Introduction to Shabbat (and Me!)

Hello!

You’re either here because you regularly read my blog, or better yet, you’re a fellow Pitch Wars applicant like myself participating in their PWPoePrompts for the next month.

However you found your way here—welcome! I’m glad you did!

As I already said earlier on Twitter, I’m a textbook INFJ, married to my best friend and fellow goofball, and I’ve been a vegetarian since 23 July 2008, so that’s what…13 years? You can read more about me throughout this website or on my about me page, but it’s probably outdated because I’m forgetful like that.

This year for Pitch Wars I submitted my Jewish-inspired epic fantasy for consideration. The best way to describe it, or at least what I’ve come up with so far, is it’s about a disillusioned bookworm, suffering from PTSD, who teams up (and may fall in love) with a King David/Aragorn deuteragonist to stop a vengeful villain from destroying their world, who just happens to be her kidnapper. It also features a found family, a talking fox, and a masque ball. That pitch still needs tweaking, I think.

Why then write this blog post? Well what you’re about to read might be a bit ambitious of me as I’m taking two simultaneous events in time and conflating them into this blog post. What are they? First, and I suppose the more pressing since it is the one of its kind for the year, is the Pitch Wars Poe Prompts. It’s a fun way for the fellow mentee hopefuls to interact as we all await the results of our pending applications we spent this past week submitting to potential mentors. It keeps us busy so we aren’t idly obsessing over our manuscripts or applications, because if you know anything about writers, we can be a bit neurotic. Or at least, that might just be me.

If you don’t know what Pitch Wars is, I suggest you check out their website because it’ll do a much more thorough job of answering your questions, but in summary, it is a volunteer mentor-mentee-ship for aspiring writers like myself. The process is much like querying agents, but instead of agents, mentee hopefuls query potential mentors. After which, each mentor selects one mentee, and they team up for three months to workshop the mentee’s manuscript. (Did I miss anything?)

Today, too is Erev Shabbat, or the eve or day before Sabbath. Shabbat is a weekly Jewish holiday, if you will, or “holy-day”.

That said, as I kneaded my challah, I had the idea that perhaps I should take today’s Pitch Wars Poe Prompt a step further than my single tweet and write about something that is as much an introduction about myself as it is Shabbat? What else would I do while the challah is rising?

And to add on one more thing to talk about (did I mention I might be too ambitious), this week was the conclusion of our cyclical reading of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. Most people will know them by their English (ish) names: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. In their original Hebrew, they are called Bereshit, Shemot, Vayikra, Bemidbar, and Devarim. Of course, that’s all a transliteration. I could tell you their names in actual Hebrew—בְּרֵאשִׁית ,שְׁמוֹת, וַיִּקְרָא, בְּמִדְבַּר, דְּבָרִים—but then I’d just be showing off, perhaps.

Anyway, why is the completion of reading the Torah so important? Well, because we celebrate it with another holiday, Simchat Torah, but I’m only suppose to be talking about Shabbas. Essentially every week is Shabbat, and every Shabbat we read a portion of the Torah, or parasha. Since we’re starting the Torah over, that means this week we’ll be reading about Creation in Genesis in synagogues all over the world. Pretty cool, right?

It is common, and a tradition, for many to study the weekly parasha before it is read in synagogue on Shabbat. This year, I happen to be doing that by utilizing a cookbook written by this really cool lady I know, Rena Rossner. In it, she has a weekly recipe to correspond to the parasha along with her own commentary as to why she chose it and how it correlates to the portion. I haven’t fully committed to the idea yet, but I may “Julie Powell” my way through it and write a weekly blog about the recipe and what I learned from it over Shabbat, etc. Since I haven’t cooked this week’s recipe yet, that blog post probably won’t be posted until Sunday, if I follow through with the idea.

“So what then is Shabbat, Lynn? You haven’t explained that yet except it’s some Jewish holy day.”

Shabbat is literally Sabbath, and you might equate that to images of attending religious services at an institution and maybe other traditions. While all those might be similar, Shabbat is so much more.

If you’re that curious about Shabbat, I highly recommend the modern sage Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Sabbath, because what he writes, in my opinion, is the apotheosis of any text to articulate this day of eternity. For me, as a someone who is religiously observant, or shomer Shabbat, which means on Sabbath I don’t cook, clean, go shopping, get on social media, and a lot more—Shabbat is first and foremost a day of reconnecting with Hashem, or G-d. By resting, i.e. the no cooking and working bit, it allows me to ignore and forget about the distractions of life for a day and remember my purpose, to refocus on what is important and not the other 50 billion things demanding my attention. Of course, it sounds a lot easier than it is. We are still all of us human, but I think the point is to do, not to be perfect.

Baking challah, an eggy sweet bread, is one of the three mitzvot, or commandments, ascribed to women. Thus, I spend most of my Friday’s in the kitchen, out buying groceries, etc. Jewish women (most Jewish people really) spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking. I didn’t really realise how much myself until after I got married because that’s when it became primarily my responsibility to get everything ready.

There’s a lot of symbolism in the food we eat (think Passover seder with the bitter herbs and the parsley dipped in salt water and matzah, so much matzah!), so what we cook and prepare to eat for our first Shabbas meal, Friday night dinner, is sacred. Sometimes it makes studying the parasha or meditating difficult. Having Rena’s cookbook, Eating the Bible, this year is one of the ways I’m hoping to dive deeper into the texts as it beautifully combines both my need to be in the kitchen preparing dinner and my desire to study. What better way than through food? I love to cook and experiment, so I’m super excited to tackle these recipes and discover more about the parashot (that’s parasha plural) and how they are connected.

That’s about it, really, or at least as brief as I can go to ensure this is merely an introduction. Though, brevity is not my strength, so I might have overshared a bit.

Thanks for reading this far, and if you’re a fellow Pitch Wars applicant, feel free to reach out and say hello! I’d enjoy hearing from you and be glad to meet fellow writers like myself. Leave a comment here, or DM me on Twitter or Instagram. I tend to be the most active on Instagram. There should be links to my accounts all over this website, but if not, just use @writinglynn.

Now to teach you one quick Hebrew phrase before we depart, we greet each other on Shabbat by saying, “Shabbat Shalom!” Shalom literally translates to “peace,” so Shabbat Shalom, dear readers, and may you all have peace!