What Makes a Jewish Home Jewish welcomes Passover?
An elderly Jewish informant in Barbara Myerhoff’s book, Number Our Days, tells a story which he attributes to Martin Buber to prove to his community that a ceremony whose authenticity some doubted was indeed the real thing. “It tells here about two men who are worried about the holiness of the Sabbath. ‘What is it that makes something holy?’ they ask. They decide to make a test to see what happens when they have Sabbath on a weekday. So they make the Sabbath in the middle of the week, everything they do right, and it feels the same way as on Saturday. This is alarming, so they take the problem to the rabbi to explain. Here is what the rabbi tells them: ‘If you put on Sabbath clothes and Sabbath caps it is quite right that you had a feeling of Sabbath holiness. Because Sabbath clothes and Sabbath caps have the power of drawing the light of the Sabbath holiness down to earth.’ ” Sources: http://www.crosscurrents.org/ochsv.
