Shabbat

Shabbat in the letters is at once sacred time, family routine, and a lost measure of intimacy. The speaker recalls Saturdays with Michel Sommo and Yifat through their shared meals, games, walks, and small domestic rituals; set against their present estrangement, those memories become an appeal for tenderness and a reminder that the family’s former closeness cannot simply be resumed.

Dates and Epistolary Setting

The correspondence is framed by two Shabbat-related dates in Jerusalem: one heading places a letter on the eve of the Holy Sabbath, 8 Elul 5736 (3 September 1976), and marks it for delivery by hand; another places a letter at the conclusion of the Holy Sabbath, 9 Elul 5736 (4 September 1976), to be delivered personally by special messenger. These headings place the writing within a concentrated span of consecutive days and give Shabbat a place in the letters’ material as well as emotional setting.

The Family’s Shabbat Rituals

The speaker’s recollection makes Shabbat palpable through repeated acts of care. On Saturday mornings, Michel brought orange juice and strained cocoa to bed. He sat Yifat on the marble shelf beside the bathroom basin, worked shaving cream onto both their cheeks, and raced her at toothbrushing while the speaker made breakfast. The family also walked to the wadi below the monastery and recited Grace after meals together on the balcony, a trio whose routine gave ordinary domestic life a ceremonial shape.

Play and shared invention belonged to the same rhythm. During Shabbat afternoons, they rested among scattered evening papers, exchanged pillow fights and animal and bird fables, and built the Temple from toy bricks. Dominoes formed the Chamber of Hewn Stone, while colored buttons from the speaker’s sewing basket stood for priests and Levites. Michel’s Parisian stories and imitations of singing clochards could make both adults laugh until they wept. The remembered Sabbath thus gathers worship, play, rest, and humor into one recurring family world.

Discipline, Tenderness, and Memory

One episode complicates the warmth of that world. After Yifat used the speaker’s lipstick to color a map of the ten tribes of Israel hanging above Michel’s desk, Michel locked her on the balcony to punish her and stopped his ears with cotton wool so that her crying would not soften him. He also forbade the speaker to comfort her, invoking a biblical text about sparing the rod. But when Yifat’s weeping abruptly ceased and silence followed, Michel hurried outside, cuddled her, and folded her small body inside his sweater. The remembered scene holds sternness and tenderness together: the ritual order of family life could enforce punishment, yet the child’s silence broke through it.

Shabbat as Lost Intimacy

The letter’s detailed evocation of these Saturdays stands against the speaker’s present experience of silence and exile from Michel. In the surrounding passage, the speaker imagines arriving at his door with a suitcase, a plastic bag, a teddy bear for Yifat, and gifts for Michel, while fearing that he would shut the door. The old Saturday mornings—Yifat creeping between her parents beneath the blanket, the shared breakfast, the walks, and the balcony prayers—are not presented as an easily recoverable routine. Their abundance sharpens the absence: Shabbat preserves the memory of a family’s intimacy, while the letter’s appeal asks whether the tenderness once shown to Yifat might also be extended to the speaker.