Loose Ends on Saturday Night

Friday night we were invited to a very large Shabbat dinner at the apartment of cantorial students Matt and Jon. They served a scrumptious vegetarian dinner and had about twenty guests. They have a nice large apartment that is right next to the Yeshiva and the synagogue so it is a very convenient place for a dinner. Since the sun sets so early now, Shabbat begins a few minutes after 4 p.m., services start at 4:30 and are done by 6. Thus, Shabbat dinner starts far earlier than in the summer and it seems really late by 9 or 10 o'clock whereas in the summer, we'd start dinner at 8ish and go until 11 or midnight.

We haven't hosted any dinners in a while so in just under two weeks we'll going to host a Shabbat dinner for an intimate crowd of about thirteen, including ourselves. In order to hold that many in our apartment, we either need to borrow chairs or get some more. We've decided that we're just going to go out and buy 5 or 6 cheap plastic garden chairs before our next dinner because we're tired of having to borrow chairs for every dinner we host.

Yesterday afternoon, I went with fellow Yeshiva students and one of our rabbis to visit patients at a nursing home. It was a rewarding and moving experience and I was able to utilize my limited Hebrew skills in talking to residents who had been born, for the most part throughout Europe and immigrated to Israel after World War II and the Holocaust. I'm looking forward to going back and spending more time there.