Shabbat in the Obama Administration

ERIC LESSER LOOKED out over the containers of Thai carryout, the bottles of wine and the Shabbat candles. “Should we do Shalom Aleichem?” he asked, and the whole table began singing a warbled but hearty version of the song that welcomes Shabbat. In Lesser’s group house of Obama staff assistants, Friday-night Shabbat dinners have become something of a ritual, a chance to relax and spend a few hours with friends, reflecting on the week. Sometimes it’s just the four housemates, sometimes it’s a large group from the campaign trail or the White House, sometimes it’s friends from college and people who happen to be in town.

Once it was even their bosses — “the Bosses Dinner,” they still call it. David Axelrod, Lesser’s boss, was out of town, but others came: Jake Levine’s boss, Carol Browner, the White House coordinator of energy-and-climate policy; her husband and her sister; and Ziskend’s boss, Jared Bernstein, the vice president’s chief economist, along with his wife and their two young kids. Linda Douglass, then the director of communications for the White House office of health reform, was also there.

Around the table on a late September night, the weekend of Yom Kippur, were the four housemates along with Samantha Tubman….

At the end of every Friday dinner, the tradition is that everyone goes around the table and says something from the past week for which they’re grateful. Over Whole Foods gingerbread and brownies, Lesser looked at his watch and announced, “O.K., we’ve got to do this and then get out of here.” They all had other friends they were trying to see that night.

….

… Lesser talked about going home for Rosh Hashanah and how it was nice to be reminded that “there are people there who I care about and who care about me and who don’t care about thestimulus package in Washington.”

Finally, they all finished saying what they were grateful for, and the group filed out of the house into the misty night….

via All the Obama 20-Somethings – NYTimes.com.

I enjoyed this little Easter Egg about Jewish holidays in the Obama Administration. Very nice.