by Jan Berlfein Burns (Los Angeles, CA)
One day friends who lived in the San Fernando Valley invited our family to a Shabbat dinner. It was a lovely invitation, but their home was a major schlep from our house on the west side of LA, especially taking into consideration Friday night traffic. After discussing it with Rick we decided for the sake of a Shabbat dinner with friends, we could deal with the traffic for one night. We accepted their invitation, and I volunteered to bake and bring the homemade challah for which I was well known in some circles.
As Friday approached and I began to plan my day around challah prep, I realized that I had a problem. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Friday mid-day and I couldn’t change it. I needed at least four hours from start to finish for making challah and I’d have to start it after I got home from my doctor’s appointment. I didn’t think I’d have enough time to prep, let the dough rise twice and then bake the challah before driving to the valley for Shabbat dinner.
As I considered my options, I felt like Moses and the Israelites in the Passover story when they were fleeing from Egypt. Though I wasn’t being pursued by Pharaoh, I still would be on the move and needed time and a warm place for my bread to rise. If I made the challah start to finish at home, by the time it came out of the oven the Friday night traffic northbound on the 405 freeway would’ve doubled my drive time to the valley and we’d be late for the kiddush and motzi (blessing of the challah) before Shabbat dinner.
That’s when I had my aha moment. Like the Israelites, I’d bring my bread dough with me on my journey to the San Fernando Valley. Our family wouldn’t be walking or trying to escape on the back of a camel. We’d be driving in a comfortable car that had a floor heater. The car heater would provide a perfect warming environment for the second rise of my bread dough. The Israelites had no such luxuries. They ended up with matzo instead of challah.
Early that afternoon after I returned home from my doctor’s appointment, I began prepping my challah dough. Routine took over as I gathered all the ingredients needed to make bread. I filled a measuring cup with warm water, poured in a package of yeast with a dash of sugar and set it aside until the yeast began to bubble up. I melted two sticks of butter and put it aside to cool while I beat the eggs, sugar and salt in my mixer.
Sometimes in the quiet of my kitchen while I prepare the dough for challah, I think about my grandmothers and great grandmothers and wonder what life was like for them when they prepared challah for Shabbat. Though I didn’t know much about life in the shtetl, I felt pretty certain that they never had to figure out how to transport dough from one shtetl to another as it was rising. I admit, mine was a modern day, first world problem. And I thought the car floor heater was a pretty ingenious, first world solution.
As it was, neither of my grandmothers actually taught me how to bake challah. That I learned from a shiksa in college who had baked the most delicious challah following a recipe she got from a hippie cookbook. But still, I liked to conjure up romantic connections to my ancestors as I moved about in my kitchen.
Rick and I left home with plenty of time so if we hit traffic the extended drive time would also give the braided loaf of challah sufficient time for the second required rise.
The drive from West LA into the San Fernando Valley on a Friday afternoon on the 405 freeway was as expected, slow-going with bumper-to-bumper traffic. But on this afternoon it didn’t bother me. Unlike my ancient forebears we had the heater turned up high in our comfortable car. We’d brought our bread dough along for the ride and it was rising comfortably covered on a baking sheet resting on the floor of the car. Lucky us, we wouldn’t have to settle for matzo.
Millenia of challenges and conflicts taught our people to be adaptable while still holding fast to our core beliefs and traditions. In a nod to that sensibility, I had devised a creative challah-rising workaround. By the time we arrived at our friends’ home the dough was ready to go directly into the oven for its final baking. When the other guests arrived, our hostess presented, fresh out of the oven, my beautifully baked and braided challah. Gathering around the dining room table, we joined together to recite the blessing over the challah, a prayer in which we thank God, who brings forth bread from the earth. In this moment, together we connected to our lineage and welcomed in Shabbat.
Jan Berlfein Burns began writing in her sixties and is the author of the book, March of the Living ~ Our Stories, a collection of war time stories from Holocaust survivors. She has also had her own memoir stories published in Good Printed Things, 34th Parallel, JLJ, Jewish Journal and read in theatre performance at The Braid. She is a photographer, genealogist and grandmother too. To learn more about Jan and her work, visit: https://rememberourstories.com
The Jewish Writing Project 