Hillel and Chabad, the two Jewish organizations on campus, served a mass home-cooked Shabbat meal to more than 200 students and 20 professors and administrators on Friday night in Alumni Hall.
"In Judaism there's no better way to come together than over food," Chabad Rabbi Moshe Leib Gray said.
Shabbats are weekly dinners to commemorate the Jewish Sabbath. The event, called Shabbat 400, demonstrated unity between Hillel and Chabad by attempting to attract all 400 Jewish Dartmouth students to a single Shabbat meal.
In order to coordinate the event, close cooperation was required between the student executive boards of Hillel and Chabad. According to Gray, Hillel is more student-run and allows a broader form of Judaism while Chabad is more orthodox and traditional.
"Jewish students who organized and were the driving force behind the program made it into a Sabbath of Sabbaths," Rabbi Edward Boraz of Hillel said.
The event, according to Bret Tenenhaus '09, speaker-chair of the Chabad board, was also intended to attract Jewish students who do not participate in either Chabad or Hillel.
"We wanted to gather people in a more casual social setting, outside of larger religious holidays that their moms want them to go to," said Andrew Kaminski '09, executive vice president of the Hillel board.
This reason was precisely why Kendall Frank '10 decided to attend the event. Frank said she usually only attends Hillel for the high holidays and large events, such as Shabbat 400.
"I think they did a good job, and there's nothing else they could do to make the people who aren't here come," Frank said.
"We want to be a role model for students, showing them that even though there are two different philosophies and we disagree on issues, there are some that we can agree on," Gray said.
Besides targeting Jewish students, high-level college administrators such as Dean of College Dan Nelson were also invited. Nelson remarked that it was great to see Hillel and Chabad "working in friendship together."
"I think it was the right thing to do [inviting college administrators] because it shows respect for the College, the Jewish community showing their appreciation," Gray said.
Additionally, Boraz mentioned that students from non-Jewish backgrounds also attended the meal, and said that the evening was not only a celebration of the Jewish Sabbath, but also a celebration of diversity at Dartmouth.
Gray tied Shabat 400 to the historical event of the Jews receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, which will be celebrated this year on May 23. The unity represented at Shabbat 400, according to Gray, is a timely commemoration of the upcoming May 23 high holiday.
Maddy Kaye '10 said she would like to see events like this to continue, and contrasted the unity achieved at Dartmouth with other campuses where Hillel and Chabad are usually divided and even competitive against one another. Boraz also said he hopes that Shabbat 400 was "a beginning of things that will follow in this spirit."
One important aspect of the meal, according to Gray, was the focus on the kosher food standards. For this reason, Chani Gray, wife of Rabbi Gray, prepared all the food in their own kitchen with the help of students. The cooking began two weeks prior to the event.
The event was partly funded by programming board and Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia.
