Embracing Shabbat: Preparation and Connection

Hello, this is Dr. Halisa Elwan. We are presenting today some recipes. Recipes? Yeah, I know, I don't look much like a cook, do I? What I want is to give you some recipes for a Shabbastic Shabbat. If you're new to the Shabbat, or even if you're old to the Shabbat and you're curious, hang around. These programs are designed for people who are fairly new to Shabbat. They kind of get the idea, okay, I need to keep the Shabbat. I'm starting to understand that now. I want to incorporate it, but how do I do that? I don't really understand all the things that go with it. Well, that's what we want to give you, some ideas. about how you can get started, how you can start some great things that over the years, especially if you have children and grandchildren, they will grow to love. It will become part of being with you. They will associate, you know, having that presence of Adonai in your home on Shabbat with being with you too. I mean, you kind of get to ride the coattails of the Holy One on that one. And so if I'm going fast, and I won't cover everything, that we have here in Torah Tips. This is where I'm taking this. And if you'll click, there'll be a a clickable link that you can click on the video that will take you to where you can download this and then you can print it off. And after you print it off, you can take your own notes. You might add to it. You might say, oh, I can't do that one. Mark that out. But this will get you started. And then you can add your own notes to it. Or you can print it off for other people. Like if you're going to have visitors, that's going to be one of our tips today. Have people over. I mean, are you really tired of people trying to draw you out to go shopping and go do this and go do that on Shabbat? And you're like, no, no, I'm going to do this Shabbat thing. I can't do this Shabbat thing if I'm constantly running and gunning here, there, and everywhere. One thing you can do is invite them to your Shabbat. But if you want to pass this around. you know, to your friends and saying, this is what I'm doing now, and this will help you understand a little bit about what I'm doing, feel free to share. Just print it off and share it. Because that's one of the hardest things about keeping Shabbat, is if most of our family or friends or co-workers don't also keep the Shabbat, then we've got some splaining to do, don't we? And so we need to be very compassionate and understanding and say, hey, they're not where we are. yet, always add yet, Y-E-T, you're not here yet, but you will be in the millennium. If you were saved, you will be keeping the day that is all Shabbat. So we're rehearsing now. We're getting ready now. And so being new to Shabbat, it's exciting. You feel like you started a new life sometimes, and you have, but it can also be very perplexing. But once you decide to observe the Shabbat. You're going to ask this question, how do I do it? Well, the Word is really great at giving general commandments, but it's not so great for telling you specifically what to do in your house. You know, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to give you some tips to help you get started. And then you're going to see that as the beauty because your house is not like my house. And my house is not like my neighbor's house. And so. We'll have things that we all do together. We'll all kind of do them the same, but then we'll have lots of things that are going to be a little bit different. It's just going to reflect who we are as a family. But in this program, what we want to address is something I alluded to in the second one, which is the scripture that says, bake what you're going to bake and boil what you're going to boil. This is from Exodus 16, 32. And Moses is having to clarify this. Clearly the Israelites, they're in the wilderness. He said, keep the Shabbat. Okay, great. But what does that mean? And so Moses has to clarify. See, he's teaching and they're learning. Hopefully it won't take us 40 years to figure out Shabbat. But here's what Moses tells them. This is what the Lord meant. Tomorrow is a Sabbath observance, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil. And all that is left over, put aside to be kept until morning. Right. So what are you going to do? You're going to prepare your meal. You're going to eat it on Friday night because remember the day starts in the evening, evening and morning. And he says, have some here to put aside so that you can have your meals also on Saturday. Right. So you're cooking a lot of food. You're getting a lot of food ready. But, you know, like I said, the great thing about it is often you cook so much food, you can't eat it all. You end up also having leftovers on Sunday and Monday. But this is important. Prepare your food beforehand. And this does take time. It takes planning. It also says you shall not kindle a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day. Well, if you can't kindle a fire, then you can't really cook food anyway. Those two, you can see how they're intertwined. If you can't kindle the fire, then you can't cook. You can't bake. You can't boil. You say, well... What do I do with all that cold food? Well, we're going to give you some ideas of how to make sure that cold food is warm food, even to the end of Saturday evening. But here's what's going to have to happen at this point. As you begin to keep the Shabbat, what you are going to become, even if you've never been one before, you are going to become a planner. Yeah. Yeah, some people aren't really natural-born planners. They're more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants people. Well, on Shabbat, we're going to have to develop some planners, right? Because if you don't plan ahead, you're going to get pretty hungry on Shabbat. If you don't plan ahead, it may not be, you know, it may not have that joy. and that sense of comfort on Shabbat. But sometimes when we get caught short on Shabbat, that's how we learn. Like, oh, well, I'll learn better next time. I really didn't plan this one, did I? And what really makes it hard sometimes is if you have to travel and you're kind of sliding into home base on a Friday afternoon on arrival somewhere. And I travel quite a bit, or I used to. I'm trying not to so much anymore. But I found that the Shabbat becomes problematic, not when I'm at home. in my own, you know, environment because I can plan. I can do things ahead. I can have things in the freezer. But when you're on the road, sometimes you are dependent upon other people to help provide the things that you normally would provide for yourself on Shabbat. So you're going to have to plan. And sometimes that means, you know what, I need to take that early flight on Friday morning, not the later one, so I can sleep two extra hours. No, you need to get there early if you're going to have to figure out where to get your food for Shabbat so that you don't end up having to go to the grocery store. And again, you're making other people work. You're not supposed to work. You're not supposed to engage in commercial activity. You're not supposed to make others. You're not supposed to make them bake and boil. So you're going to have to start planning. And that means, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know how many gentlemen like to cook. Some gentlemen are great chefs. But you're going to have to cook those dishes ahead oftentimes. It may not be the, like, say, your protein. You might wait and do your protein on Friday morning. But a lot of times your vegetables and things like that, you can cook them ahead, put them in the fridge. You can freeze them. You can have... bake extra things. Like say if you're doing a green bean casserole, you know what? You can buy these little containers, freezer containers, cover them real good, stick them in the freezer. Instead of doing one, do three. And then you can take them out at a later time, especially if it's something you know your family likes. Make extra. Make extra mac and cheese. Whatever it is that you think you're likely to want more of, pre-cook it. freeze it so that on Friday, you know, you're going to have enough to run it. It's like everything. People, I don't know why they do it. They want to call you on Friday and talk. And sometimes it's because they don't know you're trying to get ready for Shabbat, and sometimes they don't care. Let me wrap this up in my week, and they don't really care that you're just trying to get to the Shabbat table before sundown. So you might have to cut those conversations short and say, hey, call me back on Sunday. You didn't plan. You waited till Friday to try to wrap this up. Let's wrap this up on Sunday, or let's wrap this up on Monday. Because that's the great thing about Shabbat. You have to stop your work. Even if you're not done. And that's a beautiful thing. Because what you'll find out is you will survive without finishing that. And it'll give you something to do next week. Every week, you're probably going to have something left undone that has to be suspended for a Shabbat. And that's a great feeling to know that I can walk away from it. That I'm not enslaved to my work. That I'm not enslaved to my task. But instead, I'm enjoying as a free person. his Shabbat, I can enter into his kingdom. So yes, plan, especially if you're traveling. Know what's going to happen to as much as you can. You can't always know everything. But we've had to travel recently for deaths in the family, and you can't always predict those sorts of things. You do the best you can. Do the best you can. And I say, if you don't do as well as you like. you know, would like to have, then you'll get it right the next time. You've got something to work on. What about challah? If you don't know what challah is, it's a special loaf of bread that we usually make for Shabbat, usually two loaves, which is just my husband and me at this point. So unless we have company, we don't even finish for sure one loaf. We want a little piece off the end of it. But challah freezes really well. You can make it early in the week. You can make it a couple of weeks ahead. Freeze it and just set it out on the table and let it thaw. On Friday, there's some bakeries now that are making challah. You know, you can purchase it. You may not have to bake it. There's great recipes out there. You can experiment with challah. What if it's a cold salad that can marinate for a day or two? But you know, there's some salads that are actually going to taste better after a night in the fridge. If you know you're going to serve that kind of salad on Friday, go ahead and make it on Thursday. Make it easy on yourself. But this is the recipe. A recipe is just a plan. And the recipe tells you the order things should happen. So that you get the actual, you know, dish that you plan to get at the end. Because if you don't follow the recipe, you're probably not going to get that dish. You're going to get, you know, a cake that sinks, or in my case, just totally collapses, because you didn't follow the recipe. And a recipe is a plan. So as you're preparing for your Shabbat, think of it as, what's my recipe going to be this week? I have to do things in the right order. It could all fall down on Friday. And if it falls down on Friday, I get really bit out of shape. And then that just destroys the whole atmosphere of Shabbat, where we want that piece to be able to enter in. So plan your meal. Plan your grocery shopping to occur before Friday. Now you might have to run out and grab something on Friday. That could happen. But get your grocery shopping done before Friday. If you can, bake ahead. And then, if you can, extend meal invitations to the Shabbat table. Have people come in and enjoy it with you. Again, this is how you can help people to understand what you're doing. If you're new to the Sabbath and your friends and your family don't understand it, by coming and doing it with you, that's giving them very hands-on and a good experience. Instead of being worried that you're in a cult or something or that, oh my goodness, they're turning Jewish. It's fine. Just say thank you if they say that. But on the other hand... If they're having a positive experience with you, then I think they'll come closer to understanding why the Holy Spirit convicted you to start keeping Shabbat. And they might just start keeping it with you. And if they're keeping it with you, then they're devising fewer things to distract you, is the point there. Now, there's also a scripture that says, if because of the Sabbath, you turn your foot. from doing your own pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable. and honor it. And then there's blessings that follow. Okay, what does he mean? Delight. How do you call Sabbath a delight? Well, in Hebrew, that word is oneg, oneg, O-N-E-G in English. And it means pleasure or enjoyment, delight. When you delight, when you enjoy the Shabbat, you're making it honorable, is what the scripture says. And so you're saying, all right, I'm not supposed to bake or boil. You're telling me I have to eat cold food? That's not delightful. But from ancient times, people have been very creative in how they kept that food warm on the Sabbath and throughout the Sabbath. In ancient times, and I've seen these ovens in Jerusalem, they would have community ovens back before everybody had an oven in their own home. A neighborhood would have a community oven. Because they would generate a tremendous amount of heat in that particular climate. You really wouldn't want an oven in your own house. You would want it disconnected from your house. But it would serve the whole neighborhood. They would get that fire stoked. And the families would each put a pot or two, however many, in that oven. And because it was stoked, that oven would stay warm all through Shabbat. And then, of course, on Saturday. they would send the kids out to retrieve it. They would go out and find the family, I don't know what, pottery that had their food in it. Well, in more recent times, back around the turn of the century in Jerusalem, you had Jewish families coming from all kinds of different places like Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern. You know, the... The Eastern European dishes were very bland, but the North African dishes and some of the Middle Eastern dishes, they're very spicy. They're kharif. And so sometimes the kids would pick up the wrong pot and take it home. And all of a sudden you're eating somebody else's Shabbat meal on Saturday and you're saying, wow, that's spicy. And that's how in modern Israel, how they develop the spicy foods that they have today. And why you see even a lot of Middle Eastern Jews eating things like babka, you know, from Eastern Europe, because they would get their foods all mixed up in the community oven. Well, we don't have a community oven, but what you'll find is if you will go look in your stove, if you kept the owner's spaniel. Probably nine times out of ten, it's going to have a Shabbat mode on it you didn't even know about, because you have to know which buttons to push to make it work. And that can be a problem if sometimes you push the wrong button and you send it into Shabbat mode, and you didn't know that, and now your oven's going to, you know, keep running for 12 hours or something. You have to go back to the manual and figure out how to turn it off. Most modern ovens do have a Shabbat mode, where it'll just hold your food at a constant temperature in the oven. The easier way that we have found that it's so convenient, I almost wish we had used it the other days of the week, it's based on something called a blech, B-L-E-C-H. And a blech was designed to sit on top of a gas stove so that you turn the gas burners on low as they'll go, you set this metal thing on there, and then it kept the foods warm that way. We don't have a gas stove. But now what they sell is something called a stovetop warmer. Stovetop warmer. There's different brands that you can get. But basically, all you do, you plug them in, you set your food on it, and it keeps it under boiling all through Shabbat. As long as it's plugged in, it'll keep it at under the temperature of boiling. And you'll have to experiment because some of them do run hotter than others. We've got one right now that runs way hotter than the last one. So we're having to kind of lift it up, use little like wire cookie racks so we won't burn the bottom of it. But you can experiment. You can, you know, if you have lids, put the lids on there. You can make soups, stews. You know, you may not want to put your... Like if you have a protein like roast beef or chicken or something, you might want to wait until an hour or two before you're ready to eat it to put it on there and get it warm because it can dry out. But you'll learn how to use it. And then the great thing is it's on there all day. And people just kind of go and they'll pick a little bit out of there. They'll get a spoonful out of there. You can hold your food warm on Shabbat. You don't have to eat cold food. And one thing we do, just a little tip, we always put a sheet of aluminum foil or two to cover the surface of it. So that if we have spills, which we do, especially if we're going in there and sneaking a spoonful of soup or something, it'll spill onto the aluminum foil. rather than spilling down onto the top of the warmer and then just cooking until the end of Shabbat. And you'll experiment, but it's really great. And it's great, you know, if you have dinner parties, it doesn't even have to be Shabbat. You don't have to just use it on Shabbat. You'll find that it's really handy for other things. Like if you're going to have people over for Thanksgiving, you can keep your foods warm because sometimes you get some things warm before others. You can plug that baby in on the countertop and you can keep these things warm while you're using your oven for other things, right? Another tip, get your shower early enough on Shabbat afternoon that you have some downtime, right? If you can relax a little bit, listen to a little bit of music, that might be one of the hardest steps to plan. If this is a plan, if this is a recipe, that could be the hardest thing to do if you've got a bunch of little kids. If your children or grandchildren are there, especially mom, it might really be really hard to find that little space of time. But what we want to do is make sure we've got at least a few moments to center ourselves and think about Yeshua. Think about why we're doing this. Think about the... spirit of the commandment and that, wow, this was supposed to be a delight. And I might not be feeling especially delightful right now. I might be frazzled. So if you're feeling frazzled, I think it's especially important to remember the oneg, that it's supposed to be a delight to you. And there might be certain things you can leave undone that'll be okay undone. It'll be just fine. Did you leave a load of laundry in the dryer that you really needed to fold? Well, you know what? It'll be fine. It'll be there Sunday morning. Just, it's okay. If you can take that same five minutes and devote it to thinking about, hey, this is Shabbat. I'm entering into a time of eternity right here. These things that I'm about to do return, I'm about to take pleasure in the Shabbat of our Messiah. It's worth it. It's worth it to leave that laundry unfolded. You might have to get it out of sight so you don't fret over it. But be creative, you know. And like I said, make those special things for children to do or think about them. Like, get them a special box of cereal. If they like cereal on Shabbat, then get them a favorite cereal that they only have on Shabbat. You say, well, you know, my husband, he's just not happy unless he can have some eggs. He still can't. Remember, we have the stovetop warmer. And we do this often. We'll get some turkey sausage or some chicken sausage. We'll make that. We'll cook that ahead of time. And then you can fry eggs however you want them. Or you can make omelets however you want them. You put them in a little tin, cover them. For breakfast the next morning, just throw them on the stovetop warmer, and voila, you have hot eggs and sausage, if that's what you like. If you like pancakes, freeze them, and then take them out and stick them on the warmer on Shabbat. In fact, you can warm up your syrup there on the warmer, and you'll have hot syrup and pancake with butter if you want them. Just remember, it's when you're doing something new, if you can make friends with people who have done it a long time. You'll get lots of great tips and ideas. But the neighborly part of Shabbat, that's why I said send out invitation. Try to have people over because this is an important part of Shabbat. It's joining and fellowshipping with like kind and like mind. It was Yeshua's custom to go into the synagogue on Shabbat. It was Paul. It was the disciples. They would join with like kind and like mind and so have guests for dinner. Don't eat them. Feed them. Okay, I'm going to clarify that. But yes, have guests over for dinner. Connect with people if you can. My aunt did something. May her memory be for blessing. I always admired this. Whenever she had a guest over for dinner, she would write on a note card what that guest enjoyed. If it was one of the dishes she served, she would write that down. She'd make a note card for that person. If they didn't seem particularly impressed with the meal, she would say, well, what do you like? What do you like to eat? And whatever they said, she would write that on their card. So when that guest came back, she would try to serve at least one item of their favorite food. whether it was something she had already made and they tasted or something she was willing to try that she hadn't. I mean, you talk about connecting with people when you make a food and you can remember what, that's kind of cheating because I don't think I could remember what somebody liked if it was, you know, several months or years in between, but it's not really cheating. You cared enough to write it down. And so when you remember what people like, it says to them that you care about them. And this is important. Connecting with people is important on Shabbat. This is a vital ingredient in your recipe. Joining with like-kind and like-mind. You say, I don't have anybody. Okay, let's fix that. There are people out there that you can connect with online. Even if there's no congregation or families in your town, you can connect with people. You know, I have Torah classes. We've got almost 400 people in there that connect with one another in different ways. There's other things out there, other communities. You can go to a conference like Revive and connect with people, exchange email. And so it could be that maybe you spend an hour online, you know, whether it's Zoom or FaceTiming. Some time on Shabbat that set aside to connect with other people. You just have to, you have to be kind of aggressive in making those connections. What else could you do if you don't have anybody like you? Find an elderly person in your neighborhood. As you're preparing your own Shabbat dish, even if they can't come to you, you take that dish to them. Maybe you take them an ice cream. I don't know, it just seemed like most of our elderly family were like, they loved ice cream. Okay, if you don't want to take them a dish, you know, take them an ice cream. Share it. Is there somebody else who doesn't have anybody? They may not be keeping Shabbat, but they might be a neighbor. Take them a portion of your meal. Just look for opportunities and you will see them. Get the kids to help you in preparing the Shabbat meal if possible. Or, a lot of times kids will know where there are shut-ins, where there are elderly people or people alone in the neighborhood. They might be aware of them better than you. So you might even ask your children, is there anybody on our block that you know of that just doesn't have anybody? Is there an elderly person that I haven't noticed? A lot of times kids know, you know, and a lot of times you're always telling them, be careful, you know, where you go. Kids talk and they know whose yard to go in and who's not to go in, right? But often it's just a matter of setting your boundaries. And if you will invite people in, then you're going to reduce the conflicts you have with people inviting you out. which is what you're trying to avoid. You're trying to make the Shabbat a delight, and you can do that with other people who want to delight in it. So you invite them in if you can, and it will stop a lot of the distractions so that you can feel that spirit, that Holy Spirit that can just fall into that Shabbat spirit.

Hello, this is Dr. Halisa Elwan. We are presenting today some recipes. Recipes? Yeah, I know, I don't look much like a cook, do I?

What I want is to give you some recipes for a Shabbastic Shabbat. If you're new to the Shabbat, or even if you're old to the Shabbat and you're curious, hang around. These programs are designed for people who are fairly new to Shabbat.

They kind of get the idea, okay, I need to keep the Shabbat. I'm starting to understand that now. I want to incorporate it, but how do I do that?

I don't really understand all the things that go with it. Well, that's what we want to give you, some ideas. about how you can get started, how you can start some great things that over the years, especially if you have children and grandchildren, they will grow to love.

It will become part of being with you. They will associate, you know, having that presence of Adonai in your home on Shabbat with being with you too. I mean, you kind of get to ride the coattails of the Holy One on that one.

And so if I'm going fast, and I won't cover everything, that we have here in Torah Tips. This is where I'm taking this. And if you'll click, there'll be a a clickable link that you can click on the video that will take you to where you can download this and then you can print it off.

And after you print it off, you can take your own notes. You might add to it. You might say, oh, I can't do that one. Mark that out.

But this will get you started. And then you can add your own notes to it. Or you can print it off for other people. Like if you're going to have visitors, that's going to be one of our tips today.

Have people over. I mean, are you really tired of people trying to draw you out to go shopping and go do this and go do that on Shabbat? And you're like, no, no, I'm going to do this Shabbat thing.

I can't do this Shabbat thing if I'm constantly running and gunning here, there, and everywhere. One thing you can do is invite them to your Shabbat. But if you want to pass this around.

you know, to your friends and saying, this is what I'm doing now, and this will help you understand a little bit about what I'm doing, feel free to share. Just print it off and share it. Because that's one of the hardest things about keeping Shabbat, is if most of our family or friends or co-workers don't also keep the Shabbat, then we've got some splaining to do, don't we? And so we need to be very compassionate and understanding and say, hey, they're not where we are. yet, always add yet, Y-E-T, you're not here yet, but you will be in the millennium.

If you were saved, you will be keeping the day that is all Shabbat. So we're rehearsing now. We're getting ready now.

And so being new to Shabbat, it's exciting. You feel like you started a new life sometimes, and you have, but it can also be very perplexing. But once you decide to observe the Shabbat. You're going to ask this question, how do I do it? Well, the Word is really great at giving general commandments, but it's not so great for telling you specifically what to do in your house.

You know, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to give you some tips to help you get started. And then you're going to see that as the beauty because your house is not like my house.

And my house is not like my neighbor's house. And so. We'll have things that we all do together. We'll all kind of do them the same, but then we'll have lots of things that are going to be a little bit different. It's just going to reflect who we are as a family.

But in this program, what we want to address is something I alluded to in the second one, which is the scripture that says, bake what you're going to bake and boil what you're going to boil. This is from Exodus 16, 32. And Moses is having to clarify this. Clearly the Israelites, they're in the wilderness.

He said, keep the Shabbat. Okay, great. But what does that mean?

And so Moses has to clarify. See, he's teaching and they're learning. Hopefully it won't take us 40 years to figure out Shabbat.

But here's what Moses tells them. This is what the Lord meant. Tomorrow is a Sabbath observance, a holy Sabbath to the Lord.

Bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil. And all that is left over, put aside to be kept until morning. Right. So what are you going to do? You're going to prepare your meal.

You're going to eat it on Friday night because remember the day starts in the evening, evening and morning. And he says, have some here to put aside so that you can have your meals also on Saturday. Right.

So you're cooking a lot of food. You're getting a lot of food ready. But, you know, like I said, the great thing about it is often you cook so much food, you can't eat it all. You end up also having leftovers on Sunday and Monday. But this is important.

Prepare your food beforehand. And this does take time. It takes planning. It also says you shall not kindle a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day.

Well, if you can't kindle a fire, then you can't really cook food anyway. Those two, you can see how they're intertwined. If you can't kindle the fire, then you can't cook. You can't bake.

You can't boil. You say, well... What do I do with all that cold food? Well, we're going to give you some ideas of how to make sure that cold food is warm food, even to the end of Saturday evening.

But here's what's going to have to happen at this point. As you begin to keep the Shabbat, what you are going to become, even if you've never been one before, you are going to become a planner. Yeah. Yeah, some people aren't really natural-born planners.

They're more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants people. Well, on Shabbat, we're going to have to develop some planners, right? Because if you don't plan ahead, you're going to get pretty hungry on Shabbat.

If you don't plan ahead, it may not be, you know, it may not have that joy. and that sense of comfort on Shabbat. But sometimes when we get caught short on Shabbat, that's how we learn.

Like, oh, well, I'll learn better next time. I really didn't plan this one, did I? And what really makes it hard sometimes is if you have to travel and you're kind of sliding into home base on a Friday afternoon on arrival somewhere. And I travel quite a bit, or I used to. I'm trying not to so much anymore.

But I found that the Shabbat becomes problematic, not when I'm at home. in my own, you know, environment because I can plan. I can do things ahead.

I can have things in the freezer. But when you're on the road, sometimes you are dependent upon other people to help provide the things that you normally would provide for yourself on Shabbat. So you're going to have to plan.

And sometimes that means, you know what, I need to take that early flight on Friday morning, not the later one, so I can sleep two extra hours. No, you need to get there early if you're going to have to figure out where to get your food for Shabbat so that you don't end up having to go to the grocery store. And again, you're making other people work.

You're not supposed to work. You're not supposed to engage in commercial activity. You're not supposed to make others. You're not supposed to make them bake and boil. So you're going to have to start planning.

And that means, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know how many gentlemen like to cook. Some gentlemen are great chefs.

But you're going to have to cook those dishes ahead oftentimes. It may not be the, like, say, your protein. You might wait and do your protein on Friday morning.

But a lot of times your vegetables and things like that, you can cook them ahead, put them in the fridge. You can freeze them. You can have...

bake extra things. Like say if you're doing a green bean casserole, you know what? You can buy these little containers, freezer containers, cover them real good, stick them in the freezer. Instead of doing one, do three.

And then you can take them out at a later time, especially if it's something you know your family likes. Make extra. Make extra mac and cheese.

Whatever it is that you think you're likely to want more of, pre-cook it. freeze it so that on Friday, you know, you're going to have enough to run it. It's like everything. People, I don't know why they do it.

They want to call you on Friday and talk. And sometimes it's because they don't know you're trying to get ready for Shabbat, and sometimes they don't care. Let me wrap this up in my week, and they don't really care that you're just trying to get to the Shabbat table before sundown. So you might have to cut those conversations short and say, hey, call me back on Sunday. You didn't plan.

You waited till Friday to try to wrap this up. Let's wrap this up on Sunday, or let's wrap this up on Monday. Because that's the great thing about Shabbat.

You have to stop your work. Even if you're not done. And that's a beautiful thing.

Because what you'll find out is you will survive without finishing that. And it'll give you something to do next week. Every week, you're probably going to have something left undone that has to be suspended for a Shabbat. And that's a great feeling to know that I can walk away from it. That I'm not enslaved to my work.

That I'm not enslaved to my task. But instead, I'm enjoying as a free person. his Shabbat, I can enter into his kingdom.

So yes, plan, especially if you're traveling. Know what's going to happen to as much as you can. You can't always know everything. But we've had to travel recently for deaths in the family, and you can't always predict those sorts of things. You do the best you can.

Do the best you can. And I say, if you don't do as well as you like. you know, would like to have, then you'll get it right the next time. You've got something to work on.

What about challah? If you don't know what challah is, it's a special loaf of bread that we usually make for Shabbat, usually two loaves, which is just my husband and me at this point. So unless we have company, we don't even finish for sure one loaf. We want a little piece off the end of it. But challah freezes really well.

You can make it early in the week. You can make it a couple of weeks ahead. Freeze it and just set it out on the table and let it thaw.

On Friday, there's some bakeries now that are making challah. You know, you can purchase it. You may not have to bake it. There's great recipes out there. You can experiment with challah.

What if it's a cold salad that can marinate for a day or two? But you know, there's some salads that are actually going to taste better after a night in the fridge. If you know you're going to serve that kind of salad on Friday, go ahead and make it on Thursday. Make it easy on yourself. But this is the recipe.

A recipe is just a plan. And the recipe tells you the order things should happen. So that you get the actual, you know, dish that you plan to get at the end.

Because if you don't follow the recipe, you're probably not going to get that dish. You're going to get, you know, a cake that sinks, or in my case, just totally collapses, because you didn't follow the recipe. And a recipe is a plan.

So as you're preparing for your Shabbat, think of it as, what's my recipe going to be this week? I have to do things in the right order. It could all fall down on Friday.

And if it falls down on Friday, I get really bit out of shape. And then that just destroys the whole atmosphere of Shabbat, where we want that piece to be able to enter in. So plan your meal. Plan your grocery shopping to occur before Friday.

Now you might have to run out and grab something on Friday. That could happen. But get your grocery shopping done before Friday.

If you can, bake ahead. And then, if you can, extend meal invitations to the Shabbat table. Have people come in and enjoy it with you.

Again, this is how you can help people to understand what you're doing. If you're new to the Sabbath and your friends and your family don't understand it, by coming and doing it with you, that's giving them very hands-on and a good experience. Instead of being worried that you're in a cult or something or that, oh my goodness, they're turning Jewish. It's fine.

Just say thank you if they say that. But on the other hand... If they're having a positive experience with you, then I think they'll come closer to understanding why the Holy Spirit convicted you to start keeping Shabbat. And they might just start keeping it with you.

And if they're keeping it with you, then they're devising fewer things to distract you, is the point there. Now, there's also a scripture that says, if because of the Sabbath, you turn your foot. from doing your own pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable.

and honor it. And then there's blessings that follow. Okay, what does he mean? Delight.

How do you call Sabbath a delight? Well, in Hebrew, that word is oneg, oneg, O-N-E-G in English. And it means pleasure or enjoyment, delight. When you delight, when you enjoy the Shabbat, you're making it honorable, is what the scripture says.

And so you're saying, all right, I'm not supposed to bake or boil. You're telling me I have to eat cold food? That's not delightful.

But from ancient times, people have been very creative in how they kept that food warm on the Sabbath and throughout the Sabbath. In ancient times, and I've seen these ovens in Jerusalem, they would have community ovens back before everybody had an oven in their own home. A neighborhood would have a community oven.

Because they would generate a tremendous amount of heat in that particular climate. You really wouldn't want an oven in your own house. You would want it disconnected from your house. But it would serve the whole neighborhood. They would get that fire stoked.

And the families would each put a pot or two, however many, in that oven. And because it was stoked, that oven would stay warm all through Shabbat. And then, of course, on Saturday. they would send the kids out to retrieve it. They would go out and find the family, I don't know what, pottery that had their food in it.

Well, in more recent times, back around the turn of the century in Jerusalem, you had Jewish families coming from all kinds of different places like Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern. You know, the... The Eastern European dishes were very bland, but the North African dishes and some of the Middle Eastern dishes, they're very spicy. They're kharif.

And so sometimes the kids would pick up the wrong pot and take it home. And all of a sudden you're eating somebody else's Shabbat meal on Saturday and you're saying, wow, that's spicy. And that's how in modern Israel, how they develop the spicy foods that they have today. And why you see even a lot of Middle Eastern Jews eating things like babka, you know, from Eastern Europe, because they would get their foods all mixed up in the community oven.

Well, we don't have a community oven, but what you'll find is if you will go look in your stove, if you kept the owner's spaniel. Probably nine times out of ten, it's going to have a Shabbat mode on it you didn't even know about, because you have to know which buttons to push to make it work. And that can be a problem if sometimes you push the wrong button and you send it into Shabbat mode, and you didn't know that, and now your oven's going to, you know, keep running for 12 hours or something.

You have to go back to the manual and figure out how to turn it off. Most modern ovens do have a Shabbat mode, where it'll just hold your food at a constant temperature in the oven. The easier way that we have found that it's so convenient, I almost wish we had used it the other days of the week, it's based on something called a blech, B-L-E-C-H. And a blech was designed to sit on top of a gas stove so that you turn the gas burners on low as they'll go, you set this metal thing on there, and then it kept the foods warm that way. We don't have a gas stove.

But now what they sell is something called a stovetop warmer. Stovetop warmer. There's different brands that you can get.

But basically, all you do, you plug them in, you set your food on it, and it keeps it under boiling all through Shabbat. As long as it's plugged in, it'll keep it at under the temperature of boiling. And you'll have to experiment because some of them do run hotter than others. We've got one right now that runs way hotter than the last one. So we're having to kind of lift it up, use little like wire cookie racks so we won't burn the bottom of it.

But you can experiment. You can, you know, if you have lids, put the lids on there. You can make soups, stews. You know, you may not want to put your... Like if you have a protein like roast beef or chicken or something, you might want to wait until an hour or two before you're ready to eat it to put it on there and get it warm because it can dry out.

But you'll learn how to use it. And then the great thing is it's on there all day. And people just kind of go and they'll pick a little bit out of there. They'll get a spoonful out of there.

You can hold your food warm on Shabbat. You don't have to eat cold food. And one thing we do, just a little tip, we always put a sheet of aluminum foil or two to cover the surface of it. So that if we have spills, which we do, especially if we're going in there and sneaking a spoonful of soup or something, it'll spill onto the aluminum foil.

rather than spilling down onto the top of the warmer and then just cooking until the end of Shabbat. And you'll experiment, but it's really great. And it's great, you know, if you have dinner parties, it doesn't even have to be Shabbat. You don't have to just use it on Shabbat.

You'll find that it's really handy for other things. Like if you're going to have people over for Thanksgiving, you can keep your foods warm because sometimes you get some things warm before others. You can plug that baby in on the countertop and you can keep these things warm while you're using your oven for other things, right?

Another tip, get your shower early enough on Shabbat afternoon that you have some downtime, right? If you can relax a little bit, listen to a little bit of music, that might be one of the hardest steps to plan. If this is a plan, if this is a recipe, that could be the hardest thing to do if you've got a bunch of little kids.

If your children or grandchildren are there, especially mom, it might really be really hard to find that little space of time. But what we want to do is make sure we've got at least a few moments to center ourselves and think about Yeshua. Think about why we're doing this. Think about the... spirit of the commandment and that, wow, this was supposed to be a delight.

And I might not be feeling especially delightful right now. I might be frazzled. So if you're feeling frazzled, I think it's especially important to remember the oneg, that it's supposed to be a delight to you.

And there might be certain things you can leave undone that'll be okay undone. It'll be just fine. Did you leave a load of laundry in the dryer that you really needed to fold?

Well, you know what? It'll be fine. It'll be there Sunday morning.

Just, it's okay. If you can take that same five minutes and devote it to thinking about, hey, this is Shabbat. I'm entering into a time of eternity right here. These things that I'm about to do return, I'm about to take pleasure in the Shabbat of our Messiah. It's worth it.

It's worth it to leave that laundry unfolded. You might have to get it out of sight so you don't fret over it. But be creative, you know. And like I said, make those special things for children to do or think about them.

Like, get them a special box of cereal. If they like cereal on Shabbat, then get them a favorite cereal that they only have on Shabbat. You say, well, you know, my husband, he's just not happy unless he can have some eggs. He still can't. Remember, we have the stovetop warmer.

And we do this often. We'll get some turkey sausage or some chicken sausage. We'll make that. We'll cook that ahead of time.

And then you can fry eggs however you want them. Or you can make omelets however you want them. You put them in a little tin, cover them.

For breakfast the next morning, just throw them on the stovetop warmer, and voila, you have hot eggs and sausage, if that's what you like. If you like pancakes, freeze them, and then take them out and stick them on the warmer on Shabbat. In fact, you can warm up your syrup there on the warmer, and you'll have hot syrup and pancake with butter if you want them.

Just remember, it's when you're doing something new, if you can make friends with people who have done it a long time. You'll get lots of great tips and ideas. But the neighborly part of Shabbat, that's why I said send out invitation.

Try to have people over because this is an important part of Shabbat. It's joining and fellowshipping with like kind and like mind. It was Yeshua's custom to go into the synagogue on Shabbat.

It was Paul. It was the disciples. They would join with like kind and like mind and so have guests for dinner.

Don't eat them. Feed them. Okay, I'm going to clarify that. But yes, have guests over for dinner. Connect with people if you can.

My aunt did something. May her memory be for blessing. I always admired this.

Whenever she had a guest over for dinner, she would write on a note card what that guest enjoyed. If it was one of the dishes she served, she would write that down. She'd make a note card for that person. If they didn't seem particularly impressed with the meal, she would say, well, what do you like?

What do you like to eat? And whatever they said, she would write that on their card. So when that guest came back, she would try to serve at least one item of their favorite food. whether it was something she had already made and they tasted or something she was willing to try that she hadn't.

I mean, you talk about connecting with people when you make a food and you can remember what, that's kind of cheating because I don't think I could remember what somebody liked if it was, you know, several months or years in between, but it's not really cheating. You cared enough to write it down. And so when you remember what people like, it says to them that you care about them.

And this is important. Connecting with people is important on Shabbat. This is a vital ingredient in your recipe. Joining with like-kind and like-mind.

You say, I don't have anybody. Okay, let's fix that. There are people out there that you can connect with online. Even if there's no congregation or families in your town, you can connect with people.

You know, I have Torah classes. We've got almost 400 people in there that connect with one another in different ways. There's other things out there, other communities.

You can go to a conference like Revive and connect with people, exchange email. And so it could be that maybe you spend an hour online, you know, whether it's Zoom or FaceTiming. Some time on Shabbat that set aside to connect with other people. You just have to, you have to be kind of aggressive in making those connections.

What else could you do if you don't have anybody like you? Find an elderly person in your neighborhood. As you're preparing your own Shabbat dish, even if they can't come to you, you take that dish to them.

Maybe you take them an ice cream. I don't know, it just seemed like most of our elderly family were like, they loved ice cream. Okay, if you don't want to take them a dish, you know, take them an ice cream. Share it.

Is there somebody else who doesn't have anybody? They may not be keeping Shabbat, but they might be a neighbor. Take them a portion of your meal. Just look for opportunities and you will see them.

Get the kids to help you in preparing the Shabbat meal if possible. Or, a lot of times kids will know where there are shut-ins, where there are elderly people or people alone in the neighborhood. They might be aware of them better than you.

So you might even ask your children, is there anybody on our block that you know of that just doesn't have anybody? Is there an elderly person that I haven't noticed? A lot of times kids know, you know, and a lot of times you're always telling them, be careful, you know, where you go.

Kids talk and they know whose yard to go in and who's not to go in, right? But often it's just a matter of setting your boundaries. And if you will invite people in, then you're going to reduce the conflicts you have with people inviting you out.

which is what you're trying to avoid. You're trying to make the Shabbat a delight, and you can do that with other people who want to delight in it. So you invite them in if you can, and it will stop a lot of the distractions so that you can feel that spirit, that Holy Spirit that can just fall into that Shabbat spirit.

Transcript for:Embracing Shabbat: Preparation and Connection

Transcript for:
Embracing Shabbat: Preparation and Connection