I recently received an email from a young woman named Rebecca who wanted to tell me about her project of having a different family over every Friday night for dinner.  She’s chronicling it in her blog A Year Or More of Shabbats .  Her tagline, “One family. One dinner. One year.”  The families don’t have to be Jewish, but Rebecca was inspired by the Shabbat tradition of opening one’s home (and table) to others on Friday night.

I love this idea.  I don’t always have guests for Shabbat.  When my children were younger, they didn’t want other people there.  Friday night was for family—just family.  Occasionally we had guests, but the feeling was different – the adults talked to the adults, the kids to the kids.  It was no different from having friends for dinner on a Saturday night (or Tuesday for that matter).  Friday was supposed to be different.  Friday was Shabbat.  The time we talked, really talked to the kids during dinner.  We couldn’t do that with others around the table.  Plus, we were still kind of figuring things out, trying on various traditions and rituals to see which fit.  How could we ask a guest to dinner when we were still navigating the Sabbath landscape?

When we had others join us, I always worried, should I tell them to bless their children?  Should I discuss the Torah portion?  Just how many blessings should we expect them to sit through?  Somehow, it always seemed to work out.  Even when we had non-Jewish friends over, they were eager to learn, respecting the lovely traditions that encouraged us to focus on family.  I often received phone calls telling me how our guests were incorporating some of the traditions learned at our table at their own. My kids’ friends started asking for invites specifically to Friday night.

As the years progressed, our table welcomed more and more guests.  Shabbat became an excuse to invite families we were just getting to know over for dinner.  It was a way of making new friends, a kind of universally acknowledged appropriate thing to do with another family, “you’ll come for Shabbat.”  You know how some times, when you meet a new friend, it’s hard to make that transition from “chatting after pre-school drop-off” to “let’s go out to dinner as couples?”  With Shabbat, there’s no awkwardness—just like bringing a cake to a new neighbor—“come for Shabbat” is reaching out—an act of friendship.

I now love our Friday nights with friends.  We even tried to start a Shabbat dinner club with two other families (the idea was to take turns hosting each month).  I think we made it through two rounds of hosting before schedules got in the way.  Now, whenever we see each other we say, “Ach!  I think it’s my turn to host, we’ll have to get a date on the calendar” but we never do.  And we really do need to.

Friday is an easy night to get together.  There’s no conflict with Saturday night/date night.  The workweek is over.  We can all relax over a bottle of wine and a decadent dessert (which is what I always tell my guests to bring when they ask).

Perhaps the best Friday night with friends in recent memory was a gathering of my daughter’s friends.  No adults.  She asked a group of five friends to come over.  Although I didn’t expect them to, they dressed up for dinner, the boys arriving in khakis and collared shirts.  One mother even sent her son with flowers for me.  Rather than a typical dinner for teens, we didn’t serve pizza in the basement, but a full-blown home cooked meal in the dining room with china.  We lingered over dinner and really got to know the kids.  After, they were free to run around outside or crash in the basement and watch a movie.  The parents kept thanking us, but I felt like thanking them—for the gift of allowing us to spend Friday night with their children.

So, while I love my Friday nights with my family, I’m grateful that Shabbat has given me a reason and an excuse to have friends for dinner.

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