On the Chocolate Trail

Every summer during the years I was a congregational rabbi, I pulled out my annual High Holiday checklist to help me plan for the season’s intensity. Amid the sermon writing, cue meetings, neither Mark nor I, with our respective rabbinic duties, had time for home baked challah. So, most importantly for our children, my planning included pre-ordering round, raisin-studded challot. Then, on Rosh Hashanah evening when our children gleefully dunked those first chunks into honey, their tastebuds confirmed that a new year had started.

Of course, we weren’t the only ones welcoming the fall’s spiritual arc with round, sweet challot. Bread circles hint at the cycles of life and years and embody our craving for longevity. When piled into a crown shape, they echo High Holiday liturgies about God’s sovereignty and the medieval liturgical poem “Anim Z’mirot,” which refers to the Jewish people as “a crown in God’s hand, a royal tiara.”

Yet, other Ashkenazi customs also symbolically bake prayers into High Holiday breads. German Jews signified prosperity by burying coins or rings into their dough. For them, key shapes and keys submerged into the dough suggested the opening of the gates of prayer and repentance. Eastern European bread traditions expressed prayerful ideas through breads as well. Ethnographer Avrom Rechtman sweetly documented his mother’s breads from pre-1900 Chmielnicki in Western Ukraine: birds for Rosh Hashanah, ladders for Yom Kippur, and hands for Hoshana Rabbah. At Rosh Hashanah, dough formed into birds conveyed prayers flying up to heaven, divine verdicts arriving for the New Year, all sins soaring away, or, the fulfillment of the Bible’s prophecy, “As birds hovering, so will the God of hosts protect Jerusalem.” The term feigele, a Yiddish word for bird, often refers to the challah for Rosh Hashanah.

At Yom Kippur, challah ladders encouraged High Holiday supplications heavenward as well. In addition, ladders recall the ups and downs of life. In the Torah, Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder, reminding him of the divine presence even in his despair. Mrs. Rechtman preferred a different message for Yom Kippur when she rolled out a very long, thin, string of dough, and coiled it around itself to create a spiral. She compared it the unravelling of the previous year in the hope that the new one would be wrapped up with good fortune and plenty. Strands of dough shape the season’s longings.

The Hoshana Rabbah breads for the final judgment day of the High Holiday season, shaped like hands, expressed yearning for a good kvitl,  a handwritten note from the divine Author. The outspread fingers of these breads also represented friendship and forgiveness.

Prayers flow into and out of these emblematic Ashkenazi breads.