Maureen Lipman
Writer and performer
● Friday night when I was growing up, meant that my mother lit the candles under her breath and yelled "G'Shabbos!" into three rooms at the same time. Dad came home later than usual and we sat down to delicious lokshen chicken soup, roasted-over chicken from the soup with gribbines and roast potatoes and sprouts, which were a nice bright yellow from being cooked for as long as the soup - oh, and tinned fruit and jelly. There were no prayers. Prayers were for boys and, as far as I remember, no one helped my poor ma and we never saw her eat. But we really only rediscovered the point of Shabbat many years later, when my husband became ill. Weak from treatments, or in remission or in pain, Jack looked forward passionately to those Friday nights. To the warmth and buzz of the preparations, the sound of me clomping around the kitchen muttering, the chop chop and sizzling sounds and the phone calls saying: "What time do you want us?" when they knew perfectly well I just wanted them when they came.
The arrival of the kids and their friends and ours made him so happy. The discussions of the week's events, the breaking of bread, the soaking of red wine from the herrings into the bread, the dabbing of salt on the inevitable wine stain. His face glowing in the candle light… ah…golden memories. It actually did us good, washing up aside, I mean, it physically improved our well-being.
I now understand the true meaning of Shabbat is to stop time. Twenty four hours to think, read, walk, make love and refresh the parts, and as Maimonides might have put it, "turn off dem iPads and shmartie-phones and stop with the swivelling eyes!" After the prescribed time, then we should light the plaited candle, smell the spices which bring us back into life and get back to what we Jews are good at, creating… Art, business, music, jokes, inventions, chaos – LIFE!
Vanessa Feltz
Radio presenter and newspaper columnist
● It's all systems go at the Feltz household. Never have I attempted anything so lavish. I've even been sent a blech to keep the food warm. To be honest, Shabbat has passed me by in so many ways - life kind of takes over. But this year is different, this year I'm reconnecting with my Jewishness. With my granddaughter in tow, the Shabbat UK campaign has rather belatedly taught me how important it is. It brings the family together, the ties that bind us pull tighter, it's a time for a rare moment's reflection. And, let's be honest, it's a wonderful excuse to get everyone together for a fabulous dinner. Everyone will be congregating at my house, it will be the Shabbat to beat all Shabbats. In fact I can't believe the audience I've already got having said that I'm reintroducing it into my life. People have stopped me in the street, in shul, at the shopping centre. I even bumped into Chief Rabbi Mirvis the other day. Surrounded by people he remarked: 'It's between you and Hashem who's got the bigger following'. My reply? 'To be honest, Rabbi, I'm used to a bigger audience.' Anyway, it'll be a Friday night to remember chez Feltz - and long may that continue. It's taken me a while but Shabbat is part of my life again.
Diane Samuels
Author and playwright
● I'm not observant at all now. My relationship with it is nostalgic, from my childhood. My memories of Shabbat are from Liverpool, when my family went to shul most Shabbats. I remember going into the children's service, which I got bored by after one go! I preferred to be in the big shul with all the grown-ups.
It was about talking to my friends, going to kiddush and fighting through the crowds to get the one remaining fishball. It was about always thinking I wanted to drink the little glasses of whisky they had there and then always realising it was sweet wine. Shabbat for me used to be something where people were very rigid, thinking you're doing something wrong if you're not following their laws, but as I've got older I've realised it's okay to do it at the level you want to. It's about respecting each other. It's a good test of how tolerant people can be about others' practices.
It's also good to have a day of rest in the world we live in. If you do it just because it has meaning for you and not because of other people - that's how I'd approach Shabbat.
Dan Patterson
TV producer and writer
● Friday night has always been a slightly bigger deal for me than Shabbat as a whole because, when I was younger, we always had a Friday-night family dinner with wine and candles. It was very meaningful because it was when we all got together - even now, I can see my father doing the kiddush and giving us all a blessing - those are very fond memories for me.
Certainly while our kids have been growing up, we've gone to shul on Friday nights, and that gives you an ending to the week. My experience of Shabbat is not defined by synagogue, though.
The time I remember it best is when I was on kibbutz in Beit HaEmek, in 1978/79. We worked six days a week, so Shabbat was a day apart, the only day you weren't working, when you could visit people, catch up, swim, and genuinely rest. It was a day when you did very different things. I always felt Shabbat was enhanced in Israel. It feels different in Israel; there's a different atmosphere. The country stops, and it's very nice and still.
It's not a religious thing to me, it's cultural. It's not about not using a phone or driving, that's not what's important. It's about doing something different. That entails not working and spending time with my family.
These days, everything is less clear-cut, but we still usually do Friday night as it's sacred to us. It is a day we spend together. Family and the activities we do make it important to me. I'm more homebound on Shabbat, doing things at a different pace, and they tend to be things I enjoy more, like going to a sports match or meeting with people I like. I don't consciously sit there and think "I'm going to do something different," but that's what I do.
Jemma Wayne
Author
● For me, rather than being an overtly religious tradition, Shabbat is about family: family pausing, family coming together. There's always been something a bit sacred about it for us. When I was a child, it was with candles and challah and roast dinner with gravy that my brother hogged. When I became a young adult, this fused with my husband's Sephardi traditions of rice and arourk (a kind of egg pattie) and usually ended with shots of arak. Now we allow our young daughters to tear chunks from the challah that is a weekly favourite, and better than their usual wholemeal loaves!
But, wherever and whenever, it has always been a moment each week when those we loved slowed down and made time for each other. My family is not religious - by Saturday morning, our Shabbat was out - but still on Friday nights we turned down parties and work opportunities, and for a couple of hours stopped looking at our phones and held that brief interlude as precious. In typical Jewish fashion, it was during this very celebration of our Jewishness that we also often questioned and unpicked and debated our Jewishness - instigated by my agnostic father. Yet that togetherness - talking, communing, reflecting, treasuring not only Shabbat but each other, holding this night as different and special because of those things, that was what Shabbat was and is all about for me.
As I got older, as my husband's family is also Jewish, we took turns to go to each other's families. His is Sephardi and bigger; it was a feast and a celebration every week. My family's Friday nights are more of an intimate affair, but both had that same feeling of coming together. There's something about lighting the candles and saying Shabbat shalom to each other, with everyone trying to be nicer, that is precious in both our families.
As with a lot of traditions we keep in the diaspora, Shabbat is one of those things that distinguishes us as a community, holds us together and reminds us constantly of our traditions and history. I think it's a stabilising force each week: even when we're in the midst of chaos of our lives, it's a time when we slow down and take stock, and I think that's a good thing.
Daniel Cainer
Award-winning comedian
● I'm trying hard to make something of Shabbat for myself. Shabbat meant tedium to me when I was a child. It meant large amounts of boredom in the morning, and not being able to do what I wanted to the rest of the time. It also meant far too much walking. We drove to shul and walked the last couple of streets. Now I'm realising that loads of rules and regulations isn't in the spirit of Shabbat. The most important thing is the separation, switching off the noise that drives you crazy in the modern world, so you can let yourself off the hook and enforce 24 hours of utopia on yourself. I'm trying to make it so that it's different from the rest of the days. If you feel at all spiritual, you try to be at one with your creator, looking inside and fulfilling the commandment of holiness. It's an important one, and if you're able to do that, just have that communion for a little bit, you probably wouldn't need the rest of the commandments.
Shabbat UK is a great idea because it's making people thinking about it a bit more. It doesn't have to be the chore that we used to think it was. I'm not one of those who takes everything literally about Shabbat. I think there's some beauty in the idea of Shabbat, and it's a great gift that Judaism has given to the world.
Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer
Chief Executive, Spiritual Capital Foundation
● One of my very earliest childhood memories is walking home from shul with my father on Friday night, my tiny hand clasped firmly in his. It is poignant that of all the possible early childhood memories of Shabbat, I should recall the one in which I am coming home. In our increasingly complex and fragmented world, homecoming is something we deeply crave and yet too often it eludes us. Homecoming does not mean walking through the door of one's house; we all do that often enough, it means achieving a sense of returning to one's truest and deepest self.
Our work week is filled with striving, reaching, becoming, and yet often in the process of becoming we forget how to just be. Shabbat frees us from a state of constant becoming by directing our attention inwards inviting us to appreciate and celebrate being.
Shabbat is not a day off to rest and re-energise for the following week. Shabbat is an end unto itself and the point towards which the entire week is directed. It is our point of departure and our point of return. It's our frame of reference. Shabbat is the antidote to fragmentation. It enables us to become whole again.