Afew days before this year’s Shabbos Project I participated in a Skype interview conducted by Ynet one of Israel’s largest news websites. With me in the interview was the famous Israeli singer Shlomi Shabat who is a widely admired celebrity in Israeli society. He joined me in the interview because he was due to play at the Shabbos Project Havdalah concert in Paris and the interviewer asked him why he wanted to be part of the project given that he is not known as dati.
Shlomi answered that Shabbos was very important to him and to the Jewish People and that he therefore felt an emotional connection to the project. The interviewer wasn’t satisfied and probed further asking him a very pointed question: Would he sing in a concert on Shabbat? When she posed this question I was worried that Shlomi would answer that despite his proclamation of the centrality of Shabbos to the Jewish People he would perform on Shabbat given how important Friday night concerts are to the music industry. Thankfully my concern proved unfounded when Shlomi answered that as a matter of principle he would never perform on Shabbat.
At that moment I realized once again the power of Shabbos to connect all of Am Yisrael. We can never underestimate that. And that is what the Shabbos Project has shown. The full extent of what this means became apparent to me when I received an email from Faisal Benkhald a Jew who lives inKarachiPakistan saying that he intends to join the Shabbos Project together with the rest of the world. I felt such awe and respect for Faisal’s bravery and determination in keeping Shabbos in a very hostile environment that I decided to call him. He told me that he had heard about the project on Twitter and that he would be keeping the Shabbos completely on his own.
Here is a Jew living deep inPakistan without a Jewish community and deciding to connect to Shabbos after hearing about it on Twitter.
