At the end of my most recent class, the rabbi encouraged us to observe our first Shabbat. To ponder zakhor (to ‘remember’) and shamor (to ‘guard’), to write a simple Shabbat manifesto, and to “Do Jewish” for the first time.
I wasn’t expecting to react the way I did but when she told us that I was struck by a wave of emotions. Good emotions. Excitement even. I actually emailed the rabbi later that night asking for clarity and what she said was true. We were to find a way to make Shabbat meaningful to us and do our best to follow through on our manifesto.
Maybe part of it is that I wasn’t expecting for us to actually do anything until after the course concluded, which is months from now. It made this whole process feel real all of a sudden. That transition from all this reading I’ve done into something tangible.
I’ll have to think of something special.