The Sabbath Bee

<p>“Shabbat arrives as usual<br />dressed in silk<br />with her hair and make-up<br />beautifully arranged.”</p><p><br />So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today’s world.</p><blockquote><p>“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.”</p></blockquote><p>Rachel Barenblat author <em>The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah</em> and <em>Texts to the Holy</em></p>