How do you do Shabbat at home?

If you do a simple Internet search on how to do Shabbat at home, you’ll be faced with many different results. Depending on the stream of Judaism (Reform, Orthodox, Conservative being the main – but not only – streams) and the beliefs or perspectives of the authors, you can find a range of answers, from definitive guides with absolute rules, to a series of suggestions. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide how to do Shabbat at home. There are some general rules, though:

 1)     Welcome Shabbat with ritual and a Shabbat dinner on Friday night.

• Generally, this involves lighting and blessing candles, saying Kiddush – a prayer of thanks and a blessing over wine or juice, and blessing and eating bread

• You might elevate the ritual with items you keep specifically for Shabbat and other holidays.

• A challah has become traditional – a braided egg bread, but any bread will work. Again, this can be elevated by using a bread that is richer or sweeter than your everyday bread

• A meal that is somehow nicer than usual. This could be foods that are a little more expensive than usual, or using good dishes or just setting the table with intention.

2)     Refrain from work.

• There are traditional classes of work, which boil down to refraining from creative acts. These are easy to find, if you’d like to know more.

• You might consider what feels like “work” to you and save it for another day. It might be onerous chores, or the work you do for a living.

• Relaxing

3)     Join with Community.

• While Shabbat is essentially a home holiday, it is traditional to join with community to mark the day

• There are many ways to join a community virtually in worship. Not only is this a great option of you can’t or don’t want to physically go to services, it’s an opportunity to become familiar with different styles of worship and with the service itself.

• Connecting with community could even be as simple as calling family and friends to wish them a Shabbat Shalom

4)     Mark the end of Shabbat.

• It is traditional to “make Havdallah”, a simple ritual to mark the end of Shabbat (literally, to make a separation).

• Or, return to your normal activities

 At JewJu Box, both our Basic Box and our Simply Shabbat bag have the basics for celebrating Shabbat at home. You can also download Shabbat blessings and the Shabbat Kiddush for free on our site.