The Jewish Poetry Project
âShabbat arrives as usual, dressed in silk with her hair and make-up beautifully arranged.â So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk, which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today's world. âTorah, 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 canât 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 Shabbatâs faces shine.â âRachel Barenblat, author, The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah and Texts to the Holy
