Challah Is For Lovers

Learning to make this bread was my way of connecting to Judaism. Learning to love the process changed me for the better.

- Jennifer E. Crawford

I LOVE CHALLAH: thinking about it, braiding it, baking it, eating it, sharing it. Challah has been my weekly companion for the better part of a decade as I shape my loaves for Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. It has nourished me through recovery from addiction, charmed Friday night dates, soothed and mended broken hearts (mine and others'), amplified enormous joys and been a delicious anchor throughout my life's calmest waters and stormiest seas.

Loving challah means showing up honestly to my mixing bowl each week. Good food requires love and love requires truth; love and falsehood cannot coexist. No food worth eating is made by a false heart.

Nurturing my connection to Judaism is how my love of challah began. Everyone starts somewhere, and it's never at the top. Just ask my first few loaves: gummy, overproofed, lumpy. I hungrily sliced them too early, making the interior sticky. I let them rise too quickly in a too-warm environment, making the structure unstable.

I fumbled braiding the strands like a teenager struggling to undo a bra in the dark. But I loved those loaves. They were evidence that I'd mustered the humility and bravery to start, and that I was trying. I was ready to let the trying change me. Week after week, month after month, year after year: I became and am different.

American writer and revolutionary bell hooks said that love is a practice. Feelings are fickle; they come and go. But love, when understood as an action and an ongoing practice, has the guts to go the distance. You might think I'm overstating things by relating love to bread, but have you ever had real challah? It's totally swoon-worthy.

When it's made right, it's pillowy and plush. The crumb is shockingly velvety. Its egg-washed exterior gleams like a sunrise reflecting on the ocean's surface. Anything can be sacred when the love is real.