Shabbat

Shabbat is both a weekly boundary and a measure of changing belonging in the book. Its Friday-night meals, restrictions, and closing ceremony first draw Judah Loeb into the Lerner family’s home, then expose his uncertainty about where he fits, and later become practices through which the family continues after Chaim Lerner is gone. The observance is not presented as a simple test of belief: secular characters preserve inherited rituals, while the same rituals acquire new emotional weight as relationships and responsibilities shift.

A Friday-night invitation

Judah’s first Shabbat dinner with the Lerners begins with an assumption he does not yet know how to make. Chaim invites him to join the family, including Michal, after Michal explains that she has not yet asked him. She signals that she wants Judah to accept, and he does. At the end of September, dressed in his only white shirt and black dress pants, he brings a bottle of wine bought just before the grocery stores near Mount Scopus close for Shabbat. The small preparations make the invitation feel like entry into a household as much as attendance at a meal.

Michal arrives by bicycle, and the journey itself traces a boundary between places and ways of life. She pedals with Judah downhill through Wadi Joz, turns into an alley, and brings him through an arch into Geula. When Judah asks about continuing to ride, she tells him that people do not like street riding on Shabbat. They proceed on foot through a neighborhood crowded with families heading to synagogue. Michal greets people there warmly; her bicycle belongs to the neighborhood, while Judah realizes that he is the stranger despite his dark clothes and knit yarmulke. Shabbat is thus registered through a practical restriction, but also through recognition: Michal is at home in this religious enclave, and Judah is not.

At the apartment, Zehava Lerner welcomes Judah personally, and the expected gathering of prominent guests proves to be only the four of them: Chaim, Zehava, Michal, and Judah. The modest living room and the familiar smells of chicken, challah, and candle wax recall Judah’s childhood Friday nights. Chaim and Michal drink bourbon; Zehava serves Judah petel, seltzer with a strong flavor shot. The dinner makes the Lerner household intimate rather than public. Its force comes from the ordinary details of a family evening, even as Judah arrives conscious of Chaim’s reputation and Zehava’s public position.

Boundaries, expectation, and welcome

The Shabbat rhythm also gives social misunderstandings a sharper edge. After Chaim tells Judah that he and Zehava would like to meet again, Judah assumes Michal has been invited to a later dinner. She is surprised and irritated to learn of it, and he understands that he has mistaken Chaim’s invitation for a shared plan. The episode turns on a gap between Judah’s hopeful interpretation and Michal’s actual knowledge. A meal that had seemed to promise a natural continuation of their closeness instead reveals how little he knows about the boundaries of her relationship with the family.

Those boundaries are not identical for everyone. In Geula, the community’s Shabbat practices shape movement through public space: cars are forbidden, while strollers can be pushed because an eruv treats the enclosed area as a single house. Judah later walks through the same Haredim neighborhood on Shabbat, amid mothers pushing double and triple strollers and children moving in groups. He feels he belongs neither with them nor with secular Israelis. The physical permission granted to the strollers contrasts with his own sense of exclusion: communal rules make a shared space possible for residents, but do not automatically make an outsider part of it.

The book places these scenes alongside Jerusalem’s mixed public life. On a Friday afternoon, an outdoor café on Ben Yehuda Plaza fills with tourists, Israeli couples, Haredim, priests, Arabs, and shoppers preparing for Shabbat. Judah and Charlie wait there while Hannah Loeb and Michal interview a would-be suicide bomber. The crowded plaza is at once a place of ordinary leisure and a city living with recent bombings; Friday’s approach to Shabbat does not suspend the surrounding danger. The time of rest and preparation sits inside, rather than outside, the political and personal pressures of the story.

The closing ceremony and Chaim’s household

Shabbat’s ending becomes especially revealing during Havdalah, the ceremony bidding farewell to the day. Chaim leads it with a kiddush cup and sings in a pleasing baritone. Judah holds the braided candle, careful not to drip wax on the Persian carpet. Zehava stands silent and still through much of the ritual, leading Judah to assume that she has lost whatever religious faith she once had. But when Chaim reaches the final stanza and the song to Elijah the prophet, she joins in vigorously and harmonizes with Judah. Her participation complicates the easy distinction between religious observance and secular identity: she may be quiet through the ceremony, but she knows the song and enters it fully at the end.

The ritual also gives Chaim a way to acknowledge what cannot be repaired by a gesture of help. When Judah offers help, Chaim says that telling stories helps him somewhat, while Zehava finds it less helpful. He then turns the conversation toward Havdalah. The ceremony does not resolve their grief, and Zehava’s silence remains visible, but its familiar sequence brings the three of them together for a shared act. Later, Chaim explains that spiritual life can be understood as inquiry, drawing on a passage in the Zohar about God’s name as a question. That theological account resonates with the book’s treatment of ritual: inherited forms are not presented as proof that uncertainty has disappeared, but as occasions in which people continue to search and participate.

Ritual after Chaim

After Chaim is no longer alive, the responsibility for leading Friday-night ritual falls to Yoav Lerner. At a Shabbat table at Zehava’s home, he sits at its head, wears a colorful Yemenite yarmulke, lifts the silver Kiddush cup, and begins the blessing. Chaim and Zehava had been secular Jews, but their household had retained traditional Friday-night practices; while Chaim was alive, he had led them as the man of the house. Yoav’s taking up the cup marks a concrete transfer of responsibility. The ritual continues, but the person who once gave it its place in the family is absent.

Judah watches Michal watching Yoav. At their first meal together, the two had seemed uncomfortable with one another: they avoided touching, and Michal often rolled her eyes at his opinions. Now, as Yoav chants in a confident tenor, she appears warmed and relaxed. The scene does not settle the history of their marriage, but it makes the family gathering legible in a new way. The ritual gives Judah a moment in which to observe the couple without reducing their relationship to its earlier signs of estrangement. Charlie, now closer to the family, also watches Michal, adding another quiet uncertainty to the table.

A practice that outlasts the first home

Shabbat recurs in Judah’s later life in a changed setting. After returning from Israel, he is drawn by Liora to services every Friday night and then to home-cooked dinners of challah, kiddush wine, and roast chicken. He enjoys the services to some extent, but hesitates to call himself religious when Michal suggests that he has become so. The hesitation matters: the book does not describe a clean conversion or a sudden certainty. Instead, the familiar components of Friday night return in a new relationship, and Judah finds himself participating without claiming a settled identity.

This later practice stands against the loneliness of his first Shabbat journey through Jerusalem. At the beginning, he is a visitor who needs Michal to guide him across neighborhoods and into a family home; years later, Friday services and dinner have become part of his life with Liora. Across these settings, Shabbat gathers people around meals and ritual while leaving their differences intact. Its continuity is not that every household believes the same thing, or that ceremony heals loss. It is that the cup, the blessing, the food, and the repeated meeting remain available as forms of connection after the people who once led them have changed or disappeared.