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After nearly five months of practicing Sabbath, as the autumn darkness settled in earlier and more profoundly each week thanks to cloudy Pacific Northwest skies, my daughter suddenly insisted on lighting all the candles in the house one Friday evening.
Her newfound love of fire comes, in part, from recently learning to light matches by herself. But she has always loved the cozy, quiet light and smoky scent of candles. It is something alive and sensual, unlike our everyday lights that go on with just the flick of a switch.
On that October evening I was also experimenting with something new: Challah. Most weeks during the summer I had made sourdough bread for our Friday evening meal to accompany garden salads and fresh veggies, cheeses, and local wine. But work and life distracted me from starting the sourdough in time some weeks, and so the spongy, braided, egg-rich challah—traditional in Ashkenazi homes for Shabbat—seemed like a fun baking challenge.
With the braided dough resting on the counter, the orange light flickering into the kitchen from the dining room, and the smell of yeast and roasting pumpkins and onions and smoke mingling together, the my daughter insisted that we also use a table cloth and nice serving plates.
I watched as she set the table and chose the nicest hand-painted plates, setting aside a particular blue one for the chocolate-chip cookies she baked earlier in the day and her favorite bread basket for the challah. Upon finishing her work she smiled and said, “There, now we’re ready to welcome our special time.”
My ten-year-old has never read Abraham Heschel, or heard of the “architecture of holiness” or “cathedrals in time,” but she knows these things in the weekly rhythm of our house and our meals. And she is finding her own language and rituals to honor something vulnerable and precious that we invite in each week, beginning with our Friday evening meal.
Three weeks later, after the house was clean and the grocery’s bought, with the challah rising, and dinner partially cooked, I had to attend a zoom meeting. The late Friday afternoon session, which I knew would push right up against our Sabbath practice, proved unexpectedly and deeply stressful. Setting my computer aside and standing up, my legs felt like jelly from adrenaline and stress. And the ever-present ball of anxious nausea that lives between my stomach and spine seemed to have grown. I walked into the kitchen, uncovered the challah dough, and began rolling the strands to braid. Standing at the counter, the darkness gathering around the house, my legs still trembling and jelly-like, I started braiding the Challah.
As my hands worked the warm, tender dough, a wave of peace rippled out through my body, the knot of fear and anxiety and striving released. Week after week of stopping, marking time with the Sabbath has not taught my mind to stop. But these rhythms of challah and dinner have somehow, even when my mind is racing, conditioned some deep part of my body to rest.
I have read Heschel. I teach my students about cathedral in time and the architecture of holiness. But I didn’t know these realities in my own body until the weekly rhythms of a Friday meal and candle light, until days without laundry or chores or even work-related reading, until practicing sabbath together with my husband and children taught me to stop. Taught me to rest…without even trying.
grace & peace,
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