Desperately seeking Shabbos

RAHLA XENOPOULOS

The presidency of Donald Trump, the popularity of the Kardashians, why 16 minus one doesn’t equal 6, and what possible reason my verkakte dog could have for his incessant barking. These things make no sense.

But there are things that make intrinsic sense: my husband’s eyes, books, the songs of Leonard Cohen, my children’s humour, and Shabbos. Shabbos makes absolute sense to my soul.

The introspection, the examination, the collection, and the connection of Shabbos, all resonate for me. In an ideal world, my family would be shomrei Shabbos. We would walk to shul on a Friday evening, the kids skipping five steps ahead as Jason and I meditate on the events of our week. In an ideal world, we would have guests every Friday night, and every single Saturday would be spent with the family, pottering about, physically close to one another, but engaged in our separate thoughts.

The final essay of renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks was published in The New Yorker two weeks before he died. It was a deeply personal account of his own experience with Shabbos. I remember reading it to my family. We were driving home from a weekend in Stanford. It was dusk, the car was winding over Sir Lowry’s Pass.

Sacks was 82 when he died. In this exquisite piece, he wrote about his religious upbringing, his mother’s response to his sexuality, his love, loss, and final return to the ritual of Shabbos. It made me cry because I felt that thing, a sort of nostalgic longing for something I had never had. I, too, wanted to be shomrei Shabbos. “That’s it, this is our year of keeping Shabbos.” I announced to my family, who gazed nervously out at the sunset. “We have to do this; this means more to me than anything else!”

You see, my family have dabbled with keeping Shabbos. We seem to do it once every few months, but never consistently.

It feels like some of our happiest memories are of the times when we have been keeping Shabbos, not super strict, but just no driving, sometimes no electricity, no money spent and most, most important of all, no screens.

There was the Shabbos in Stanford, when the moon got so bright, midnight looked like midday, and the sky was kind of silver. We sat outside in front of a fire, laughing, slightly perplexed, kind of like when you have jetlag or you’ve seen a horror film.

There was the hot summer’s night when all the electricity in our road went off. We took the dinner candles out to the garden, and swam in a pool that was half empty because, you know, Cape Town had forgotten to rain. Our faces were half obscured by the darkness, but it felt like our souls were illuminated by the water flickering in the candle light. And also, mostly, by one another. We laughed a lot. It was so pretty, do you know, I think it was perfect.

As a child, I remember my mother and brother doing Havdalah with a plaited candle. For some reason, that ceremony felt more romantic and serene than the Friday night lighting of candles. Maybe because we didn’t do it every Shabbos, maybe because it wrapped everything up. We got closure, as it were.

I think what I love most about Shabbos is the window out of our chaos. Our constant chatter stops for those few minutes, between the lighting of candles and the serving of bread – hush! – even the verkakte dog seems meditative for those few minutes.

This year has been a big year for me. My husband calls it his “year of being Jewish”. But the thing that has felt the most Jewish about it is the distance. We are in the process of moving. In August, Jason started working in New York, so I’ve been mostly in Cape Town with our children.

I’ve thought often about our ancestors; my late grandfather who was sent as a young boy to South Africa, everyone whose late grandfather was sent ahead, alone, as a boy, to South Africa, to London, to New York. There is always one representative of the family sent out ahead.

We are travellers, immigrants, refugees, adventures. We have traversed the world entire, and we depend on our traditions to hold us true, to calm the waters of our journeys.

My family didn’t become shomrei Shabbos after I read the Oliver Sacks piece. Maybe once or twice, but otherwise we went back to our own derelict ways.

As I board a plane to New York, I wonder, who will our Shabbos guests be? I wonder if we will finally become shomrei. There’s a part of me that thinks, maybe like Oliver Sacks, I’ll do it only when I’m in my eighties. Maybe we do that, we save the things we want the most for the end.