Image of the Week: Ethiopian Sabbath
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Here is an illustration from my picture book Around the World in One Shabbat. From sundown to sundown, this book follows the 25-hour cycle of a single Sabbath (Shabbat in Hebrew), visiting families in many different countries along the way. Since the Jewish diaspora began in the year 70CE with the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman empire, Jewish people have settled all over the world. These populations have swelled and diminished over the centuries, mostly in response to rising and falling anti-Semitism. My editor at Jewish Lights Publishing and I had to make some tough choices in selecting which countries to represent. Should we focus on the largest or smallest communities? Most or least well-known? Most familiar or most exotic?
We decided to show a little bit of everything. Ethiopia was chosen as one of the smallest Jewish communities in the world, with only a few hundred people left. Persecution and civil war have driven most of them to Israel. In 1984 and 1991, the Israeli defense forces successfully airlifted 8,000 and 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel from 500 villages in northern Ethiopia and the Sudan. Today there are 120,000 of them in Israel, a little more than one percent of the population. (To read more about this, see Operation Moses and Operation Solomon).
So the little boy Avraham in this illustration is part of a tiny, diminishing Jewish community. Pictured here is the special rest of Shabbat morning, called menuchah. The Sabbath is a day of reflection and rejuvenation, and both Avraham's family and their farm animals get a break today from grinding coffee beans and carrying heavy loads to market. Avraham looks northward toward Israel, where his older siblings are in college and serving in the military. He knows he will follow them someday. His life is a blend of old and new, primitive and modern, rural and urban.
Researching this illustration was very challenging. The hut of mud and straw was easy, but finding the wanza tree was not. I've always struggled with drawing draped cloth, too, and that is what these people wear. Putting together a fictitious scene from such a foreign place, without having been there, took all my imaginative powers.
It's the Sabbath right now as I write these words here in upstate New York, and I'm thinking about how Jewish people are observing the holy day of rest all over the world. The Roman empire fell a long time ago, but the Jewish people live on, and Shabbat may be the oldest existing holiday on the planet. From non-observance to simple time off to family rituals to attending synagogue, Sabbath customs are as diverse as the Jewish people themselves. You can learn a whole lot more about these fascinating and evolving traditions in my special picture book.
As for me, I'm ready to take a break. Spring is in the air, so my menuchah today will definitely be spent outdoors!
You can order a signed copy of Around the World in One Shabbat here.
D Yael Bernhard