The Sabbath Meal

As you know, Ryan and I have been visiting a variety of churches in our new area, looking for a place to call home. We visited a church a couple of weeks ago that was launching its fall programs, and one of them caught our eye!

The truth of it is, for this season of our lives, it's not really feasible to commit to a long term small group or study. Our schedule is too varied and our hours are too unpredictable. We would hate to give our word to being part of something and then have to miss or leave a good number of the meetings to be available for work.

We are okay with that, because we have several other ways to feed our souls with study and fellowship with co-workers. But we were excited to see that with this fall program launch, they had a short term study. It just had four meetings on the schedule, and the topic intrigued us!

The class is about some of the feasts or meals in the Bible. Each class offers teaching time that explains the practical and spiritual aspects of the meal - and then there is an ACTUAL meal, too!

They limited the class size so they could space out the tables appropriately, but we were able to sign up, and last week we went to the first class. It was about the Sabbath meal.

The class was also an introduction to the many places (over 700!) in Scripture where meals or eating are mentioned and why it seems to be an important theme.

Our teacher explained that the Sabbath means to cease, desist, and rest. We know from the Creation account that God rested from His work on the seventh day and He calls us to rest (body and soul) as well.

They taught us that the Sabbath is observed from a few minutes before sunset on Friday evening until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night. It's ushered in by lighting candles and reciting a blessing. It's closed on Saturday evening with another blessing.

She gave us the words (Hebrew and English) to the blessings, and we read them (in English) together.

Since part of the Hebrew Sabbath rest meant not working to prepare - or even warm up - food, the meals had to be able to be consumed cold.

I took a few pictures of our night...want to see?

This was our table. (She said it might not be so fancy at every class, but she wanted the full effect for the first night.)

Our table ended up not being full, but it sure was pretty!

This was our meal! (It came to us already plated and oh so pretty.)

We were also given the recipes, so don't be overly impressed that I know so much about what is in each thing. I'm not THAT good! :) The salad is an Israeli salad with chickpeas, feta, and fresh mint. It was a cold salad - similar to a pasta salad. It actually reminded me of a Dashing Dish salad I made once. The salad had cherry tomatoes, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, chickpeas, feta. mint, olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper. It was quite delicious, actually.

The wrap was a curry chicken wrap with coconut milk yogurt. It was a mix of savory and sweet and I really liked it. But the recipe is pretty intricate, so I don't know that I would make it. It had chicken (cold), basmati rice (I don't even know what that is), coconut milk yogurt, mayo, salt, curry powder, turmeric, coriander, cinnamon, raisins, salad greens, and the wrap itself.

It was a very filling meal, and it didn't feel like cold leftovers - which, I guess, has always been my mental image of a Sabbath meal.

We also had Challah bread and grape juice (which she called wine, but thankfully for this non-drinker, it was really just grape juice).

I am so, so glad we took this class. It was really interesting to learn a few new things about the Sabbath meal and get a taste of what one might be like.