Challah Baking and Parsha Shelach

     The parsha connected to today's art therapy session deals with the story of the 12 spies who went on a fact finding mission to the land of Canaan, and returned with a terrible report claiming, " We were like grasshoppers compared to the inhabitants." The punishment for this bad PR was to force the Jews to wander around the desert for forty years until the generation who was taken out of Egypt died out. Two members of the team of spies did not give such a negative view ( Caleb and Joshua) and were not punished to the extent of the others.
     This event is the cornerstone for many aspects of our current Jewish practices such as praying in a group of ten (a minyon). The Spies returned with their stories on the 9th of Av (Tisa B'Av), and this became a day in Jewish history in which terrible things happened such as the destruction of both temples, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and many other tragic events in our history.
     One positive commandment connected to this day is that of making Challah. One idea of this commandment being connected to this event is that the actual commandment of making challah ( and removing some of it for a sacrificial offering) is that it could not be performed until the Jews were living in the land of Israel, and until the wheat could be cultivated. The forty year journey of preparation toward this act of making challah might have been a way to set a pong term goal for the future and imagine the possibility of being free people growing their own food and making their own decisions.
     Our challah making was a very enjoyable experience for the participants. One participant's family owned a bakery in Kansas City for much of her adult life, and everyone was able to recall stories of their mother's making challah. The interaction of working with dough was very therapeutic and calming, due to the familiar feeling of working with ones hands to create food. The challah was baked after the group and given to each participant in several hours after the group. Each challah was identified  by placing a popsicle stick with a name under the challah and was kept there while it baked.