אַתְקִינוּ סְעוּדָתָא דִמְהֵימְנוּתָא שְׁלֵמָתָא, חֶדְוְתָא דְמַלְכָּא קַדִישָׁא. אַתְקִינוּ סְעוּדָתָא דְמַלְכָּא.

As we do our best to live through this crisis It's important to tend to both our physical health as well as our mental health.

Our Pesach food order arrives late Monday night and we switch our house over to Pesach mode on Tuesday and start the cooking Olympics. Yes, we are starting early, but not as early as we normally would ( there will be fewer mouths to feed over the course of the holiday). Never the less, our usual rhythms matter as so much of our lives has been out of order.

I baked challah with almost the last bit of our white flour. I probably could have found bakery made challah but it will do all of us good to eat our usual challah.

We can eat pancake for breakfast on Sunday.

I only baked two challot instead of our usual four.

We aren't eating meat. We are eating fish and noodles and spinach.

As I got my challah dough going I watched for the corona of blooming yeast in the bowl.

The familiar work of making the dough come together was a comfort.

I took challah

I braided the challah

Over the past few days two passages from two books I had read over and over again have been running through my head.

The first is from Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe  which tells of Esther's experiences during the Shoah. Her family was relatively fortunate and they were deported from Vilna to Siberia.During the horrific time when Ester and her family were being transported to Siberia, Esther wrote about a neighbor woman who gave herself a full beauty treatment and put on a face full of makeup as the group was forced to sleep on the floor in a train station. Esther noted the defiant bravery of that woman insisting on taking care of her outer beauty during such insanity.

The other moment in a book that keeps running through my head these days comes from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn despite the family's abject poverty, the narrator mentions that her mother allows her to waste her morning coffee each day so she have the knowledge that there is one thing that she can afford to waste.

During this hard time we need to create comfort and small luxuries for ourselves.

My youngest sat down next to me a little while ago to ask me what I was planning to cook for Passover. He mentioned that having the familiar foods would be a comfort. I agreed. The work of preparing will keep us busy. The foods that we will eat all during Pesach will sustain us, body and soul.