My Sabbath days are rarely boring. My wife Shira and I often have guests for Shabbat meals on Friday nights and Saturday lunches. And just about every Friday night, Shira and I play Scrabble, a board game that is perfect for Sabbath observers: no electricity and no writing (another Sabbath prohibition). How do we keep score? We each have a big fat book where we match our score with the page number. If you get forty points, you turn forty pages. (Shira usually wins.)

Ari L. Goldman, writing about his Sabbath practices as an Orthodox Jew