“Oh, I thought you were saying chauffeur,” Dan replied with a chuckle. “You had me worried there for a second.”
What a year it had been for Dan! One minute his wife is camping out in the front yard with nothing but a walkie-talkie for protection; the next she’s announcing that she’s adopting a computer baby; the next she’s living in a monastery; the next she’s searching for an ancient instrument with which to mark the beginning of the New Year . . . in September.
We were just weeks away from finishing the project, and by this point I’d abandoned any pretense of having it together. I let my big, scary hair run wild. I ignored the extra eleven pounds I’d gained since the start of the project and reverted to my peasant skirts for comfort. I locked myself in my office for hours at a time to write, struggling to finish the book by deadline. I neglected the blog. I ran around town, collecting ingredients and supplies for my final few tasks, unconcerned with the crazed, frantic appearance that prompted one friend to ask, “Should you maybe consider taking a break for a month or two, maybe pick this up after Christmas?”
A break this close to the end was beyond the realm of possibility. I had that end-of-the-semester feeling, the kind that inspires you to pull three all-nighters in a row if that’s what it takes to just be finished, to turn in that last paper, get in your car, and drive the heck home.
Needless to say, our sex life suffered.
As did our social life.
As did just about every other life we might have once had.
On top of all of this, back in August a reporter for Slate.com had called me up for an interview and published a nice, long online article about my year of biblical womanhood. The article generated something like one thousand comments, a front-page feature, no small amount of controversy, and the interest of several major new outlets across the U.S., the UK, Australia, and even Israel.1 Before I knew it, my in-box was bulging with interview requests from the Guardian, the Toronto Star, the Times of London, Huffington Post, the BBC, a newspaper in Tel Aviv, Oprah’s blog, and—this is the one that made me scream like a little girl—NPR.
That’s right. Ira Glass wanted to know about my year of biblical womanhood! Well, actually, the producer of the weekend edition of All Things Considered with Guy Raz wanted to know about my year of biblical womanhood . . . but close enough.
I drove to the radio station on the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga campus for the interview, trembling all the way and praying I’d manage to speak in complete sentences. Let me tell you, nothing will make you forget just how fat and dysfunctional and asexual you’ve become more than hearing your own voice between a segment on North American oil reserves and a plea for listener donations on National Public Radio.
As it turns out, not everyone likes the idea of a girl following the Bible literally for a year. Online, a shared hatred of the project developed between two unlikely groups: atheists who assumed I was a naive religious nut doing this as an act of piety to glorify the patriarchal elements of Scripture, and evangelicals who assumed I was a raging liberal feminist doing this as an act of rebellion to make the Bible and those who love it look stupid.
“An affront to all who hold dear,” one person called it.
“An embarrassment,” said another.
“A pathetic waste of space and time on the planet.”
“A mockery of God and Scripture.”
“Yet another example of the dangers of religion and the idiocy of those who subscribe to it.”
You would think all this negative attention would have deflated me, or at least diluted some of the mania with which I was tackling the final days of the project, but I noticed that this time around, the online hate didn’t penetrate me the way it had before, back when I first announced the project. It wasn’t that I’d cut myself off from my feelings or convictions; it was just that, through the practices of contemplative prayer and meditation, I’d finally developed a strategy for controlling them. When I felt my spirit begin to grow volatile, rocked by the colliding waves of criticism and praise, I’d take a moment to close my eyes and meditate on a psalm or a word or a prayer until I found equilibrium. Time and again I returned to the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila that I discovered back when the project first started:
Let nothing upset you,
Let nothing startle you.
All things pass;
God does not change.
Patience wins all it seeks.
Whoever has God lacks nothing.
God alone is enough.
That, or a piece of Divine 70% Dark Chocolate with Raspberries, usually did the trick.
I didn’t have much time to engage in online banter anyway, as I was busy preparing for my final biblical holiday—Rosh Hashanah.
Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year, and a sacred time of evaluation and reflection among the devout. While many around the world welcome the new year with drunken parties and gross excess, Rosh Hashanah provides the opportunity for an annual cheshbon hanefesh, or “inventory of the soul.” It is described in Leviticus 23 as a period in which the children of Israel must sound the shofar, a ram’s horn that recalls the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai and summons the faithful to “wake from their lethargy” and humble themselves before their Creator.
“One year we had a neighbor who blew his shofar faithfully every evening during the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah,” Ahava told me over a Skype call. “Unfortunately we had a newborn who liked to nap during that time, so I admit I started to get a little annoyed with the whole thing.”
Rosh Hashanah begins a ten-day period of repentance that culminates with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. These Days of Awe, as they are often called, hold mystical significance in the Jewish community, for it is believed that they represent a period of judgment in which all the people of the world fall under the scrutiny of the Almighty.
“In the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah, we say prayers of repentance and the shofar is blown every day,” Ahava explained. “We prepare ourselves spiritually with an accounting of our soul. It’s easy to ask daily for normal forgiveness, but this time of year we take into account the things that we might have neglected, especially those petty things that can build up over time. We seek forgiveness from those we may have wronged, even our closest family members, children, spouses, and parents.”
This year, Rosh Hashanah corresponded exactly with the final three days of my year of biblical womanhood, so it seemed fitting that I should conclude the project with a time of evaluation and introspection, and that I should mark the end of the project with the foods and traditions that mark the “biblical” new year.
Fortunately, after I posted a rather desperate Facebook status asking if anyone knew where a girl could get herself a shofar, my dad called and said, “Rachel, I’ve got a shofar in my office, remember? I use it as a teaching aid in my Bible classes.”
Let the Days of Awe begin!
“Present a loaf from the first of your ground meal and present it as an offering from the threshing floor. Throughout the generations to come you are to give this offering to the Lord from the first of your ground meal.”
—NUMBERS 15:20–21 UDPATED NIV
When I asked Ahava if there was anything else “biblical” I needed to try before the end of the year, she wrote back, “Have you made bread yet? That’s an important command for women: making bread and separating the tithe for the priests. I usually bake round challahs through the holidays to symbolize the cycle of life. If you need a recipe, let me know.”
Challah—pronounced a bit like “holla,” but from the back of your throat—is a traditional braided bread eaten on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. The double loaf recalls how, when the Israelites wandered the desert, manna fell from heaven every day except the Sabbath and on holidays, so God provided a double portion the day before. According to tradition, three Sabbath meals and two holiday meals should begin with challah bread.
Numbers 15 stipulates that a portion of the dough must
be separated out and presented as an offering for the Lord. “Even though there is no Temple or priests to receive it,” Ahava explained, “we still separate the portion, (the size of an egg from the whole batch), and it is holy. But what to do with it? Burning it to make it unfit for any other purpose and to keep us from wanting to eat it ourselves is what we do. This portion is called challah, and is where the bread gets its name, not the other way around.”
For centuries, Jewish women have observed this custom, tearing a portion from the risen dough, burning it in the oven, and saying a blessing. I agreed with Ahava. I definitely had to try this before I concluded my year of biblical womanhood.
The thing was, I’d never made bread from scratch before, and the process intimidated me. The notion that eggs, yeast, flour, and water could magically materialize into bread fit into the same category of my mind in which plastic, silicon, and metal magically materialize into a computer. That such a miracle could occur in my own kitchen seemed outrageous and required quite a bit of faith.
I asked Ahava for her recipe, and she sent it to me with a note that said, “When we were dating, my husband made this bread, which was yards better than any challah I’d ever made or tasted. But he refused to give me the recipe until we were married. Now I make the bread all the time, and am free to give the recipe out. You don’t even have to marry me to get it!”
The recipe made enough for six loaves, which meant it called for 5 pounds of flour, 7 egg yolks, 4 1/2 cups of water, 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 7 teaspoons of yeast, and 4 tablespoons of salt. That seemed like a lot, but I figured it would be easier to make six loaves of challah than to do the math required to divide the recipe in half.
Before I started, I used the blog to solicit advice from seasoned bakers. Advice poured in:
• “The main thing to remember is that sugar acts as a catalyst and salt as a blocker (anti-catalyst). The ratio of sugar/salt/ yeast is the most important thing, so be especially careful when measuring those ingredients.”—Kenton
• “That sounds like a HUGE recipe! How many loaves is it supposed to make? If it were me, I’d cut it down by at least half, if not 3/4. I’m thinking of the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode where the bread kept coming out of the oven. Also, if your oven has a Proof feature on it, it creates the perfect temperature for bread to rise properly.”—Patricia
• “Make sure your water is warm enough to get the yeast going, but not too hot that it will kill the yeast. It shouldn’t scald your hand. I also had to learn patience when I first made Challah—it takes a while for the dough to rise and double.”—Sherry
• “Tip from seasoned bread baker: Make sure your yeast isn’t expired. (There should be a date on the package.) Depends how much bread baking goes on in your neck of the woods, but if their yeast stock isn’t turning over regularly by purchases, the stores sometimes aren’t good about noticing that their yeast is expired. And you want lively yeast . . .”—Becky
• “Just put my challah loaves in the oven! Remember that loaves for Rosh HaShanah are round to symbolize the continuity of life . . . just like how we both finish the Torah reading and begin with Genesis again. Shana tovah!”—Lindsay
You don’t exactly “whip up” six loaves of bread, so I set aside the two days before the start of Rosh Hashanah to make my challah. I decided to work on the dining room table because the faux butcherblock surface provided the most space. So on a Tuesday afternoon, I dusted the table with flour, put on my frilly apron, pulled back my hair, and got to work.
Dan grew up watching his mother make bread and had a sort of manly respect for the scientific processes involved, so he helped me measure out all the ingredients, careful to be precise, like my readers said: 4 1/2 cups of warm (but not scalding) water, 1 1/2 cups of sugar, and 7 teaspoons of yeast.
Then we combined the water and sugar in the biggest bowl we owned, added the yeast, and watched. Little bubbles appeared in the pale brown mixture, which I’d been told meant it was working.
After five minutes, we added the egg yolks, oil, sugar, and salt.
“Slowly begin adding flour,” Ahava’s directions said. “After a while, it will be impossible to stir.”
Dan tilted the bag of flour over the bowl while I stirred. The mixture slowly transformed into a gooey dough . . . and lots of it. I stirred until my arm hurt, gave Dan a turn, and then we dumped the recalcitrant mixture onto the table.
“Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and begin kneading in the rest of the flour,” Ahava’s directions continued. “It all has to go in according to Jewish law. If you find the dough is too dry, add more water.”
I had to Google “kneading” to see how it was done. Within a few seconds, I found a YouTube video in which a chirpy thirty-something in an apron demonstrated the proper method—press, stretch, fold, rotate; press, stretch, fold, rotate—but she did this so quickly, I kept falling behind, and I couldn’t replay the video because my hands were coated in sticky dough.
Kneading nine pounds of dough is like getting thrown into a wrestling ring with the Pillsbury Doughboy. I struggled and sighed and cursed, while Dan coached me in my technique.
According to the YouTube lady, you can tell that you’re done kneading if you press the dough with two fingers and the indentations stay after you move your fingers away.
Well, we kept kneading and testing and kneading and testing, but that mound of dough just kept springing right back under our fingertips.
Even Dan got frustrated.
“It shouldn’t be taking this long,” he said. “Maybe we did something wrong.”
We must have kneaded for thirty minutes, taking turns, before we gave up and assumed we’d passed the finished point long ago and probably destroyed our bread.
“Put dough ball into LARGE oiled bowl or pot, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise overnight in a warm place, for at least six hours,” Ahava had written. “The longer it rises, the better the flavor. Punch it down a few times if you need to.”
We didn’t have a mixing bowl the size that Ahava showed me in our Skype conversation, so I’d gone to Wal-Mart and gotten a 18-quart plastic bin in which to let the bread rise.
Everyone and their mother had an opinion about where to store the bread overnight so that it rose properly, but I’d decided on an unconventional method: we heaved the blob of dough into the bin, covered it with a towel, put it in the guest bathroom with a space heater, and closed the door.
Now all we had to do was wait . . .
One of them, an expert in the law tested [Jesus] with this question: Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? Jesus replied: “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
—MATTHEW 22:35–40
Because I started the project with a list of ten commandments, I decided to end it with a list of ten resolutions.
The question everyone was asking as I approached the conclusion of my year of biblical womanhood was what, if anything, I planned to hold over from the project and incorporate into my regular life. While I’d be happily ditching the head coverings and “Yes, Masters,” I’d learned a lot over the past 363 days, some of which had changed my life. The New Year seemed as good a time as any to make resolutions for the future, so, while I waited for the bread to rise, I got out my journal and wrote down my “10 New Year’s Resolutions”:
1. Try a new recipe every week. I like to cook. I like it because it helps me get out of my head and channel my creative energies into something tangible, something I can taste, touch, smell, and share with other people. A new recipe, complete with mysterious ingredients and religious symbolism, is like a little adventure I can embark on every week. Success makes for good food; failure makes for good stories.
2. Eat more ethically. It’s worth paying extra to know we did our due diligen
ce to ensure that the food we eat does not perpetuate the exploitation of other people. I’d like to continue learning about the origin and production of the products we buy so that I can make more informed decisions as a consumer, doing my part to “repair the world.”
3. Identify and praise women of valor. Ahava inspired me to “take back” Proverbs 31 as a way of honoring other women of faith for their accomplishments and bravery. I want to learn more about influential women like Dorothy Day, Catherine Hamlin, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Sojourner Truth so I can draw inspiration from their lives and share their stories with others. I also want to be quick to cheer my sisters on, for big victories or small, by declaring, “Eshet chayil! Woman of Valor!”
4. Embrace the prospect of motherhood. The project reminded me that I can do anything I set my mind to, and that includes parenting. I’m still scared, and I’m still unsure of what motherhood will look like for me, but I’m not going to wait until I’ve overcome all of my fears to start a family.
5. Nurture the contemplative impulse. It may be nothing more than a bunch of neurons firing in just the right places of my brain, but something powerful and life-giving happens when I take the time to calm and quiet my soul. In the year to come, I want to nurture that impulse by practicing contemplative prayer, returning to St. Bernard, studying the mystics, and maybe even praying the daily office from time to time. I want to gain better mastery over my volatile spirit, so I can understand for myself what St. Teresa meant when she said “patience wins all it seeks.”
6. Make room for ritual and remembrance. From celebrating the Passover Seder, to walking through the stations of the cross, to lighting candles in honor of the victims of the text of terror, engaging in rituals throughout the year helped connect me to the past in ways that illuminate the present, making the everyday sacred. I want to make more room in my faith for rituals like these, perhaps by observing the church calendar, celebrating Jewish holidays, or helping to create new rituals that honor the particular struggles and triumphs of women of faith.
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 29