Kabbalat Shabbat, "receiving the Sabbath", is the Jewish service that welcomes the Sabbath at its onset on Friday evening, recited before the regular evening prayer of Maariv. Unlike the ancient framework of the daily services, it is a comparatively late creation, composed in the sixteenth century by the Kabbalists of Safed in the land of Israel, a circle of mystics who gave Jewish practice some of its most enduring devotional forms. They imagined the arrival of the Sabbath as the coming of a bride and a queen, and went out into the fields at dusk to greet her with song, an image that shapes the whole service.
The heart of Kabbalat Shabbat is a sequence of psalms celebrating God's kingship and the rejoicing of creation, culminating in the hymn Lecha Dodi, "Come, my beloved, to meet the bride," composed by the Safed Kabbalist Shlomo Alkabetz. Its refrain calls the worshippers to go out and welcome the Sabbath, and at its final verse the congregation traditionally rises and turns toward the door to receive the Sabbath as she enters, enacting the mystical greeting in the body of the community.