you looking for some ‘food for thought’ as well as food for your Shabbat Table? You’ll be inspired by: Eating the Bible: Over 50 Delicious Recipes to Feed Your Body and Nourish Your Soul by Rena Rossner.
Eating the Bible is a visual feast for the eyes, palate, mind, and soul that will inspire those gathered around your table to reflect on the beauty of simple ingredients combined in creative, innovative ways. Mouthwatering recipes and magnificent photographs are intricately interwoven with biblical text and quotations into a tantalizing culinary tapestry.


Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Being stuck in revision is the very reason I need Shabbat

http://www.thejc.com/blogs/student-views/being-stuck-revision-very-reason-i-need-shabbat

Last term I didn’t go to Friday nights, so how can I justify it now, when I’m looking for a reason to get out of the library? It would have felt disingenuous, as though I were using Shabbat as a get-out clause.
The thing is, though, isn’t that sort of what Shabbat is? Isn’t it meant to be the get-out clause that we all need once a week, an excuse to stop doing the miserable things that we haven’t been able to escape? What is Shabbat if not an obligatory wind-down? My being stuck in revision is the very reason I need Shabbat.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Shabbat: A Vessel of Blessing

"Shabbat, the seventh day, has double sanctity. In the painting, this is characterized by the table with candles that seem to be rising upward, reflecting the uplifting power of Shabbat. On the other hand, Shabbat is a gift from Above, crowning us with Divine light. The crowns look like bowls holding blessings that flow down onto the Shabbat table. The Zohar says that the blessings of the week are dependent on and inspired by Shabbat"

http://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/3246847/jewish/Shabbat-A-Vessel-of-Blessing.htm

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The Serenity of Shabbat


The first translation of the Torah into another language — Greek — took place in around the second century BCE, in Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy II. It is known as the Septuagint, in Hebrew Hashiv’im, because it was done by a team of 70 scholars.

The Talmud, however, says that at various points the sages at work on the project deliberately mistranslated certain texts because they believed that a literal translation would simply be unintelligible to a Greek readership. One of these texts was the phrase, “On the seventh day God finished all the work he had made.” Instead the translators wrote, “On the sixth day God finished.”

What was it that they thought the Greeks would not understand? How did the idea that God made the universe in six days make more sense than that He did so in seven? It seems puzzling, yet the answer is simple. The Greeks could not understand the seventh day, Shabbat, as itself part of the work of creation. What is creative about resting? What do we achieve by not making, not working, not inventing? The idea seems to make no sense at all.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Between the Holy and the Frustrating

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/the-torch/between-the-holy-and-the-frustrating/