My one regret after making Aliyah last July is that I didn’t show my friend Patrick how I make challah. If I had, maybe he would have made Aliyah, too. He had asked me several times, but I never got around to it. Patrick and I were part of the same small but vibrant modern Orthodox Jewish community in Oakland. We argued a lot about politics, but our common ground was Israel, Judaism, and challah.

I started making challah about two years ago for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. I have nothing against bakery challah. Most Jews go that route, and that’s fine. I just felt a compelling need to make the challah I would bless at my Shabbat table.

My challah recipe is simple: quality bread flour, sugar, salt, oil, eggs, and yeast dissolved in warm water, which I feed with a little sugar. I fashion my challah from a vision of a golden, flaky crust and a moist crumb (the inside) that pulls apart in strands.

Oakand Shabbat Challah

My first try yielded two small, dense challahs. Probably a yeast issue. I didn’t lose hope. Instead, I imagined them as closer to what the Jews ended up with in their haste to leave Egypt. Then I did a little research and learned that braided, white-flour challah didn’t appear until the 1400s, and the fluffy, strand-like texture I was seeking came even later, after the Fleischmann brothers introduced their mass-produced yeast to the American market in the 1870s.

I solved my yeast problem with a food thermometer. I make sure the water is around 40°C (105°F) and add a generous tablespoon of sugar for my yeast to feast on. After a few tries, I could tell by touch when the water was the right temperature. After about ten minutes, I gently stir my yeast mixture into a bowl containing two eggs, sugar, salt, and oil. I measure my flour precisely in grams (540, depending on the flour), but I always adjust for the kitchen atmosphere, which changes weekly. With a fork, I gradually incorporate the flour into the bowl mixture, observing it transform into a moist but not too moist dough. I started out using a KitchenAid for kneading, but it didn’t feel right giving up my dough to a cold, mechanical hook. I was making the centerpiece for my Shabbat dinner. I needed my own hands to connect directly with this living, growing, spiritual medium.

I press my palm into the center of my dough, take one end, and fold it over the other, all the while thinking, I’m doing this for Shabbat. This quickly evolved into a meditation that I knead into my dough with each fold. I listen to the dough with my hands, waiting for its texture to tell me when it’s ready to rest. Usually about fourteen minutes.

I place my dough in a lightly oiled proofing bowl and cover it with plastic wrap (not a wet towel). Within a couple of hours, my dough usually doubles in size unless my mind wanders during the kneading, and I didn’t fold enough Shabbat thoughts into it. I gently press the dough with my hand and let it rest for another hour and a half. It will double again, if it wishes.

I flour my granite countertop, then gently roll out my dough into a long log. I cut it in half with my dough scraper. I take one half and cut it into three equal pieces. I roll each piece, then braid them into a loaf. I do the same with the other half, all the time, holding the thought that I am doing this for Shabbat. I cover my challahs with plastic and wait about an hour for another rise—but not too much of a rise. I crack open two eggs and place the yolks in a cup. I want the yolks at room temperature when I’m ready to coat my challahs.

I gently paint my challahs a transparent yellow and then sprinkle them with poppy seeds. I bake my challahs at 177°C (~350°F) for about twenty to twenty-five minutes (every oven is different). I know my challahs are ready when they turn to gold.

In the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we witness Richard Dreyfuss’s character obsessing over the meaning of a vision he has of a mountain. So much so that, with his two hands and a lot of garden plants and earth, he crafts a miniature mountain in his living room, hoping that by doing so, he will learn the meaning of his vision. When he sees a news report on TV about strange activity at a mountain in Wyoming that resembles his model, Dreyfuss knows he must go there (watch the movie for the ending).

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'jyKKEfMiRMxdNmCW05apfg',sig:'2dE6IehQi4p0oZwJFazE5Cp_IdtdoviuAu0V4qVhr9I=',w:'594px',h:'405px',items:'492841547',caption: false ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

From our Torah, we learn that G-d told Avraham he was giving the land of Israel to Avraham’s offspring, his descendants—the Jews—as “an everlasting possession.” Clearly, G-d was insistent that Avraham get the message, because he repeated it to him on three separate occasions (Genesis 12:1-2, 7; 13:14-15; and 17:8). Because this message of faith was meant to be passed down through the generations, G-d, being G-d, didn’t want to leave anything to chance. So, he made the same promise to Isaac (Genesis 26:3-4) and then to Jacob, whom he told twice (Genesis 28:13 and 35:12). But much went down after Jacob. Memories fade, Jews get enslaved. Then Moshe comes along and frees the Jews. The Jews wander in the desert, miracles happen. Still, the Jews complain. So, after much desert wandering, to hedge his bets, G-d instructs Moshe to speak to the children of Israel and tell them that “you shall possess the land and settle in it, for to you have I given you the land to possess it” (Numbers 33:53).

In January 2025, approximately 3,762 years after G-d first told Avraham that he was giving the land of Israel to the Jews, and after about a year of making my own Shabbat challahs, blessing them, and handing pieces to my guests, I received the memo—or, rather, the vision.

In relative terms, my decision to make Aliyah was sudden. It came to me in the space of less than ten days, during which I gained a clarity of sorts that culminated at my Shabbat table. I heard no heavenly voice, nor did I experience an epiphany, and making Aliyah was not on my mind during my challah-making sessions. The best way I can explain it is that the many reasons for making Aliyah converged all at once, and the practical reasons I wouldn’t consider Aliyah no longer mattered. Was it my Shabbat challah-making meditation that induced this clarity? 

Before I started publishing with the Times of Israel, Substack, and Instagram, I was on Facebook, where I mainly posted about music, Israel, and politics. Nothing I posted received more reactions and all favorable, than pictures of my challahs. I’ve always understood these praises not as a compliment to how my challahs looked—many left much to be desired—but rather as a y’yasher koach, an encouragement for the strength of what I was doing. These imperfect-looking challahs of mine, these spiritual vehicles of Shabbat, had in some way moved even my non-observant friends. Had my challahs also moved me to Israel?

It’s fair to say that engaging weekly in a three-thousand-year-old ritual central to Judaism, one packed with spirituality, can be a weighty experience. Either by coincidence or design, I was developing a vision of Israel without even realizing it. Then, on a Shabbat night in early January, after my meal (and several glasses of wine), like Dreyfuss seeing his mountain on TV, I looked at the half-eaten challahs on my Shabbat table and found myself in Israel. Just like that, I achieved clarity. My time in Oakland and the U.S. was up, and I had to make Aliyah—there was no reason not to. So, here I am, in Jerusalem, still making challah. Only now I’m trying to get a handle on this force that brought me here and figure out where it’s leading me as I dwell in the land that G-d first promised Avraham and his descendants as an everlasting possession.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)