I am going to share a secret with you. I did not grow up a religious Jew.
My life now, as a wife, a mother, and an Israeli, looks very different than it did when I was a child. Yes, my family celebrated Chanukah, we had a Passover Seder, and I even went to Jewish day school. But in between those memories, there were also ham sandwiches, delicious but not kosher, and trick or treating whenever Halloween fell on a Friday night. There was nothing wrong with that. It was our life then, and I am incredibly proud of the way that I grew up.
It was only in my later elementary school years that the dynamic and priorities in my family began to shift.
I am sure my parents would have a very different take on this, but when I go back and recall the memories of ten year old Sara, the shift took place when we started spending more time with our Jewish community on Shabbat. Many members of our synagogue were not religious, but the rabbi and his family were. And there was a culture around coming together for lunch, for Kiddush, after services.
We built incredibly deep and meaningful relationships with the other families in our community this way. Slowly, our community became more than just a word. Shabbat afternoons filled themselves with card games, Bible study sessions, and playdates, as my friends and I roamed from house to house in the neighborhood, all within walking distance of our synagogue.
My family began taking small precautions. We tried not to turn lights on and off. We cooked our food before Shabbat. Eventually, we started walking to synagogue instead of driving, even though we lived a mile and a half away, uphill, alongside a local highway.
All for this magical, incredible twenty five hours of Shabbat.
Today, my life is full, busy, beautiful, and very busy. And yet I count down the minutes until Shabbat. Until I breathe in the elevated air of this day of rest.
Shabbat was not only a practical shift in our schedule. It changed the texture of our time together, and that change went deeper than belief.
The Torah never presents Shabbat as something you keep alone. When it is commanded, it is commanded collectively:
That verse is practical, not poetic. Everyone stops together. No one moves ahead while someone else rests. Time itself becomes shared.
And that shared pause does something powerful.
When you cannot drive, you walk. When you walk, you see people. When you cannot cook, you eat together. When there are no errands and no screens, conversations stretch. Children roam. Adults linger. Relationships form without being scheduled.
Shabbat does not ask whether you are social or private. It creates proximity. And proximity, over time, becomes community.
This is not incidental. In the Torah, holiness is rarely solitary. God tells Moses:
Covenant is lived publicly, through shared rhythms, not privately, through isolated moments. Faith is sustained not by intensity, but by repetition and community.
That is what I tasted as a child, long before I could name it. The card games, the shared lunches, and the wandering from house to house were not side effects of Shabbat. They were the result.
Today, I live in Israel. Every Friday afternoon, the same thing happens across the country. Stores close. Phones quiet. Streets empty. Families and friends gather. Neighbors who barely see each other all week suddenly have time.
Shabbat builds community because it removes the alternatives. There is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but be together. That limitation is not a loss. It is the gift.
For Christians who take the Bible seriously, this should sound familiar. Scripture never imagines faith without shared life. From Abraham’s tent, to Israel standing together at Sinai, to meals eaten and time set apart, covenant is reinforced through lived, communal practice.
Shabbat is one of those practices.
It does not ask you to become Jewish. It asks you to step into a biblical rhythm that insists human beings were not meant to carry life alone. A rhythm that resists isolation and teaches belonging through time shared and meals eaten together.
Once you have experienced that kind of community, unforced and unscripted, rooted in Scripture and lived out in real life, you begin to understand why people keep returning to Shabbat, week after week.
