The Sabbath Bee

“Shabbat arrives as usual,

dressed in silk

with her hair and make-up

beautifully arranged.”

So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk, which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today’s world.

“Torah, say our sages, has seventy faces. As these prose poems reveal, so too does Shabbat. Here we meet Shabbat as familiar housemate, as the child whose presence transforms a family (sometimes in ways that outsiders can’t understand), as a spreading tree, as an annoying friend who insists on being celebrated, as a child throwing water balloons, as a woman, as a man, as a bee, as the ocean… Through the lens of these deft, surprising, moving prose poems, all seventy of Shabbat’s faces shine.”

Rachel Barenblat, author, The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah and Texts to the Holy