Shabbat Table
After a few months without, we have returned to having guests for Shabbat. While the food is always important, once again last night it struck me - - - our Shabbat table is about what comes afterward.
Enjoying the food is a given. We are blessed in our home to be pretty good cooks. To be sure after all of these years we have learned to make what we like, the way we like and our guests either enjoy our food too or they are at least cordial enough to always say something nice. The food, though just isn’t where the “it” of the evening is.
Before the meal, the blessings, the washing, the cutting into the challah…again, all very nice and generally participated in quite enthusiastically but they are just the prelude to what ends up being the heart of the evening.
We are conversationalists. We love talking. We love telling stories. We love when our guests say funny things, share personal stories and bring themselves to the table. Often as not, the members of our family will dominate the early part of the conversation but once our guests get the vibe and warm up they are off and running, too. We laugh, we raise our voices, we tell old and new stories, we tease, we force someone to sing or to tell a joke and generally we move the verbal pieces around the table with skill to be envied by Gary Kasparov. We love to talk and we love to have people join us in that talk. We think about God, we laugh about death, we toss off an insult or two and we gossip probably more than we should. We host a happy Shabbat table and I am so poud to be a part of this family that has developed a reputation as good Shabbat hosts.
Shabbat likes coming to our home, of that I am sure. Shabbat likes to see us with guests and enjoys dropping by our home every week. We are happy to have her and we love to have others join her.