<p>&ldquo;Shabbat arrives as usual,<br />
dressed in silk<br />
with her hair and make-up<br />
beautifully arranged.&rdquo;</p><p><br />
So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk,&nbsp;which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today&rsquo;s world.</p>
<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Torah, say our sages, has seventy faces. As these prose poems reveal,&nbsp;so too does Shabbat. Here we meet Shabbat as familiar housemate, as&nbsp;the child whose presence transforms a family (sometimes in ways that&nbsp;outsiders can&rsquo;t understand), as a spreading tree, as an annoying&nbsp;friend who insists on being celebrated, as a child throwing water&nbsp;balloons, as a woman, as a man, as a bee, as the ocean&hellip; Through the&nbsp;lens of these deft, surprising, moving prose poems, all seventy of&nbsp;Shabbat&rsquo;s faces shine.&rdquo;</p></blockquote>

<p>Rachel Barenblat, author, <em>The Velveteen Rabbi&#39;s Haggadah</em> and <em>Texts to the Holy</em></p>