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"Shabbat Across America" begins at sundown tonight — more than 600 synagogues and Jewish centers will join in, and I'll be part of it , baking challah and chicken for 20 guests around my dinner table. Nonetheless, I'm troubled by aspects of this well-marketed ingathering of the Jews.

I'm saddened that we need an organized marketing strategy including billboards and radio jingles to encourage Jews to return to their spiritual home.

But there's no denying it. For vast numbers of Jews, Sabbath is a remote concept, a day of rest once embraced by their grandparents but today more appropriate to austere sects like Seventh-day Adventists. Though my table will be filled with friends tonight, others I invited felt threatened. They were afraid even to participate in a Shabbat in the home of friends.

Thomas Cahill, the religious historian, lauds the Sabbath as one of the great "Gifts of the Jews," in his upcoming book of that name. He sees that the Sabbath is the source of freedom and creativity, and those who live without a day of rest once a week "are emptier and less resourceful." Maybe hearing it from an Irishman will be convincing: Many Jews have no first-hand experience of what cessation from labor means and how it heals the soul.

But if I mourn the last generations' loss of affiliation, I understand why it happened. The disconnection from the Sabbath began in my own family.

My father was raised in a strictly observant home, with the emphasis on strict. Duty, obligation and a grim funereal attitude — as if the weight of the world is on your shoulders — these were the mark of a believer. Sabbath was a mini-Yom Kippur, albeit with food.

He made my mother promise that after they married, he could lighten up. She complied. All the rituals and symbols of the Sabbath were kept at a protective distance from him. No challah. No wine goblet. She would never even serve the traditional chicken meal on Friday, lest it arouse painful childhood memories of his mother's boiled fowl. The Sabbath was restrictive to palate and spirit; he wanted no part of it.

A whole generation followed a path like my father's. But why? Most social historians blame America — that we assimilated ourselves into oblivion, captivated by Little League, tennis and golf or the shopping mall. They think we suddenly became insanely ambitious, launching blindly into the "Goodbye, Columbus" suburban culture. They assume we left Shabbat behind without knowing what we were doing, confused and distracted by Madison Avenue into believing that Sunday was just as adequate a day off from work.

But don't insult our parents by assuming their ignorance. The consumerism came later. The discarding of punitive ritual came first. My father's generation took leave of Shabbat not as an act of passive forgetting, as they did with Sukkot. They rejected the Sabbath forcefully, rebuffing its stigma of doom and grief.

In that rebuff, they rejected a spirituality based on pain. And they were right to do so.

In this month's issue of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, spiritual leader of the Conservative Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, recalls the strict Sabbath in days of old.

"In my youth the Sabbath was a wet blanket," he writes, "a puritanical litany of prohibited joys, a series of proscriptions and negations that inhibited productivity, creativity, and fun. The Sabbath was the day of `no' — no, you cannot play ball, listen to the radio, ride your bike. `You shall not do any manner of work.'"

But the problem, the San Fernando Valley rabbi writes, was in the interpretation: a world based only on "no." Jews were trained to focus on the liberties that were missing rather than on the freedoms they received. On the pain and deprivation, not the joy.

The great insight of our parents was that "no" was not enough, even if they didn't know what they wanted in the way of "yes." They didn't have to accept punishment, not here in America, a free land. It wasn't Judaism they rejected, but the poverty of its messengers.

And that brings me to another troubling point regarding "Shabbat Across America," the sense that its true architects are being slighted. "Shabbat Across America" appears to be the product of normative Judaism. Sponsored by the National Jewish Outreach Program, it is co-sponsored by 500 synagogues and community centers. But it is not the result of mainstream Jewish trends.

During the past several decades, three fringe movements have been hanging out on the periphery of the Jewish world, unacknowledged, sometimes scorned: the Lubavitcher outreach vision of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Jewish Renewal movement's focus on soul through the work of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and the rise of Modern Orthodoxy and its first family, Blu and Yitz Greenberg.

These three grassroots movements have worked distinct but incalculable wonders on a tradition wedded to sadness. They have taken individual Jews on personal voyages of self-discovery, and have offered not the stale old philosophy of "no", but a spirituality of "yes." Yes to Jewish soul music and good food with friends. Yes to family. Yes to a day of rest. They have reinvisioned Jewish spiritual life, in ways that are becoming evident to us all.

"On Shabbat," writes Blu Greenberg, "I can almost feel the difference in the air I breathe, in the way the incandescent lamps give off light in my living room, in the way the children's skins glow, or the way the trees sway."

This Shabbat, feel the joy.