Challah is joy

Baking good bread isn’t easy, I’ve been told. There’s a science to the measurements, a rhythm to the kneading, an intuition that leavens the logical process. It’s sophisticated, but to a non-baker like me, it all seems like magic.

But being in the presence of newly baked bread is something else. To smell it is to feel pure joy. It’s primal, and it is marvelous.

Which brings us to Shabbat dinners, with the two gleaming, braided challot that wait demurely under their embroidered cover until it’s time to unveil them, say the bracha, tear one (or cut it if you’re fancy), sprinkle some salt on it, and pass it around. Then you hear the little sound of chewy delight.

Many of us know this particular pleasure, challah at Shabbat dinner or lunch, but many of us do not.

That’s where OneTable and the Challah Back Girls come in.

The Challah Back Girls are four sisters —  Sara, Marni, Hannah, and Eliana Loffman — who lived in Teaneck, started baking challah during the pandemic, and basically never stopped. They sell their challot and send part of the profit to social justice causes. The name that the sisters chose for their business reminds us that as you bake a challah, as it begins its transformation from ingredients to bread, you are supposed to separate a bit of it as an offering. That’s what the sisters do when they donate some of their profits to a different cause every month. They also offer many programs around the area and the country; many of them have to do with braiding, baking, and breaking bread together.

They also got National Challah Day registered on the National Day Archives. It’s May 2; May is Jewish American Heritage Day, Sara Loffman, Challah Back’s CEO, said; she and her sisters wanted a day at the beginning of the month, but because occasionally Pesach doesn’t end until May 1, they thought it was wiser to wait a day. What could be worse than being unable to eat challah on National Challah Day?

(And if you think that National Challah Day sounds sort of niche, you might want to know that there’s also National Taco Day and National Baguette Day; moving away from food, there is also March 30, which is National Pencil Day.)

OneTable is a nonprofit dedicated to connecting young people to Jewish life through the joy and sense of both horizontal and vertical connection of Shabbat dinners — horizontal in that when you sit at a Shabbat table, you can feel part of the community formed by the people sitting around that table with you, and vertical in that maybe or maybe  not your parents, maybe your grandparents, probably your great-grandparents sat around another table, maybe on another continent, and also ate braided bread together.

Its mission and Challah Back Girls’ mission align perfectly.

Both the Challah Back Girls and OneTable do more than I possibly can describe in this small space. This Shabbat is National Challah Day, but Shabbat comes every week, and it brings the chance for good bread, good company, and a sense of what Sara calls Jewish joy.

Challah Back Girls is at challahbackgirls.org and  OneTable is at onetable.org.

—JP