At Its Set Time

The bakery three-ish blocks from our new, albeit temporary apartment announces itself from down the sidewalk aways. We followed the smell in this morning and left with challah for tonight (amongst other things, who are we kidding). We have spent the hours since getting the keys yesterday thinking schlepping a lot into this apartment [fortunately it was already furnished] — dishes, towels, bedding, enough vegetables to feed a kibbutz. We bought wine, we made sure we had candles, we cleaned. Yet, the thing that made Shabbat feel imminent was a smell.

Some context. My husband and I are in Kiryat Shmona, at the very top of Israel, on what’s called a pilot trip — the reconnaissance run a family makes before aliyah, before moving to the Land for good. The aliyah itself, God willing, comes later this year.

Making it a kitchen where two observant Jews can cook was its own project. We kashered it — the scrub-everything, boil-the-water, etc. processes that readies a kitchen for keeping kosher. And we made a decision that will hopefully make it easier: the whole kitchen is a dairy-free zone. Keeping meat and dairy separate normally means two of everything — two sets of dishes, two sponges, two drawers that must never meet. In a rental with one short counter, we picked a side. Meat won. (We already drink coffee black and I’m lactose-intolerant, so it’s not a huge loss.)

And then this afternoon, while we were on yet another run to the same discount store down the block, the city filled with motorcycles.

Hundreds of them, a convoy up from the center of the country, flags out, engines wide open, and all of it for one purpose: to spend a Friday in Kiryat Shmona. To eat in its restaurants, buy in its shops, and make sure the city heard them arrive. And yes, we definitely all heard the welcome ruckus. This city sits close enough to Lebanon that the border is part of the view, and it spent years under rocket fire — evacuated, battered, slowly coming home. So this is one of the things Israelis do about that. They get on motorcycles, ride north, and buy lunch. Everyone — whether participant or bystander — was having a wonderful time, including, audibly, the engines.

This Shabbat we read Pinchas, a portion famous for its drama. It opens with a zealot and a covenant of peace, counts the whole nation in a census, seats five remarkable sisters at the inheritance table, and puts Moses on a mountaintop to hand his work to Joshua. Any of those could carry a column.

The ending of it, though is a menu. A long one. Two full chapters of it. After the spear and the census and the succession, the Torah settles down and lists what should be cooked, and when: lambs, fine flour, olive oil, wine. The daily offering — the tamid, “the regular one” — every morning and every twilight, war or no war. Then Shabbat’s addition. Then the new moons and the holidays, each with their portions. The ETERNAL introduces the whole calendar like this:

צַ֚ו אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְאָמַרְתָּ֖ אֲלֵהֶ֑ם אֶת־קׇרְבָּנִ֨י לַחְמִ֜י לְאִשַּׁ֗י רֵ֚יחַ נִֽיחֹחִ֔י תִּשְׁמְר֕וּ לְהַקְרִ֥יב לִ֖י בְּמוֹעֲדֽוֹ׃ Command the Israelite people and say to them: Be punctilious in presenting to Me at stated times the offerings of food due Me, as offerings by fire of pleasing odor to Me.

— Bamidbar 28:2

“My food.” God does not eat, yet the vocabulary is a kitchen’s anyway. Food, fire, and the detail I keep snagging on: the smell. Re’ach nichochi — “My pleasing aroma.” Of all the senses the text could assign to heaven’s satisfaction, it picks the one that stopped us on a Kiryat Shmona sidewalk this morning. Whatever else a korban (an offering) was, the Torah insists it worked the way a bakery works. It filled the air at a set time. B’moado, the verse says. At its appointed moment.

And Shabbat, in this menu, gets its own line, stacked on the daily one:

עֹלַ֥ת שַׁבַּ֖ת בְּשַׁבַּתּ֑וֹ עַל־עֹלַ֥ת הַתָּמִ֖יד וְנִסְכָּֽהּ׃ a burnt offering for every sabbath, in addition to the regular burnt offering and its libation.

— Bamidbar 28:10

In addition to. Shabbat’s offering rode in on top of the morning lamb, the pause stacked on the routine. You get the seventh day by doing the other six. You get a Shabbat table by kashering a kitchen on a Thursday night and carrying vegetables in Friday morning.

One more thing about the timing, because this week it is almost too much. Yesterday was the seventeenth of Tammuz, a fast day. The Mishnah keeps a short, terrible list of what happened on that date, and one entry reads: the tamid ceased.

During the siege of Jerusalem the lambs ran out, and the offering that had been brought every single morning and every single twilight — through wars, through everything — stopped. The three saddest weeks of the Jewish year begin there. And right here, the Torah commands the daily offering. Every year the reading and the fast sit side by side on the calendar: the thing we lost, and the instructions for it, kept warm.

So here is where I found the joy this week. A bakery fired its ovens before dawn in a town that has known too much of the other kind of fire. Hundreds of strangers rode three hours so that town could sell them lunch. And two newcomers with one key and a kitchen that finally works are going to light candles at the appointed time.

The cooking is next. Then the pause — stacked on top of everything we scrubbed and assembled and carried, just as it has arrived each week since Sinai.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham