When most people think of challah, they think of the egg-rich Sabbath bread that has been made by Jews for centuries. But the word challah is thousands of years older than Sunday morning French Toast, even older than yeast in a jar.

The word challah comes from the mitzvah of challah hafrashat. In the Torah, God tells Moses to speak to the Israelites and tell them that, when they reach the promised land, they are to set aside the first yield of their baking as a gift for God, and that this act is to be carried out for all time.

Challah is the piece of dough that’s set aside.

In ancient days when our Temple stood in Jerusalem, women set aside a portion of their dough as a gift for the priests, who I assume didn’t do much baking of their own.

Our Second Temple was burned to the ground in 70 C.E. As its ashes were carried away by the winds, our people were carried away as far as the four winds blow. But even though our Temple has long been relegated to the stuff of archeologists and dreamers, Jews continue to set aside a piece of dough whenever they bake bread.

Without a Temple we have no priests to feed, so this little chunk is now burned.

The time to separate challah is after the first rising, after the dough is punched down and before it’s divided.

When we fulfill the mitzvah of separating the dough, the piece becomes something consecrated, holy. In consecrating the dough, we consecrate ourselves. And so, when we hold it aloft it becomes a lightning rod, a conduit between ourselves and The Name.

This is an especially auspicious time to ask for blessings—for healing (physical and otherwise), and especially for matters relating to family—for childbirth, for finding love, for searching for a job, for marriage…for making manifest that which we want to bring into our lives.

Here’s a beautiful and powerful ritual you can do when a group of people are baking challot together. The person present who is most in need of a blessing at that moment holds the separated challah aloft. Everyone else places a hand over their hand and, with the loving support of the community, the one holding the challah asks for the blessing they need. The group responds with “amen.” Then the challah is passed around from hand to hand and each person asks for what they need, either out loud or silently, whatever makes them most comfortable.

We then set the piece aside, to be burned.

We burn it because we mourn the loss of our Temple; in beholding its ashes we remember. But even though it’s burned, the piece—just like the Jewish people—still remains. And so, burning the challah is also an act of hope—hope for the future, hope for the rebuilding of our Third Holy Temple, and hope for our world perfected in the messianic age to come.

In her article, “A brief history of Challah,” Marnie Winston-Macauley explores the etymology of the word, challah. She postulates that it might come from the root word “Chalal” which means space, or from Gal, referring to a circle. This rings true to me.

Just as we can separate dough, we can separate space. When we cast a circle, we define and separate out an area of physical space into which we can concentrate a particular energy.

Making challah can carry us beyond our three dimensions.

Stepping into that space, we step onto a plane that’s beyond space and time, to an encounter with the higher reality of pure unconditional love. It’s a mind-blowing thing to experience, one that overwhelms the soul with awe and joy. We capture some of that awe and joy, some of that pure love, and bring it back with us into our physical world.

When we remove a piece of our dough we remember that our sustenance is a gift, that all the earth belongs to its Creator, and that as we receive we are to freely give.

The process of taking challah is simple. Before shaping the dough for baking, set your dough in front of you. If your dough contains—some say 12 cups and others say 16 cups of flour—or more, the following blessing is said:

Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav ve’tzi-vanu l’hafrish challah.

We praise you, Adonai our God, sovereign of space and time, who commands us to separate challah.

If your dough contains less flour, skip the blessing and go right to the next part

Then pull off a small piece of the dough, at least the size of an olive, hold it aloft and say,

harei zo challah!

This is challah!

It’s my own personal custom to toss the burned chunk out to the local wildlife, who often substitute for priests in my life, at the close of Shabbat.

As above, so below

Nature repeats its own patterns. Every atom, with its electrons orbiting a nucleus, is like a tiny solar system with planets that orbit a sun.

Everything has consciousness and vibrates at its own frequency. We take it for granted that, as humans, we have consciousness. But consider this—humans are made up of individual systems—digestive, circulatory, neurological, etcetera. Each system has its own awareness, and is made up of individual organs that also have consciousness. Those organs are made up of cells, and a liver cell knows that it is not a lung cell. Taking it all the way, each cell is made up of multiple components—nuclei, mitochondria, etc—and all of them are made up of molecules that are composed of atoms of one or another element on the periodic table. Atoms are made of subatomic particles, which (I’m not going to venture into an exploration of quantum physics just now) are essentially energy.

So it follows that we’re all made up of the same stuff—humans, elephants, amoebae, trees, rocks—and that stuff is mostly energy. Our thoughts are energy. That’s why sending someone “good energy” is actually a thing, and why a heartfelt prayer from one tiny human actually reaches and connects with That Which Is Beyond All Matter And Energy—The Divine. The Name. Adonai.*

Take a breath and see if you can sense the oneness of all things – our individual selves, the Jewish people, all people, the natural world in which we live, and the food that we consume—All is One. 

And as our earth is a living, breathing entity, made of land and water, every human is a miniature world, made of body and spirit.  As such, we’re like a dough of flour and water.

And so, when separated with intention and imbued with the energy of our prayers,

a meager bit of dough becomes a vehicle for rectifying ourselves and the world.

*All that said, we’re not meant to be passive balls of energy, sending out “thoughts and prayers.” We have physical selves because we’re meant to take action and affect our world, here on this material plane of existence.