Why do you have guests?

I hope that you all had a wonderful Shabbos!  Here it was beautifully sunny and warm, and just waking up to sun shining in the window is enough to get my day off to a great start. 🙂

Today we did something we haven’t done for quite some time – we had two families for Shabbos lunch.  We’ve had periods of having a table full of unrelated guests, which has its own appeal, but we’ve decided in the past that it’s not the way we most enjoy hosting.  At this point in our lives, we prefer to have just one family at a time or one to three singles, so we have time to better get to know them.  But both of these families are small, knew each other, and this was the only week before Pesach that worked out for each of them.  So because at the point I invited them I wasn’t inviting anyone past this Shabbos (from here on I’m going on a week by week basis, in case I give birth early again), I thought it would be good to have them both rather than not be able to have one of them for a number of weeks.  

It was a mistake.  It was a nice meal – a very nice meal, actually – but doing this was a good reminder of why I prefer to have one family at a time.  My ds10 really liked it, and said how interesting the meal was (“there wasn’t one minute with no one talking!”), but I found the non stop conversations and cross conversations unrelaxing.  Today, I didn’t have the usual warm feeling I usually have when we say good bye to our guests, even though nothing could have gone more smoothly.  It’s strange to spend three hours with people and not feel much more connected to them when they leave than when they came, but that’s how it was.  They were all great people, but the conversation jumped so fast from one thing to another that there wasn’t really time to discuss anything  – a couple of comments on one thing, and boom – off someone went on a different tangent.  I like stimulating discussion, but at this speed, nothing got to the point of being stimulating! 

I think a lot of this depends on who you are and who your guests are, and there are plenty of families we could have had together and not been left with this feeling.  Today it was almost like a competition to try to get a word in!  I was thinking that though I very much enjoy having company, I don’t enjoy ‘entertaining’, which is what lunch today was about; I find it draining, shallow, and superficial.  (To clarify, I’m not referring to having the needy over; rather to people we invite to better get to know them.)  To me, it’s the connecting and fellowship with others that makes it worth my time and effort to open my home.  Without that, I feel like I’ve just been a vehicle for people to enjoy a free meal. 

We tend to assume that everyone invites guests for the same reason, for the mitzva.  But it’s really not true.  Inside, we all have different motivations and goals, and like with everything, the more we’re in touch with what our needs and abilities are, the more productively we can use our energies.  This has been a good opportunity for me to mentally clarify my goals in hosting guests, and clarity will serve me well in the future when I invite people over!

Avivah 

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