A few weeks ago, as Friday drew to a close, a friend in London tweeted a picture of his shabbos candles and wished his followers “Shabbat shalom”. Amid the anxiety of a pandemic, he reflected, the ancient ritual of welcoming the Sabbath felt reassuring.
Three thousand miles away and five hours behind in Washington DC, a dormant flame flickered inside of me, too. It’s been years, decades even, since Shabbat candles have been lit in my home but seeing those two familiar lights took me back. I could picture the amber glow of candles in the kitchen, smell the hot aromas of onion and chicken stock, taste the fluffy challot waiting to be dunked and see the silver cup of Palwin sitting unpalatably on its tray. I missed Shabbat.
And so I followed my friend’s lead. I bought long white candles and a fat white challah. My girlfriend made chicken soup from scratch. We filled a kiddush cup to the brim. And as the sun went over the yardarm I said the familiar troika of blessings: fire, wine and bread. And of course we washed our hands: turns out the Jews had that one right all along.
Since then it has become a weekly ritual. Each Friday evening, the clatter of keyboards in our living room cools down, the chicken soup warms up and I shower, put on a fresh shirt and mumble the half-remembered words to Eshet Chayil, joining millions of our brethren around the world in welcoming the Sabbath queen into our home.
It’s nice to have shabbos back in my life. For despite being as Jewish as schmaltz, I don’t really observe much in the way of religion: shul twice a year, a seder night and that’s about it. But in the dizzying, unmoored strangeness of lockdown, when each day brings unsettling new realities and all that was once solid becomes liquid, I’ve found the sturdy familiarity of shabbat deeply comforting.
Do we turn our phones off? Sadly not quite. In my day job I work as a correspondent for the Sunday Times, so being unreachable on a Saturday is a sackable offence. But for a few hours at least, the two of us sit in peace, both thousands of miles from our families yet somehow at home in the light of those candles.
For those few hours there are no mounting death tolls, no social distancing, no fearful masked shuffles to the grocery store and back. There is respite. There is shabbos, which is as close as I’ll come to getting a hug from my mum, or hearing the gossip from shul over sherry and cashew nuts with my dad, or taking a well-deserved Saturday afternoon shluf on the big sofa at home,
It’s all there in the words of Lecha Dodi, which help explain the appeal of Shabbat in a time of tribulation: “Why are you downcast? Why do you moan? The afflicted of my people will be sheltered within you.” The news outside may not be getting much better, but each week we can at least find shelter in our Sabbath.
I asked a learned friend, Rabbi Harvey Belovski, about my old-new enthusiasm for the day of rest. “In times of stress, people often retreat to the familiar, to meaningful childhood experiences,” he told me. “We tend to reach inside ourselves for comfort.”
Rabbi Belovski also pointed out that one of Shabbat’s key roles, creating a separation between the weeks and distinguishing between work and rest, has rarely been more important.
“One thing that’s missing right now is any normal time markers,” he said. “How many weeks have we been in lockdown? What day is it? The shabbos rituals mark the passage of the week.”
Life of late has indeed become an indistinguishable blur of Zoom conferences and dishwasher ministrations, as morning blends into afternoon, day into night and week into weekend. But for Shabbat you have to stop, to acknowledge that the week has ended and it is time to rest, body and soul. And somehow those flickering candles give me hope.
I think of all the desperate moments when they have shone over the centuries, all the dark places they have illuminated, all the trials through which they have sustained our people.
It’s comforting in a way to remember that things have often been so much worse and that even at our lowest moments, even in our deepest sorrow, those shabbos lights have never been extinguished.
