Shabbos Anew

Feeling the Rhythm

By Rachel Weiss

My brother was unrelenting. “You’ve gotta experience a real Shabbos. It’s a day of transcendence. It’ll change your life.”

He was a fresh baal teshuvah studying at Aish in Jerusalem. I was in Manhattan, working grueling hours in a castle-shaped skyscraper.

Week after week, I firmly refused the Shabbos invitations my brother tried to arrange. Eventually, I capitulated. “It’ll be a 25-hour cultural experience,” I told my friends, who couldn’t fathom why I’d voluntarily go to a stranger’s house to get brainwashed about Orthodox Judaism. Truthfully, I was dreading it — I only agreed because I thought it would halt my brother’s hounding (it didn’t; he stopped only after I became fully observant).

The woman who hosted me for Shabbos was a baalas teshuvah my age, in her late 20s. Over the phone, Zahava gave me directions to her Washington Heights apartment and mentioned that I should try to arrive before Shabbos began. I balked when she gave me candlelighting time for that January weekend – who leaves work before 6 p.m.? No, I most certainly wouldn’t take her suggestion to finish work early “just this once.”