Israel365 brings groups of young Christian leaders to Israel several times every year. They see everything: Jerusalem, the Gaza border, Judea and Samaria, the Knesset. They meet politicians and generals. They stand at sites they have read about their entire lives.
Ask them afterward what they remember most, and almost all of them give the same answer: Friday night dinner, sitting around a Shabbat table with a Jewish family they had never met before.
Not the history, not the politics, not the geography, though they remember all of that too. The thing that stays with them, what many of them still talk about years later, is the experience of sitting in a Jewish home on Shabbat: watching a family light candles, hearing the blessings, sharing the food, being welcomed in as if they had always belonged there.
Several of these young Christians have stayed in touch with their host families for years afterward — people they met for exactly one Shabbat meal, one evening, and the connection formed around that table was strong enough that it never broke.
This is the insight behind Israel365’s Shabbat Table Project. And this May, as part of the Rise Up with Israel campaign, you can help bring the power of Shabbat across America.
Rabbi Tuly Weisz, the founder of Israel365, has been watching this phenomenon for years. “You can go bowling with people,” he said recently. “You can do all sorts of fun things. You can have meetings after meetings after meetings. But one Friday night Shabbat meal together, and it’s completely different. It changes everything.”
The reason, he argues, is that Shabbat is unlike anything else in Jewish life — or in modern life, for that matter. For three thousand years it has been the heartbeat of the Jewish people: one day each week to put down the work, gather the family, and remember what actually matters. There is no better window into what Jews actually believe, what we actually value, how we actually live, than a Friday night Shabbat table. And for Christians who have spent years supporting Israel from a distance, experiencing that from the inside changes something.
It is not about trying to change each other. It is about learning from each other. And that learning, Rabbi Weisz has found, happens best around food, in a home, with candles burning.
In February, Israel365 hosted a unique Shabbat at Congregation Shearith Israel in Nashville, following the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. Two hundred people — Christians and Jews — celebrated Shabbat together. Among them were people who had traveled from Ohio, from Indiana, who had never met before that evening. Several of those people are now planning to host each other for Shabbat in their home states.
That is what one Friday night built.
The Shabbat Table Project takes that experience and turns it into infrastructure. Working through trusted relationships and personal introductions, Israel365 connects Christian leaders — pastors, ministry heads, civic and political leaders — with traditional Jewish families across America for authentic Shabbat experiences. This is a hand-matched, relationship-driven network built on the belief that the Jewish-Christian alliance runs on exactly this kind of trust — and that trust has to be built one table at a time.
The stakes are not small. It is traditional Christians and Jews, standing together, who will form the backbone of any serious pushback against antisemitism, against the radical secularism dismantling Western civilization, and against a world growing increasingly hostile to everything both communities hold sacred. That alliance cannot be built in a Zoom call or a press release. It is built at a Shabbat table, in someone’s home, over a meal.
Your support makes that possible. Give to the Rise Up with Israel campaign.
For Jewish families who open their homes, it is an act of kiddush Hashem, sanctifying G-d’s name, by sharing the beauty of Jewish life with the world. For the Christian guests, it is often a turning point: the moment when support for Israel stops being a theological position and becomes a personal commitment rooted in real friendship.
For Israel365, it is the foundation on which everything else is built.
Shabbat has been a gift the Jewish people have carried for three thousand years. The Shabbat Table Project is Israel365’s effort to share that gift, and in doing so, to build something that can carry this alliance through whatever comes next.
