An open house on Shabbat

A Jerusalem kehila welcomes Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Armenians into their homes.

By AMARA MCLAUGHLIN
Swedish-Jewish family 521 (photo credit: AMARA MCLAUGHLIN)
Swedish-Jewish family 521
(photo credit: AMARA MCLAUGHLIN)
When the sun sets in Jerusalem on Friday, the streets of Baka bustle with men, women and children making their way on foot down Lifshitz Street toward Kehilat Yedidya. At this time of year, the Friday night Shabbat service at Yedidya begins at 7:30, but the synagogue’s regular members are not the only ones who attend.
Every week, Yedidya host families welcome Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Armenian pilgrims, along with many youth groups, scholars and tourists from all over the world into their homes for Shabbat dinner.
“It is interesting and enriching to meet people from places we would otherwise not have an opportunity to talk to,” says Noomi Stahl, a Swedish Jew who hosts Shabbat guests twice a month with her husband, three daughters and son.
“Shabbat dinner is a highlight of the week,” says native Londoner Deborah Lionarons. “We are a Zionist family, and from the beginning of the evening we always invite our guests to ask anything about Israel.
It is enriching for us as a family to meet people from such different backgrounds and to hear their ideas about religion.”
One thing that Lionarons and Stahl have learned from their guests is that there are a lot of misconceptions about Israel and Judaism.
“Our guests are often surprised by what they see in Israel,” Stahl says. Michael McGarry joined Yedidya member Debbie Weissman for Shabbat service and dinner, not realizing how the experience would impact him or his Roman Catholic group. Shabbat dinner was the highlight of their trip to Jerusalem and Israel.
“It would be difficult to exaggerate how important this experience is for them as they get to meet more observant Israelis and get to know that Israeli society is as complicated and varied as their own,” McGarry wrote in a letter to Weissman.
“There will be more sympathy, I think, and less stereotyping.”
McGarry’s letter is one of many that Yedidya members have received over the years from their dinner guests.
“We get very touching letters that the meal was the most moving experience they had in Israel,” says Yedidya member Judith Green.
In 1986 Green started the Shabbat dinner project at the synagogue, which had been founded six years earlier. Although she doesn’t recall exactly where the idea came from, she distinctly remembers the first group she welcomed into her home for Shabbat.
The week before the fast day of Tisha Be’av, Green hosted German theology students and recently married couple Wolfgang and Annette Schmidt from the University of Heidelberg. Green’s longtime friend, a teacher of Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of Heidelberg, contacted her about inviting his group when they visited Jerusalem for a study session as a way to involve his students in Jewish life.
Since then, something that began as a favor to a friend evolved into a real project at Yedidya.
“It was really an extremely wonderful experience,” Green recalls. “We were the first Orthodox synagogue to choose to invite people from other faiths to a service and to people’s homes.” Although Green received some backlash from members of the synagogue who said that hosting Shabbat dinners left them feeling like part of a museum for Jewish religion, in the years that followed she dealt with the criticism by giving a dvar Torah, or lesson, at the Shabbat morning service.
“I gave a talk on the weekly Torah portion that has to do with Abraham when he hosts the three angels,” Green says. “There’s a beautiful scene in Genesis where these three strangers walk by in front of Abraham’s tent and he spontaneously runs out and says, ‘Stop, wait, come into our tent and I’ll prepare a meal for you.’ And he does, and they turn out to be angels, although he thought they were just people. It’s a very important scene in Christian art and in Christianity in general as a premonition of the Trinity and for Jews about the concept of hospitality,” she says. “Abraham is a symbol of hachnasat orhim, the bringing in of guests, and that’s where it started.”
The Shabbat dinners have continued as an important part of Yedidya’s principle of welcoming others. For the 30 years that the congregation has offered this experience, members have collectively hosted 6,000 people.
“It’s important for your home to be open for strangers because you don’t know who they are or what they might be bringing to you, which certainly turns out to be true from my experiences,” Green says.
She is not the only one to experience this. Stahl says she could write a book about all the things she has learned from welcoming others into her home.
Lionarons has many stories as well. “A couple of hours over a table can somehow bring the world into the room and gives the sense of a shared humanity,” she says.
Multifaith dialogue is very important to these women.
“Religious people of any faith have a better understanding of other religions because they understand the fundamentals of religious thought,” Stahl says. “There are people thirsty for a spiritual experience everywhere.”
Stahl’s husband, Michael, who works for Intel, is often away traveling for work. When he is at home, he blesses each of their four children before the meal, a common Shabbat tradition.
“Guests seem to find that remarkable and touching,” says Stahl. “One guest who is a devout Christian and has been to our house a few times told us that he has started to bless his children in the same way.”
The three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – share elements, which Green tries to bring out at the dinner table. As part of Shabbat, she steers the conversation towards serious topics, such as the Torah portion read in the synagogue or about the different dynamics of churches, because many of the individuals who partake in Shabbat are ministers or pastors.
“They tell us afterwards that ‘It’s an interesting idea that you do it this way in your synagogue or in your home’ and ‘Maybe we can also do something similar in our Bible study groups or with our congregations,” Green says.
These shared perspectives among different faiths enrich the evening’s experience.
“Friday night dinner can be a way to build bridges between us and our guests,” says Stahl.
Some of these bridges made while blessing the wine and breaking the bread evolve into lasting friendships. Last year, Green’s family received an e-mail from a couple they had hosted in 1986.
Although they had lost touch when the couple returned to Heidelberg, Wolfgang and Annette Schmidt found Green’s contact information again in 2011.
“They had looked us up because they were coming back. Not just coming back, but he became a very important Lutheran minister and was appointed the provost of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City,” says Green. “This guy who was a student had been our guest.”
When the Schmidts returned to Jerusalem, Green met them, remembering their evening 26 years earlier.
“When I told my daughter, who was only three at the time, that they were coming back, she somehow remembered them and went through this whole pile of photographs that we have, and she picked out a Polaroid that had been taken when they visited us,” Green says.
Green and the Schmidts rekindled the friendship started through Yedidya’s first Shabbat dinner in 1986. The Polaroid photo was passed around the table at their next meeting 23 years later.
The sharing of religious traditions between religious and nonreligious people leaves each person at the dinner table with a new perspective, a greater appreciation for his own customs and an understanding of the other’s traditions. According to Green, Stahl and Lionarons, this is an important part of Shabbat.