The Shabbat table was set with two braided challahs, covered by a cloth, two candlesticks, a jug for hand washing and a Kiddush cup.
The mystery is: Why? Why two challahs? Why sprinkle the bread with salt? Why cover the loaves?
Those mysteries — and many more — were revealed Sunday, Feb. 25 at the second annual Young Adult Feast of Jewish Learning, planned by the Bureau of Jewish Education and co-sponsored by 23 Bay Area Jewish agencies. About 400 people ages 25 to 45 attended the event, held at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. The BJE estimates that nearly three-fourths of them had not attended anything formally Jewish in the past year.
“I’m involved in the organized Jewish community, and there are so many people here I don’t recognize,” said Sara Pflantzer, 24, regional adviser for the North American Federation of Temple Youth.
She wasn’t surprised, though. “It’s so open here. If you don’t know anything, then this is the place for you. The presenters find a way not to be intimidating, and to engage people wherever they are, without assuming knowledge.”
With that in mind, Emily Shapiro Katz spent more than an hour demystifying the Sabbath table for 20 young adults who attended her workshop.
Ordinarily, she explained, Jews say the blessing over bread first, since it’s the biggest staple in our diets. Shabbat is an exception. Wine comes first, since the prayer not only blesses the grapes, but also ushers in Shabbat.
“The rabbis were so witty!” Shapiro Katz said. “They said, ‘We’ll cover the bread, and it will be as though the bread is not really there.'”
After her talk, several “feast” participants thanked her for her entertaining and thorough description of Shabbat traditions, which also included why it’s customary to take off rings when washing your hands (to cleanse and purify every inch of skin) and how to talk about the week’s Torah portion at the table in a way that engages all dinner guests.
The Young Adult Feast of Jewish Learning explored provocative topics like gender in Judaism, sodomy in the Bible, Judaism and Islam, and the Jewish role in the Black Power movement of the 1960s.
Marc Dollinger, a professor at San Francisco State University, told a standing-room only crowd that historians have mostly ignored the evidence predicting that the union of blacks and Jews was “destined for failure.”
“Blacks and Jews had a paternalistic relationship, but that’s missing from what we talk about in public,” he said.
He spoke with enthusiasm about American Jewish history in the 20th century, engaging his audience with questions as he lectured about blacks and Jews. He said that while he conducted research for a book, he found numerous quotes (again, mostly ignored by historians) indicating that Jews should have been more sympathetic to the Black Power movement, since the Jewish people understand the quest for ethnic identity.
“It was shocking to me to find these quotes in literature but not in the historiography,” he said. “But the viewpoints weren’t self-serving, so they were ignored.”
A range of people taught workshops — rabbis, college professors, actors, authors and even yogis. A hip-hop concert by Y-Love, a black Chassidic Jew from New York, concluded the event.
Marianna Roytman Schiffner, who coordinated the event, was “thrilled” at the turnout.
“When we first considered planning a young adult Feast of Jewish Learning, most people would say, ‘Oh, you’ll never get young adults to come learn,'” she recalled. “I knew that wasn’t true. Young adults want substance. We all miss college. We all want to get back to the classroom, to dig a little deeper, do a little more soul searching.”
And last week, 400 people proved her right.