Taking Pause: Shabbat at Harvard

UPDATED: April 9, 2015, at 5:07 a.m.

It only takes a few moments of awkward loitering to catch the attention of Aaron J. Klein ’17. After a big hello, I’m ushered into a packed side room inside of Harvard Hillel, where a crowd is gathering before Shabbat dinner begins. After our mouths have been satisfactorily stuffed with cookies, Klein launches into a spirited explanation of the night’s services, but quickly stops himself. “Which of you are Jewish?” he asks.

One of my friends, here for the food, nervously speaks up. “I’m not,” she exhales. “I can leave if that’s a problem.”

Klein lets out a laugh and ushers her in for a hug. “I’m both amused and upset that you considered that,” he says. If Hillel is anything, it is open to all. As we move into the dining room we are swept up in the festivities and the sense of community. Klein plays the host, encouraging us to join the raucous singing and pointing out which foods we simply have to try. For us, it’s a fun evening highlighted by excellent cuisine. For others, it’s a time of greater significance.

The fourth of the Ten Commandments tells its followers they should no do any work on the Sabbath day. “Work,” here, doesn’t just refer to your 9-to-5, but is rather understood to mean any act creates or exercises control over one’s surroundings. This places a number of restrictions upon the observer, which range from not using electricity to not writing, and even to not tying knots.

As with any religious practice, levels of observance vary, and is most wholly observed by the Orthodox members of the Jewish faith. Orthodox students arriving on campus come fully prepared to continue their observance, but know that keeping faith on a secular campus may be different than it was back home.

COMING TO CAMPUS

Klein’s involvement in the Jewish community at Harvard began with last year’s Opening Days. Through a friend he heard that Hillel was hosting a falafel event, and after hitting it off with a fellow student interesed in linguistics (though he has now settled on neurobiology), he returned the next day for an ice cream social. The following day he was busy, and didn’t make it back to Hillel. Feeling bad, he reached out to the linguist. “It’s okay,” she laughed. “You don’t have to live here.” A pause. “Yet.”

But just as with many others, Hillel transformed into more than just a building or a place of worship. “It’s one of the places this year where I think I feel the most comfortable,” Klein says. “It just feels very much like home.” The establishment contains the dining hall and synagogue, but also has a library, study spaces, and a recording studio in the basement. It hosts speakers who come and discuss issues ranging from social, to political, to religious. For some it is a religious space, for some it is a social nexus, for some it is a source of identity. And for many, it is all three.

Growing up, observing Shabbat “wasn’t really a thing” in Klein’s family. But since arriving on campus he has become more observant, he explains. It’s a transformation he attributes to spending more and more time among other adherents to the Jewish faith. According to Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, co-founder of the Chabad House at Harvard, this is common. Shabbat has been “the vehicle through which many young Jews have entered or connected with the Jewish community,” he explains.

For others, Shabbat has been a constant throughout their lives. Joseph A.Z. Hostyk ’17 was born in Israel and moved to the States in 2001. Shabbat observance is less of a conscious choice and more of something that he has always known will be a part of him. For Hostyk, Shabbat is “a time to relax.” Because you know that you cannot do any work, it is a day that one can reliably spend enjoying the company of your peers. There is “no social networking, except in person,” he says.

Talia Weisberg ’17, a former Crimson columnist, was on Hillel’s executive board last year, and currently serves as the Orthodox student minyan president. Hailing from an Orthodox community, says she was tagged as a black sheep for attending a college with dorms. But regardless of what her old friends may think, she believes that she has only grown more observant since arriving in Cambridge.

She jokingly warns anyone who wants to avoid her to stay away from Hillel. “There’s one couch in the student lounge that I always say it has my permanent imprint because I’m always sitting on it.”

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

One advantage of the melting pot that is the Harvard Hillel is its power to connect students to Cambridge and Harvard as a whole. Through Hillel, many undergrads have the chance to meet and connect with graduate students, members of other nearby colleges,and Jews from the surrounding area. “I think that’s an experience a lot of people at Harvard don’t really get,” says Weisberg. “I don’t think a lot of people have grad students who are friends or just randos who live in Cambridge even as acquaintances.”

It isn’t uncommon for undergrads to venture out of the Harvard bubble because of the connections they make within the Jewish community on campus. “If you’re sitting next to someone praying with them, maybe they’ll invite you to Sabbath dinner Friday night,” Hostyk explains. “It’s just a very tight community.”

Weisberg discusses how she occasionally visits an Orthodox community in Brighton for Shabbat. The experience there is more akin to what she was used to growing up: a home cooked meal shared by a family around the table. But she relates experiencing separation sadness each time she ventures away from Hillel. The tight-knit community on campus can be hard to leave, she explains, especially on Friday nights when its ranks are bolstered by a number of students who make the trip to Hillel just once a week for Shabbat.

Harvard students can also be connected to the Jewish community outside of Hillel through Chabad House, another institution that caters to members of the Jewish faith on campus. Rabbi Zarchi and his wife moved to campus 17 years ago to found Cambridge’s Chabad House. Chabad opens its doors to Jewish students at Harvard, but also focuses on community programming for Jewish families in Cambridge, hosting weekly events such as “Mommy and Me” and “Friendship Circle,” a program where community members can volunteer to spend time with young adults with disabilities.

Alex B. Zaloum ’16 is the Hillel Orthodox student minyan Weekday Gabbai, but he also lives in the Chabad House. He smiles when asked the difference between the Hillel and Chabad experience, and responds, “Hillel is more of a tossed salad and Chabad is more of a stew.” Both are welcoming communities, but Chabad has a more streamlined directive. Whereas Hillel has minyans representing all sectors of the Jewish faith, Chabad has a more Orthodox lean.

Klein describes his own take on Chabad. “If you go to Chabad, there’s an ideology,” he says. “Chabad isn’t and doesn’t pretend to be pluralist.” And on Tuesdays, Chabad hosts Chinese food dinners for undergraduate students, “so I consistently go on Tuesdays,” Klein notes.

OBTRUSIVE OBSERVANCE

Observing Shabbat isn’t all about delicious meals, however. At its core it is a demanding practice, and because of this its practitioners can run into conflicts with institutions that are not structured around their beliefs. This is not to say that Harvard has a track record of being unresponsive or unhelpful in meeting the demands of its Shabbat-observant students. In fact, the opposite is often true.

It’s easy to switch final exams, and professors are very accommodating if observant students need to take their midterms on a different day, Klein explains. “People are very understanding and very willing to accept that.”

Inability to use electricity on one day of the week can be problematic for swiping into dorms, but Thayer, Hurlbut, and Mathews are all equipped with manual key access.

Aside from the technical challenges, the fact that Shabbat takes place on a Friday night means that some social programming is simply going to be off limits for the observant members of the student body. “I think for me, and for a lot of other students, the hardest part of keeping Shabbat on a college campus is the missed opportunities—you feel like there’s always so many things happening every weekend, and you can’t always take part in them,” Zaloum says.

While Harvard usually manages to do a good job reacting to the restrictions of the Jewish faith, some feel that more could be done ahead of time to be more accommodating. “I feel like there’s a frustration among students regarding Jewish holidays and that the University or certain clubs could put in more effort to not schedule things on those days where we can’t take part,” he adds.

Rabbi Zarchi provides an example of this difficulty. “Most recently what comes to mind is one student, very bright young man, very creative, appreciation for the arts,” he recalls. “And for him it’s a challenge that some of the best shows coming up are staged on the Sabbath.”

The Orthodox community itself is taking steps to provide alternative events for students during Shabbat. “One of the biggest things in terms of the progression that’s been happening lately is that there’s been a lot more social programming on Friday nights,” says Zaloum. Zaloum discusses the positive trend he’s noticed lately. In the past two years he has seen numbers, involvement, and engagement increase.

When he arrived, there was a sense of disparity.

“People were feeling like there were a lot of individuals in one place rather than a community,” he says. In part to address this issue, there was a push to have more organized gathering on Friday nights after Shabbat services end for the evening.

These gatherings fall on the more social end of the spectrum. “It’s very different than a Friday night dinner at Hillel, which can seem like, ‘Oh, this is something I might do at home,’” Hostyk says. “But having this get together on a Friday night—there’s nothing to it. It’s just a bunch of people hanging out on a Friday night.”

"A CULMINATION"

Looking around the Hillel dining hall on Friday night, it’s easy to see how this community can become front and center in a student’s life. The singing is joyfully disorganized and off key, the chatter is loud and welcoming, and the food is by far the best I’ve ever had on campus. And, most importantly, a quiet but powerful sense of meaning underlies the current of the room.

“Sometimes people are like, ‘How do you keep Shabbat?’ But I don’t understand how they don’t keep Shabbat,” Zaloum says. For some students, Shabbat provides a chance to step away from their hectic schedules and reflect and enjoy time with the Jewish community at

Harvard and beyond. For Rabbi Zarchi, the most moving experience he has on Shabbat is when he observes the “faces of students sitting around the Shabbat table who maybe have never experienced Shabbat and see how happy and at home and at peace they are.” Shabbat, he says, “is sort of a culmination... [that] gives perspective to the week ahead.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: April 9, 2015

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Joseph A.Z. Hostyk ’17 moved to the United States in 2011. In fact, he moved to the U.S. in 2001.