I am sitting in the airport on a desperately awkward date. The guy – we’ll call him Moishy – nearly jumps out of his hard, plastic seat and peppers me with question after ridiculous question. I, on the other hand, slink lower and lower as heads begin to turn in our direction. I can think of nothing I want more than to go home and take some Tylenol.
But Moishy is relentless. He shoots out his next question: “My wife is gonna have to bake challa. Uh…do you bake challa?”
Now here is a question I can answer confidently. “No!” I state emphatically and maybe a bit too happily. (Is this my lucky ticket out of here?)
Moishy is thrown off, but only for a moment. “Uh…do you plan on baking challa when you get married?”
“Nope.” I had tried in the past, but after too many burned, flat, sad-looking loaves, I concluded that I was born with the “buy-challa-at-the-bakery gene.”
* * *
It’s Thursday night, 15 years later, and the smell of challa is wafting out of the oven and making its way around the house. I pull two crispy loaves from the oven, while my children clamor for “just one little roll.” Whisking the challas to an away-from-little-hands spot, I marvel at how life has changed. I, the girl who was never, ever going to bake challa, am now the undisputed baker of her family’s favorite Shabbos dish.
I wonder if Moishy ever got his challa-baking wife. I ended up marrying a wonderful man who didn’t mind at all if his wife bought challa at the store. And that was that! Except that it wasn’t really, because somewhere deep inside, I felt a little bad. A woman has three special mitzvos to call her own, and I couldn’t really say I did all of them. So when my neighbor, Miriam, opened a little challa business in her home, I jumped at the opportunity.
It happened one Thursday afternoon in her kitchen. As I admired her fifth batch of dough for the day overflowing onto her counter, I had an idea. “Miriam,” I said hesitantly, “Could I do the mitzva of hafrashas challa for this batch?”
“Why not?” Miriam shrugged as though this were an everyday request. “You can even come every week. But you need to be ready to jump over here when I call,” she warned.
So jump I did. For the next few months, I dropped everything and ran when Miriam called. She would hand me her pink, framed “Yehi Ratzon” with the bracha on top and tactfully leave the room for a few minutes. I would make the bracha, take challa…and daven. I left her house each week glowing with satisfaction.
But my challa saga was far from over. A few months later, I received a bread machine as a gift. Now I could make fresh bread for my family! Soon enough, I discovered the dough cycle. Hey, could I make challa dough in the bread machine? Surely a bread machine wouldn’t flop the dough. Did I dare?
I dared. I poured in the ingredients, pressed a button and…Presto! Out came springy, light, elastic, challa dough! I served my challos that Shabbos proud as can be. It’s true I couldn’t do the mitzva of hafrashas challa with so little flour, but still, these challos were my very own creation! Sort of…
I still felt like a bit of a cheater. After all, it wasn’t I who made this beautiful and fragrant dough. But what’s a woman to do if she just doesn’t have the challa-baking gene? Besides, I saw plenty of ladies in the store buying challa. No need to feel guilty about machine-made dough.
But I had underestimated the power of a mitzva. It seemed that I started a chain reaction with my mitzva of hafrashas challa, and there was no stopping it now!
In the weeks that followed, I started to throw more flour into each cycle until I was able to make the bracha on challa according to some opinions. My machine protested the extra flour by bouncing a little on my counter, but I didn’t let that bother me.
Things really began to flow from there. I bought myself a proper egg brush and became better acquainted with my temperamental oven. And, oh, how good it felt to finally unravel the mystery of six braids! Using my friend’s challa chant (“second on top, top in the middle…”), I chanted away in my kitchen on Thursday nights. My fingers flew, the dough took shape, and my house began to have that erev Shabbos feel that long-ago-airport-Moishy must have been talking about.
Then the inevitable happened. One Thursday, I heard a loud bang coming from the kitchen. I got there just in time to see my dear bread machine’s final moment before it jumped to its death – right off my counter and onto the ceramic tiles!
No matter. By this point I was determined. I lugged my heavy Kitchen-Aid mixer out of its hiding place. Imitating the bread machine cycle, I did 10 minutes of kneading, 30 minutes of rising, 10 minutes of kneading…I could do it myself! I was on a high.
My faithful Kitchen-Aid! How it stood patiently week after week as I crammed in just one more cup of flour…and then one more. But when the motor began smoking, I knew I had done it again.
“I need a Bosch,” I confidently explained to my husband.
He wasn’t as convinced. “Can’t you just put smaller batches of dough in the Kitchen-Aid?”
“You know,” I replied, “We’re talking about one third of my olam habah.” He smiled and I knew I had my Bosch.
* * *
Airport Moishy wouldn’t recognize me today. I knead and braid and egg and bake like the best of them. I am the undisputed Challa Queen of…well…my family.
But that’s not the point. You see, this story is not really about mixers or technique. In fact it’s not even about challa. This is the story of how and when I beat my yetzer hara – the yetzer hara that told me that I wouldn’t, that I couldn’t, and even that I shouldn’t.
It wasn’t a loud, clashing, glorious battle. Some might claim it wasn’t really a battle at all. One thing just seemed to lead to another. But it all had to start somewhere. And the action that started it was so small it was barely recognizable at the time as the masterpiece it would become. But therein lies the key.
Sometimes we are so overwhelmed with the enormity of the task before us that we fail to act at all: But it won’t be perfect. But that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. But what good will it do?
If we can quiet the voice of the yetzer hara just long enough to do an action – any action – we could be on our way to creating a masterpiece. And you never know how scrumptious that masterpiece may turn out to be!
