CTeenConnection

Kinneret Birwadkar// Mumbai, India

“Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest.” After six long days of hard work God gave us this seventh day to rejuvenate and recharge ourselves for the next coming week. Does this mean we spend more time with our family? 

Yes, the idea of a day of rest comes from the story of our Creation: God rested from creating the universe on the seventh day of that first week, so Jews rest from work on Shabbat. The seventh day of the week, “Shabbat,” is considered as a day of peace and holiness.

Shabbat is that one day in our busy weeks where we actually get time to reconnect with our family. Shabbat is ushered in by lighting candles and reciting a blessing. 

We all will agree that Shabbat in the modern world is celebrated a little differently compared to what it was earlier, maybe a few decades ago. Earlier people didn’t practice personal hygiene like having a bath on Saturdays as warming water was a lot of effort, but today we have advanced techniques to do so. This change is actually an inevitable part of our lives. 

The first reason I celebrate Shabbat is that it offers amazing opportunities for individual rest and renewal. It is also very much a community experience. Many Shabbat prayers, as well as the Shabbat Torah reading, can’t be said in isolation but are recited only with a minyan. That’s where we connect with others.

Shabbat is also the time for our personal renewal as it sets aside all the worries of our world. Being teenagers, we all go to schools or colleges and have a lot of pending work in our to-do list. However this is the day we detach our minds from all this clutter and find ourselves with our very own religion.

We relearn the fundamentals of life every Shabbat. Sometimes, because of competitions, facing huge changes, uncertainty, having loads of responsibilities and while striving for the best, we forget that the main focus of our life is You, yourself. You shouldn’t try to become the person you aren’t. Instead, you should compete with your past and appreciate small improvements in yourself. That’s where Shabbat plays a major role in shaping our mindset.

On this note, wishing all CTeen readers and enthusiasts a happy Shabbat!