An Unexpected Return to Shabbat

Every Friday night, when I tuck my son into bed, I whisper my usual Goodnight and I love you, and then I add, Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Shalom, Mommy.

Every week, I never fail to wonder how we got here. I didn’t grow up keeping Shabbat, despite the fact that I went to a Jewish day school. My Friday nights as a kid mostly looked like my parents going bowling in their rec league and my brother and I having a babysitter, ordering pepperoni pizza, and reveling in the snacks my mom bought for us. We rarely went to shul (synagogue), and I never really felt the desire to go. (I have a lot of thoughts on why this was, most notably the way Judaism was presented to me in day school, along with the sexism that was ever-present in many Conservative communities back in the 80s and 90s.)

When the pandemic started, I began doing Zoom Shabbat every Friday night with my son so that he could see his beloved preschool rabbi and friends. It was the first time I’d attended Shabbat services in nearly 30 years, and I was often lost because of unfamiliar melodies and differences in the order of the service. But it became our routine.

Before I go any further, let me explain to you that my son… Well, I never quite understood what people meant by a “calling” before mothering him. He has a deep, unshakeable faith and a tangible joy for Judaism that I’m not sure I’ve ever had. These days, I’ll often hear him singing prayers or songs he learned in Hebrew school or from Saturday morning services, like “Ashrei,” a prayer from the Book of Psalms that you’re supposed to say three times daily, or humming “Ein Kamocha,” the prayer we sing as the Torah is removed from the ark. (His choice of songs also strikes me as incredibly telling, but that’s another story.) Judaism is a part of his very neshama, his soul, and he’s pulled me along for the ride, leading me back to my own observance and belief.

When we switched shuls a year or so later, we found ourselves, ironically, at the shul in which I grew up. It was late 2021, and my son and I started attending Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat services, masked but in-person. The first night we attended, the melodies felt achingly familiar, though I felt a little out of step since it had been so long. But as I gazed at the doors of the ark — the same doors I’d gazed at as a child during day school Passover Seder rehearsals that dragged on forever, the same doors I stood in front of with my family at my Bat Mitzvah and at my eighth grade graduation — it started to feel like home.

At one point in the service, the chazzan (or cantor, a clergy member trained in vocal arts who leads the congregation in song and prayer) motioned for my son to go up and sing with them. I panicked. My son has severe speech apraxia, which is a speech-sound disorder that interferes with motor planning for speech. At the time, nearly three years ago, my son barely knew the alef bet, and singing in English was hard enough, let alone another language. I turned to his Hebrew school rabbi and said, “He doesn’t know Hebrew very well, he doesn’t know this song, the apraxia makes it hard for him to sing.” She looked at me and smiled, and told me he’d be fine.

He didn’t know the song (“Romemu”), but he stood next to the clergy and danced and clapped as they sang. He enthusiastically high-fived them when it was over, and then ran back to his seat, completely overjoyed. When I emailed the chazzan to thank her for how they rolled with it and to explain about how apraxia of speech works, she wrote back: BTW, I think dancing and clapping is a beautiful expression of prayer.

And just like that, I knew we had found a home. We went back the next Friday, and my son went up again for the song, dancing and clapping. On the way home, he asked if I could teach it to him. Now, two and a half years later, he leads the congregation in “Romemu” every week. This kid, who I was told might never talk, sings the entire Hebrew song and loves every minute of it. It still chokes me up every time.

After services, if there’s no get-together planned, we come home and light our candles, including one for the hostages. I say the children’s blessing and my son recites Hamotzi over the challah we made, and we eat Shabbat dinner. As a single mom who works full time and homeschools, Friday nights have become one of the few times I can exhale. At services, I can feel the tension evaporate as the melodies bring a sort of comfort that I’m still trying to figure out. And at home, I know that after my son goes to bed, I have a quiet night of catching up on daf yomi (the daily section of Talmud), reading this week’s parsha (Torah portion), or catching up on reading I haven’t had time for.

I still marvel that Shabbat is part of our lives, and I’m grateful for it. I never planned for or expected any of this. If you ask me if I’m observant, I still don’t know how to answer.

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What I do know is that on the Fridays when I don’t feel like going to shul but force myself to go anyway, I end up feeling better. The rare Fridays we don’t make it there at all are the weeks when something inevitably feels “off.” I know that when we sing “Shalom Aleichem” at the end of Kabbalat Shabbat before we go home, the Talmudic story of the angels accompanying people home from shul comes to mind. When we light the candles and I place my hands on my son’s head to recite the blessing of the children, I feel an ancestral anchoring somewhere in my soul. Though this routine was never part of my own childhood and I don’t even remember being taught about the blessing of the children when I was younger, I love knowing, even if I can’t quite explain it, that countless parents before me over a multitude of generations have done the same thing.

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And every week, when I finish the blessing and my son turns his face up to me and gives me a smile that crinkles his eyes, I find myself grateful, once again, that I get to carve out this sacred time with him.

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At The Well uplifts many approaches to Jewish practice. Our community draws on ancient Jewish wisdom, sometimes adapting longstanding practices to more deeply support the well-being of women and nonbinary people. See this article’s sources below. We believe Torah (sacred teachings) are always unfolding to help answer the needs of the present moment.

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