“I’m sitting next to Mommy!”
“No, I am! It’s my turn—you sat there last week!”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-huh!”
You wearily try to break up the fight at the table while your husband just as wearily tries to sing “Shalom Aleichem.” No one else joins in.
Then the next fight starts. “Eew, someone put gefilte fish on my plate! I don’t like gefilte fish!”
And on and on, as you think to yourself, How much longer until bentching time?
Sounds familiar? I thought so. Because all too often, the beautiful Shabbos seudah we try so hard to conduct just slips out of our grasp, amid all the chaos and fighting and seat-finding and guest-small-talking going on around us…
But don’t lose hope—you can still have the Shabbos table of your dreams! You just have to read How to Run a Successful Shabbos Table, by Rabbi Dovid Kaplan. In this book, Rabbi Kaplan, a veteran mechanech and popular author, presents ideas and techniques that can, with just a little preparation, effort, and forethought, help transform the Shabbos table into something your whole family will look forward to each week.
Could such a thing really be? Read the book, and then you can answer the question yourself!
Click here to purchase online.
Below is an excerpt from this handy—and very helpful—little book:
WHAT TO DO AT THE TABLE
Keeping everyone’s interest at the table is extremely challenging, especially when there are children and teens of different ages. The goal is to have some sort of interaction which is Torah-based, but achieving that is not always so easy. Discussing the parshah may interest some and not others. Often the ideas presented may bore the people at the table. Telling stories is good, but you may not always know a story, or the ones you do know are already familiar to the audience. There is also the disadvantage that stories do not necessarily lead to conversations which everyone can be involved in. Keep Reading…
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