This Friday night should be different.
Yes, I know we have just finished asking why these nights are different from all other nights.
For six close, dear friends, however, this upcoming Friday night has taken what feels like an eternity to arrive.
The six of us you see came together for years of Shabbat dinners at the home of our host couple, because one of our hosts had suffered a debilitating stroke making it difficult at times to leave her home.
Yet Susan and her husband Bob welcomed us to the table through seasons of hot humid Baltimore nights when the air was so thick our late night walk home seemed like we were jogging through water. Then there were the opposite nights of bitter cold, slippery black ice and sometimes snow.
My wife Lisa, myself and our friends Glenna and Lenny would make the walk go by quickly catching up on our lives, our children and grandchildren.
With the plague of Covid, we have not been together for our Shabbat dinner for a year. We are all four vaccinated twice. We are all so ready to meet one another at the same table, not through a weekday Zoom, but instead renewing what over the years had become the welcome of Shabbos into our week.
Our hosts would provide an entry, our friends would bring the soup and the salad and we’d bring the dessert and the wine. On occasion other friends would happily join us.
Sometimes one does not realize how sacred time can be, especially when living through it.
We did not know, the six of us, that it would be a year that we’d hear our friend Bob so beautifully lead us in Kiddish. We did not know how desperately we’d miss the taste of Glenna’s soup or fulfillment of a piece of potato kugel.
How we all missed hearing Bob’s loving tribute to his wife Susan every Friday singing, “You are so beautiful to me” as almost a second verse to Eishet Chayil.
We’ve been living in not the new normal so much as the abnormal for the past year, more likely secluded than together.
I am so blessed to have the love and friendship of my wife Lisa. That same love is held between our friends.
It’s going to be wonderful to share our Shabbat with our chevra, picking up where we left off, six friends who have been through a great together looking forward not backward with the blessing of our friendship as our guide.
A year.
Thank God, we’ll be back together.
