In the News  ||  Media Releases  ||  Events  ||  Jewish Life & Celebrations  ||  Careers  ||  Newsletter

Jewish Life & Celebrations

Shabbat

A Secular Shabbes

Rabbi Judith Seid
Rabbi Seid offers practical, useful advice for an enriching and enjoyable Shabbes experience.

Rabbi Seid is the author of We Rejoice in Our Heritage: Home Rituals for Secular and Humanistic Jews, and God-Optional Judaism: Alternatives for Cultural Jews who Love Their History, Heritage, and Community. Rabbi Seid is also the cultural leader at Tri-Valley Cultural Jews in Pleasanton, California. Visit Rabbi Seid at www.SecularJewishWeddings.com
Judith Seid, God-Optional Judaism, Citadel Press, 2001, pp. 130-139.

A Secular shabbes can be full of ritual or completely free-form. The only requirement is to do whatever it is you do self-consiously, with the idea that you are doing it because it is Shabbes.

You might like to observe a Sabbath, but you probably don’t want to do it by following prohibitions. Rather, you’d like to make it a positive, enriching experience. How to start?

First, make a list of the activities you value but rarely make time to do. Next, make a list of the activities that are onerous or tedious or based on some one else’s agenda.
Choose one – just one – from the value list and one of the onerous list. Next Shabbes, deliberately make time for the one and avoid the other. The follwing week, choose another pair. Find what makes you happy and comfortable and make it a regular part of your Friday night or Saturday. It’s not the actual things you choose to do or not that make a Shabbes; it’s the choosing, itself.

Whether your Friday night dinner is pizza or pheasant under glass, what makes the occasion special is the attention paid to the enjoyment and significance of the Sabbath. Before dinner, you might like to signal the beginning of the holiday by emptying your change into the tzedakah box. Since giving tzedakah is traditional on holidays, and since it is also traditional to free yourself from dealing with money on Shabbes, this is a great start to the observance of the day.

Tzedakah, from the Hebrew root for 'righteousness,' is the word that embodies Jewish ideas of social justice. Tzedakah is not charity, because it is not a gift from the donor; it is, rather, the right of the recipient. Many Jewish families have special boxes in which they deposit their change.

Light candles, make a little ceremony of sharing challah and tasting the wine. Sing a few songs.

A lovely custom from the religious tradition is blessing the children by saying, “May you be like..." You can name anyone you’d like your children to be like, perhaps choosing people who have been especially kind during the week, or perhaps choosing someone extraordinary you’ve read or heard about on the news. Don’t forget, most of all we want them to be like themselves!

At the dinner, talk about the week – our triumphs and disappointments and the moments you want to remember. Each person can take a turn to thank each other person at the table for something nice he or she did during the week. When your tzedakah box is full, spend a Friday night dinner deciding where to donate the money.

On Saturday, we can make it a point to spend time with families and friends, to read, to sing, to attend cultural events. Torah study is a Sabbath custom. Secularist Jews, too, can read the Torah to see what’s really in there. There are some amazing stories and some perfectly dreadful examples of how to behave, as well as lots of rules and descriptions that teach us about how people lived in ancient times.

Torah study isn’t the only Jewish study, of course. We can read Jewish history, literature, or anything we normally don’t have time to pay attention to.

You can also make Saturday your get-in-touch-with-family day. Most of us have out-of-town family these days, and it’s a lovely Shabbes tradition to call them or write to them. Everyone in the family can write to a different relative each Shabbes, or you can each write to the same one and send a big packet of letters and drawings. Or you can make a family newsletter and send it to everyone.

No matter how you choose to spend your Shabbes, make it your choice rather than allowing it to be dictated by outside forces. And enjoy it!

Back to Shabbat

Back to Jewish Life & Celebrations