Late Friday Night Service

These used to be part of the schedule for URJ and USCJ congregations right through the end of the last century and have gradually disappeared, with all area synagogues now beginning Kabbalat Shabbat at about 6-7 PM. There were reasons given for this, mostly a desire to make Shabbat more family than communal. Unfortunately, for many families shabbat began with candles and ended with yigdal, or perhaps TW3 or Dallas, depending on which decade. Without the service to follow supper, for a lot of people there is no shabbos worship. For my father’s year of Kaddish, the URJ affiliate had a service that I could get to after work/supper, but that stopped a couple of years before the pandemic. Our USCJ area affiliate restarted an 8PM service once monthly, which I attended after shabbos dinner this week. There are a lot of things congregations used to do in terms of music, choirs, speakers, programs that did better without the formality of Saturday morning. It was well attended, with some programming centered around Veterans Day for a speaker and honoring a few congregational vets and the Carlebach yahrtzeit to introduce those in attendance to some of his enduring repertoire, also with teaching about him by those too young to remember him in his prime.

Wonder why this concept, which was very useful at cementing congregational kehillah, tapered off as it did.