zayl ziaxr zltz Shabbat Evening Service
.d¨N ©M z` ©x §w ¦l i ¦cFc d¨k §l :d¨l §A ©w §p z ¨A ©W i¥p §R
Come, my friend, to greet the bride, to welcome in the Shabbat eve.
The form of the Shabbat evening service has evolved over the centuries. The earliest components date back to the Jerusalem Temple. Psalm 93 was the daily Psalm chanted by the Levites in the Temple on ‘the sixth day’of the week (Mishnah Tamid 7:4). The heading of Psalm 92, ‘a Psalm to sing for the Shabbat day’, indicates when it was read in the Biblical period. These two Psalms alone introduced the Shabbat in the Sephardi tradition. In Safed in the sixteenth century, mystical circles took up the Talmudic tradition of going into the fields to greet the Shabbat bride. They introduced the reading of six Psalms (95–99, 29), corresponding to the six days of the week. To these they added the song L’chah dodi , ‘Come my friend, to greet the bride’, with its messianic yearnings. We added the zemirot , the Shabbat table hymns, in the last edition of Forms of Prayer, and chavurah groups introduced the singing of the mystical hymn, yedid nefesh , ‘Beloved of the soul’, to set the mood for Shabbat.
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