Jeremy:
Trisha reached out to us a couple of times I think on Instagram. And she really, really want an answer to this question, it’s a great question. We get it a lot and I wanted to just, I told her, “Hey, we want to do an episode on this,” because it’s going to take a little bit of time for us to tease this all the way out. But she’s asking about when to do the Shabbat, when to do a Shabbat dinner in particular. And she says, “My husband and I are going back and forth on what day we should pick. We are going back and forth between weeknights or Friday night. He thinks doing Wednesday is better because we have less things during the week, but I am stuck on Friday as a good regroup for the week. Do y’all have any insights or suggestions for this? Thanks so much, Tricia.” So love this question. I’m going to let Jeff, I’m going to let you take a crack at this first. And then I’ll kind of follow up with some thoughts, but this is a really good question.

Jeff:
Yeah. I would say, first of all, we’ve done kind of a couple of different things and I think you just have to think about the story of your family and all those different things. For the first couple years of us start practicing it, we had a very irregular life where I was traveling a lot. I mean, a regular schedule, traveling a lot speaking, all different things. So we didn’t just have like a day that wasn’t normal, like a weekday, which is not normal for most people. We also even had a season where we would change it every week. Now I don’t think that’s ideal and that’s why we don’t do it anymore. But I think you just have to give yourself grace just be like, “Man, am I even just like even entering into the spirit of rest? Am I even just attempting? Am I trying to resist the culture of productivity?”

That’s what it’s about. Just stay in the spirit of rest and Shabbat and that’s what I think 99% of it is. But then on the really practical side, I think we just realized that like man, consistency of day, first of all, gives our body kind of something to look forward to, our life something to look forward to. It feels a little bit more anchor, little bit more ritualistic. And then yeah. Then I would say pick a day that works best for you and for your family, what’s the best day for your family culture, and then what’s the best day for your family’s need for rest. Right? Because that’s really what you’re trying to craft backwards. And for us Friday feels like that. We don’t operate on a super Monday through Friday nine to five, but Fridays feel like an end of a week to us and a beginning of a week to us at some level, depending on how you define it. It just feels like that’s when it feels most powerful, most necessary.

Another one to two is like, what would I say is like, it feels the most in line with our culture’s ability to let us do it. Does that make sense? Like Friday night is kind of the cultural version of Shabbat of like I go watch a movie, I go to a bar, I get a drink. I hang out like Friday night, shoes off kind of thing, put your feet up. And so I think Shabbat has way more than that, but I think that allows us to even like step into it easier. So I don’t know if that’s helpful, but yeah. What would you say, Jeremy?

Jeremy:
Yeah, I think Trisha, you have to think about this in different stages and I like how Jeff’s describing the stages their family went through. Every family that has entered into sort of a Shabbat has had to go through these stages. So the first stage I think is kind of have to mirror where your family’s at and then hold those decisions with an open hand. So whatever you can do consistently, whatever does create that feeling of rest and really you feel like you can commit to, that tends to be the best day. But what we’ve noticed is that once people start to do that, they begin to live rhythmically. And when they begin to live rhythmically, they begin to notice things about different days of the week. And then as they do that, they begin to tweak when they do things.

And that’s when this tends to migrate its way to Friday night. I found that so consistently. Few people start it on Friday night, so don’t feel like you need to, but I have noticed that the more rhythmic people tend to live the more into a really, really rhythmic seven days, the more they sort of migrate. We did our Shabbat dinner on Saturday night for seven years, at least before we migrated to Friday night. And I don’t think we could have done it Friday night when we first started. That would have felt really weird to us and I’m kind of glad we did it Saturday night for so long. But man, now that we’ve learned to live really rhythmically and we’ve been doing it for a long time, Friday night just started feeling better.

And usually it’s an experiment. So what we’ll do is let’s say you’re doing yours Wednesday night and then you’re doing it for a couple of months and you’re like, “Hey, let’s just try a Friday night thing,” or, “Let’s try a Saturday night and see how that does. Let’s do that for like a month and see how that goes. Oh, that didn’t go too well back to Wednesday night,” or, “Whoa, that felt better. Why did that feel better?” And that’s why we really encourage you guys to have like weekly meetings where you’re having conversations about your rhythm so that as you’re making improvements, you can tweak things. You don’t feel like you’re making some kind of epic decision when-

Jeff:
For life.

Jeremy:
Yeah. You should just get it going and try to be consistent and then tweak. It’s easier to move like a car that’s moving or steer a car that’s moving. Same kind of principle. So yeah. Thank you so much for this question, Tricia. We just hope you guys really get a lot of blessing from getting to experience a Shabbat dinner.