College students rarely find the time to sit down to dinner, and almost never 2,000 of them sit down to eat at once. But on Friday, more than 1,000 Penn students shared a Shabbat dinner.
Shabbat for 2,000, or S2K, is an event run by Jewish Heritage Programs, an organization that has branches at several Mid-Atlantic schools. On Friday, students took a chance to stop and celebrate Shabbat with their friends.
At Penn, JHP provided students with complete dinners consisting of challah, kugel, salad, chicken and drinks. Students also received a booklet detailing the traditions and history of Shabbat. This year, approximately 1,100 people participated at Penn, and students hosted 60 dinners.
“The goal is to get 2,000 people who wouldn’t normally celebrate Shabbat to celebrate Shabbat,” Rachel Waxman, JHP campus fellow at Penn , said.
Shabbat, which begins Friday at sundown and ends at Saturday sundown, is the Jewish day of rest. It traditionally begins with a Shabbat dinner on Friday night. “It doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, you just kind of have dinner and clear your mind,” College junior Sam Werther said.
According to Waxman, observant Jews do a Shabbat dinner every week, but college students who regularly celebrate with their families at home often find it harder to find the time or fellow students whom they can celebrate with at college. However, S2K provides an easy opportunity for students to celebrate with friends.
At Penn, the 55 dinners varied greatly. Some were held at students’ houses and some at more public places, but they all consisted of friends getting together to share both a meal and Jewish traditions.
The dinner held at College senior Carly Blick’s apartment served as a chance for a group of friends to get together and enjoy one another’s company.
After prayers in Hebrew, the dinner proceeded to conversation varying from spring break plans to power outages due to Hurricane Sandy.
Blick’s dinner consisted of about 25 of her friends, and, although a Shabbat dinner is traditionally Jewish, Blick invited several of her non-Jewish friends to experience Shabbat for the first time.
Blick uses the event as a chance to share Judaism with her friends in a comfortable environment. “[JHP] makes it so you can get your friends involved,” she said. “It’s a really good way to bring people together.”
“It’s pretty cool to see the Jewish community at Penn come together,” first-year MLA graduate student Josh Luger said. “Even though they’re not going to be all in the same place, they’re all doing the same activity on the same night at the same time, and it’s pretty remarkable.”
Campus Rabbi Levi Haskelevich, who works at Penn’s Lubavitch House, added, “Our sages teach us that Judaism values hospitality and kindness even more than the interaction with the Divine. Which, in other words, is that your ultimate interaction with the Divine is when you reach out to your fellow person so that they’re not separate.”
Waxman had a slightly simpler view on the subject. “It’s just dinner, so why not?”
