When my daughter was in preschool, I loved picking her up on Fridays, when she pulled her little homemade challah from her cubby, complete with rainbow sprinkles and chocolate chips. At home, as we lit the candles, she tore off a piece for me, which was often rock-hard but so special.
Now that my daughter is in first grade, I’ve gone out searching for some new inspiration to lighten up our Friday nights — and I found it in the just-published book, “The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat,” by Meredith L. Jacobs.
This book might push the limits for more conservative families — who might question whether it’s really OK to serve pizza instead of chicken on Shabbat — but it has certainly inspired me to think about creating my own blessings, and perhaps dive into some challah-making at home.
“My favorite tradition is blessing my children,” Jacobs said during an interview. “I not only bless them in the traditional Hebrew, but I add a comment about something that happened that week. This shows that I am paying attention and that, each week, I am more than saying ‘I love you.’ I am telling them why.”
Of course, in the Bay Area we always need to invent our own traditions. Here are some inspiring ways I know of that local Jewish moms are bringing in Shabbat every week:
“We try to invite folks we would like to see but don’t get to,” said Berkeley mom Alison Bernstein, who, with her partner Judy Appel, often reaches out to ask friends to come for Shabbat dinner.
“It is also a time that we try to remind our kids about the mitzvah of treating guests well,” Bernstein adds. “So sometimes it will be a time for families that do not have the same age kids, so they can work on being polite to people who aren’t necessarily their friends.”
For some Bay Area families, celebrating Shabbat every Friday night at home can feel overwhelming — perhaps even lonely — week after week. Fortunately, the Bay Area offers a range of community Shabbat dinners to connect with friends (ranging from $12 per person to $35 per family, depending on the venue).
The third Friday of every month, for instance, the JCC of the East Bay in Berkeley hosts what a promotional flier calls a community Shabbat dinner with “candle-lighting, a festive meal, shmoozing, singing, community building and Shabbat entertainment.”
“I always found Shabbat to be lonely at home with just two of us,” said Ruth Reffkin of Oakland, who raised her son, now 27, as a single mom. Still, Reffkin was always “very appreciative — and still am” when people invited her to their homes on Friday night.
“One of the painful things about being a single parent is that married people do not seem to like to invite a single woman to dinner parties at their home — not on Shabbat, not to seder, not to social evenings in general,” she said. “There is some reasoning having to do with having an even number of people at the table that seems to supersede the mitzvah of inviting someone to come share these events, or even just showing consideration.”
These feelings inspired Reffkin, the development director at the JCC of the East Bay, to help start the monthly community Shabbat dinners.
“I wanted to make sure that everyone felt invited to a Shabbat dinner at least once a month,” she explains. “Our focus is on being very inclusive. Single people and married, young and old, everyone is invited to celebrate with us at the JCC.”
Another venue is the often sold-out YLD Shabbat Around the Bay. Co-sponsored by the East Bay YLD, San Francisco and Silicon Valley YAD, the dinner is hosted at private homes and centered around various themes. Dinners are vegetarian, and a recent Friday-night theme in Oakland was “The Jews of Islam” with special guest-speaker Hagar Ben-Eliezer, whose family comes from Iraq and lived through the Farhoud.
While many local mothers say they regularly recite the blessings and talk about the weekly Torah portion, Bernstein says, “Mostly, we also try and not stress about it, so if we don’t get to any of this stuff, we still remember to be thankful.”
Author Jacobs adds that in diverse communities like the Bay Area (she lives in Rockville, Md.), this is a great opportunity to celebrate the uniqueness of your family.
“No one says you have to have chicken soup and matzah balls,” Jacobs says. “I went to a wonderful Shabbat dinner recently that started with red lentil soup. Why not incorporate foods from Africa or Asia or Spain or Germany, or wherever your family is from?”