A Tale of Love and Challah
Eight o’clock on a Friday morning, two-and-a-half days before my daughter’s wedding, and here I am, in the basement of an Israeli hotel kitchen. Along with my dear friend and co-conspirator, Katja, I am assembling yeast and water, flour and sugar, honey, eggs, salt and oil to surprise the bride-to-be with freshly baked challah for Shabbat dinner that evening. We are doing it together, with the help of so many others because, just as it takes a village to raise a child, it can take a village to celebrate her marriage, too.
I considered it a small coup to have taken over a hotel kitchen in Israel. For the past several months, I had been upset that I couldn’t make my daughter Shabbat dinner filled with her favorite foods, including my challah, as I would have done had we been in America. But we were in Israel, guests at a hotel, gathering for the weekend before her wedding on Sunday, and who would be so bold as to ask a hotel chef, “Can I use your kitchen to make challah for 80 people on Friday?”