One thing I've gotten into the habit of is Friday night dinners. Being Jewish has always been a fairly low key undertone to my life. There's no real equivalent to American Reformed Jews here in the UK. On top of which I now live in a fairly small city (150k population). While it's nice and international, the religious communities are small. My choices are chabad (no) or UK Reform which is more like US Conservative. But if I want my daughter to connect to her Jewish heritage, needs must. So we belong to the local Reform Synagogue, which is fine. And I do my part to increase our activities at hone, hence Shabbat.
It's also been a great way to connect with my mom, who now has a small retirement flat in the same city and stays here 6 months out of the year. When she's not here, we do video Shabbat together. It's actually turned into a really nice family thing and a way for me to create a religious association where we generally have very few. Judaism is a lot about family- and I'm glad that I've been able to create this tradition. Although obviously contrived because I never really did Shabbat dinner pre-kid. But I'm okay with that.
I've perfected my bread machine challah dough recipe. I make little challah's because we're only two people and I don't eat a lot of bread. So one batch of dough makes 4 little challah- a month worth of Shabbat dinners. We say all the blessings, but I've yet to introduce more of the 'day of rest' concepts to my daughter. Right now, we just do Friday dinner. That's cool. It's something. I look forward to it. It makes a nice rhythm to the week.
It would be nice to share it with a bigger community. This may come in time, there's been talks with some synagogue friends about joined up Shabbat dinners but Friday nights are tough, especially with kids. It's fine.
Anyway, I've made a few playlists of Shabbat music, getting in the spirit. Bread is defrosting on the table (soon to go into the oven) and candles and wine are ready. Shabbat shalom y'all!
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