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A free guide from Our People · Jerusalem
The Joy of Shabbat
25 ways to make your Shabbat table the best hour of your family's week — plus 30 conversation cards you can use for years.
The guide · free PDF
Leah
Executive Director, Our People
Executive Director, Our People
I have sat at hundreds of Shabbat tables in Jerusalem, and the ones I remember are almost never the ones with the most beautiful dishes. They are the ones where a nine-year-old was allowed to run the whole meal, or where a grandmother told a story nobody in the family had heard before, or where somebody asked a question so good that the soup went cold while everyone argued about it.
This guide is not here to add another obligation to your Friday. It is here to give you a few small ideas that turn a meal into something your children will still be talking about when they are forty.
Try one this week. Ignore the other twenty-four until you are ready.
This guide is not here to add another obligation to your Friday. It is here to give you a few small ideas that turn a meal into something your children will still be talking about when they are forty.
Try one this week. Ignore the other twenty-four until you are ready.
What's inside
25 activities, arranged in the order of the evening — before the candles, around the Kiddush, and through the meal itself
30 conversation cards to cut out and keep in a jar on the table
Nothing that needs more preparation than a few slips of paper
Works for a four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old at the same table
№25 — Whispered Blessings
At the end of the meal, put your hand on each child's head and whisper the blessing, and then whisper one sentence that belongs only to them — something you saw them do that week that made you proud. Twenty seconds. Every week.
Of all twenty-five ideas in this guide, this is the one I would fight for. It is the thing children remember most clearly, decades later, about their childhood Friday nights.
Of all twenty-five ideas in this guide, this is the one I would fight for. It is the thing children remember most clearly, decades later, about their childhood Friday nights.
Who made this
Our People is a Jerusalem-based organisation working with Russian-speaking families across Israel — some who arrived decades ago, many in the last two or three years, most of them with suitcases and very little else.
Their children are bright and funny and completely at sea. A great number of them have never sat at a Shabbat meal in their lives. They know they are Jewish the way you know a fact about yourself that nobody ever explained to you.
We are the ones who set those tables. Shabbat meals, holiday camps, learning, trips, and the slow ordinary work of making a child feel they belong to something older and larger than the apartment they live in. Every activity in this guide, we are doing with children whose parents do not yet know how — and very often teaching the parents at the same time.
Their children are bright and funny and completely at sea. A great number of them have never sat at a Shabbat meal in their lives. They know they are Jewish the way you know a fact about yourself that nobody ever explained to you.
We are the ones who set those tables. Shabbat meals, holiday camps, learning, trips, and the slow ordinary work of making a child feel they belong to something older and larger than the apartment they live in. Every activity in this guide, we are doing with children whose parents do not yet know how — and very often teaching the parents at the same time.
One thought before you go
Our Sages taught that whoever teaches another person’s child is treated by Scripture as though they had brought that child into the world themselves. It is one of the most generous ideas in our tradition: that your responsibility does not stop at the edge of your own family, and that the blessing you want over your own table is somehow drawn down by the tables you help set for others.
If this guide is useful to you, you can make the same Friday night possible for a family that has never had one. This work is paid for entirely by people who will never meet these children.
If this guide is useful to you, you can make the same Friday night possible for a family that has never had one. This work is paid for entirely by people who will never meet these children.
Get the guide
25 activities and 30 conversation cards, free, in your inbox in under a minute
The guide · free PDF