When my synagogue reached out to ask me to bake rainbow challot for our Pride Shabbat last year, I have to admit I felt some trepidation. As a bisexual cis-gender man in a long-term committed hetero relationship, I often feel anxious about expressions of my personal queerness feeling performative and touristy in queer spaces. I have the privilege of only expressing my sexuality on my own terms, “passing” when it makes life easier. In moments of self doubt, I often think about myself as the “wicked” child in the Passover midrash - reduced to asking my queer community “what does all of this mean to you?” instead of feeling confident to take my place standing among them.
In truth, the broad spectrum of the modern LGBTQ+ experience is certainly wide enough to accept and embrace my story. Bi erasure is enough of an issue without me erasing myself out of anxiety about doing the wrong thing. The queer community does not and should not bear the burden of my feelings of guilt or the ignorance and lack of empathy displayed by allowing myself to simply sidestep uncomfortable moments. I must acknowledge my shortcomings, acknowledge that I will not always act perfectly, educate myself better, and take my place in the fight. When I worry about where I stand in the queer community I miss the real point: where I stand is on the side of justice, love, and empathy for all people. Everything else, as Rav Hillel might say, is commentary.
I’ve been conscious of the cultural dialogue around Pride’s association with glitter and rainbows and neon colors and the like - symbols that have the power to act as another buffer zone of inaction, a branding opportunity that otherwise does little to further the cause of justice for the LGBTQ+ community at a moment where moral victories are simply not enough. It isn’t hard to make rainbow challah; take a standard challah recipe, add food dye, braid, bake, done. The difference between slapping a rainbow onto a corporate logo versus creating a rainbow challah lies in the centrality of challot to our collective Jewish experience. The interwoven colors act as a radical and vibrant beacon of welcome and acceptance for all people into our Jewish community. The rainbow that God showed Noah after the flood served as a covenant; more than a simple object of beauty, it symbolized an ongoing promise between god and human kind. In making rainbow challot, we make a promise of our own: that we as a people will continue to do everything in our power to educate ourselves and others, that we will continue to fight for justice for every community, that we will meet people where they are and embrace them there.
A quick guide to making rainbow challah is below. Three other things we all can do right now to cause real change:
Donate! There are countless worthy charities doing excellent work in this space, so let me just highlight one that I found incredibly meaningful recently, The Okra Project - “The Okra Project is a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home-cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People wherever we can reach them.” They also have established free cooking schools and grocery and mental health assistance funds for trans people. It’s impossible to read through their mission without the bold imperative from Passover ringing in our heads: “All who are hungry, let them come and eat.”
Check out the Human Rights Campaign’s congressional scorecard to make yourself aware of how you are being represented on a federal level, and then write a letter to your congressperson thanking them for their support and/or vocalizing the need to do better. HRC and the ACLU both offer more granular guidance and education on state and local politics as well.
Educate yourself - The New York Public Library put together an incredible list of books written by trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming authors about a multitude of the many facets of the queer experience. MTV’s “Look Different” campaign is an easy and accessible place to begin the long journey of examining and reshaping your own biases and policing your own microaggressions. The need to educate carries a heavy emotional burden for every queer community member - even if you don’t feel comfortable educating others, do your part to educate yourself.
To Make Rainbow Challot
To start, we need to make challah dough. As opposed to my attempts to make the greatest challah of all time, we want a dough that is simple and resilient, able to withstand a second kneading without becoming overly dense. I’ve found Deb Perlman’s recipe from Smitten Kitchen (which itself is an adaptation of a Joan Nathan recipe) is excellent for this purpose.
Regardless of which recipe you use, start by just preparing the dough as normal. After the dough has been allowed to rise, divide the dough into 6 equal balls (highly recommend weighing the balls vs. eyeballing it). You’re now going to work the colors into the individual balls.
Traditional food coloring is not strong enough to create the vibrant colors we are going for, so I use food dye in its place, which is simply food coloring that has been concentrated into a gel. It’s quite powerful so I highly recommend getting yourself some disposable gloves to use through the process if you don’t want your hands to be tie-dyed at the end. I use Wilton brand dyes because they’re kosher parve and easily accessible at Michael’s and Amazon, but truly any food dyes would work. The six braids of the challah allow us to hit all but one of the standard rainbow colors, and I never much cared for indigo anyway.
So you will knead each dye into the different dough balls until each one is completely uniform in its color. In my experience, one of those small bottles provides enough coloration for around 25 challot, so you should start with around ⅛ tsp and adjust upward as you want. The finished dough balls will look like play dough, which is totally awesome.
From here I’ll point you to Tori Avey’s excellent guide to 6-strand challah braiding, which does a better job than I ever could of making the seemingly complex task of 6-braiding very very simple. Allow your formed loaves to rise for an hour before you put them in the oven.