Friday Night Live!

Where are you on Friday Night? Hopefully, you are at home seated around the Shabbat table. The candles, lit 18 minutes before sundown, are burning brightly, and your table is set with wine or grape juice for kiddush, 2 covered challot for hamotzi, and a festive Shabbat meal.

Now where are you one hour prior to your Shabbat meal? Hopefully you are at shul. Just as important it is that we spend the opening night of Shabbat at home with family and friends, it is vitally important that we welcome in the Shabbat together as a community, at the synagogue.

Our Friday night service is the most beautiful and appropriate way to begin your Shabbat, and to truly enter into a 25 hour period of peace. We begin with the Mincha prayers, the afternoon service which formally puts a close to the work week. The first words of Mincha, ashre yoshvei veitekha, mean "happy are those who sit in Your (God's) house," and I can assure you that those in attendance on Friday evenings are a happy bunch. Following Mincha, we participate in the moving Kabbalat Shabbat, the service created by the 16th century Kabbalists of Tzfat. The central feature of Kabbalat Shabbat is L'kha Dodi, when we greet the Shabbat as if we were greeting a bride. Surrounding L'kha Dodi are a series of psalms, corresponding to the days of the week. Psalm 96 begins with the words, Sing unto the Lord a new song, and Cantor Berris has indeed introduced a number of new melodies to fit the meaning of this and the other psalms.

Following Kabbalat Shabbat, we daven Ma'ariv, which is very similar to the weekday evening service, but includes a few changes for Shabbat, as well as a number of special melodies.

The whole service, from start to finish, lasts less than one hour. In January we begin at 5:00 p.m., because of the early sundown, and we never start this service later than 6:00 p.m. even after the sundown moves much later. Therefore everyone, young and old, should be able to attend this service year round. If you don't yet read Hebrew (and you really need to start learning), you will be delighted to know that we are making available transliterations of a number of the Hebrew prayers. After enjoying the service and especially the welcoming community, you can then go home for your Shabbat meal, perhaps a bit later than you normally eat dinner, but hey, it's Shabbat, a special night and you need not be in a hurry.

After all, the next day is Saturday. Unlike Monday through Friday, when you are likely off and running very early, on Saturday you can take a little extra time, since Shul doesn't begin until 9:00 a.m.