Each Friday night, I light Shabbat candles.
Generally, they burn for three to four hours, giving me pause from the workweek, and the ability to focus on what it means to stop, to relax, to step away from the hustle bustle of every day and to give my brain and body a break from the norm.
I started this tradition a dozen years ago, while I was a fellow with the Jewish Organizing Initiative (now JOIN for Justice). We had a retreat focusing on the importance of Shabbat and stepping back in order to step forward.
My senior year in high school, I performed the havdallah service each Saturday night, marking the end of Shabbat. I had grown used to doing it as part of my high school in Israel experience and found it to be a profound and beautiful tradition marking the return to every day life. Upon going to college, where lighting candles was forbidden in the dorms, I was forced to end this tradition and have yet to pick it back up again.
Several years after graduating college, and having searched for a meaningful Jewish connection, lighting candles each Friday night became a beacon of sorts, lighting my way to reflection and reconnection.
There is a Roald Dahl novel that I read in high school called "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More." One of the stories was about a man who could tell the future by staring at a candle. Of course, I tried, but it didn't work.
My candles simply burn. They burn away stress, anxiety, fear and self-recrimination and replace these feelings with a sense of calm, of looking forward to the last puff of smoke from the candlesticks, usually marking the time I should be in bed.
I light candles each Shabbat not out of a sense of religiosity, but as an obligation to myself to remember to take time out for self care, for meditation, for relaxation. Also, candles are pretty. There's always that.
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