Celebrating the Sabbath

This year, we started celebrating the Sabbath on Friday nights. Friday night to Saturday night is the Sabbath as the Bible describes. We don’t know any one else in real life that celebrates the Sabbath on Friday night. We do feel that God has lead us to this, and called us to celebrate the Sabbath on Friday night/Saturday.

This has been a process for us. We started out with just my lighting the candles and saying the blessing. We now take communion as part of our Sabbath meal. In this picture from tonights meal, you can see our little wooden communion cups.

You can also see the beautiful loaf of challah bread my daughter made. I started out making the challah earlier this year, but she has taken over. She has learned how to make 6 braided challah. Beautiful and tastes great. We use pieces of challah for the communion bread, and grape juice in our cups.

We also have a tzedakah container. Tzedakah is commonly translated as charity. At some point during our Sabbath meal, we try to put money into the tzedakah container. So far, we have taken the money out once to buy food for the food pantry.

Even though we eat supper together as a family every night, this is different. It just feels different. It’s hard to describe. We are more relaxed, we talk more over the meal, and linger longer at the table. It’s not just dinner, it’s an event. One the whole family looks forward to.

So far, we haven’t had any one over for our Sabbath meal on Friday night, but I do see us sharing this with others at some point.

Our Sabbath isn’t perfect. There are still some things I would like to work on. For example, I still haven’t memorized the candle lighting blessing. And I would like to learn to say it in Hebrew, also.

Celebrating the Sabbath on Friday night has been great experience for our family. It has brought us closer together as a family. It is really awesome to honor God together as a family.

I very highly recommend starting the Sabbath with a family meal on Friday night.