Renowned businesswoman and heiress Ivanka Trump and her husband, real estate mogul Jared Kushner, praised the benefits of observing Shabbat in the March issue of Vogue magazine, saying it is the one day a week they spend all their time together as a family.
“From Friday night to Saturday night we don’t do anything but hang out with one another. We don’t make phone calls,” Ivanka said. “It’s an amazing thing when you’re so connected to really sign off. And for [our daughter] Arabella to know that she has me, undivided one day a week? We don’t do anything except play with each other, hang out with one another, go on walks together. Pure family time.”
Kushner added that his wife learned to cook so she could make Sabbath meals. He said, “for Friday, she’ll make dinner for just the two of us, and we turn off our phones for 25 hours.”
Jared and Ivanka dated for two years before getting married in 2009. Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Kushner, and her father, business tycoon Donald Trump, recently joked that while he didn’t plan on having a Jewish daughter, he was “very glad it happened.”
"It’s been such a great life decision for me", she reflected. "I am very modern, but I’m also a very traditional person."
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it."
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).