Preparing Dabo Kolo

Yesterday morning, we continued to explore several cultural elements of the Beta Yisrael edah - specifically, some aspects of its music, dance and food.

After a review of what we had learned to date about the Beta Yisrael history, I focused in on how some historians believe the group had likely separated from the main body of the Jewish community immediately prior to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.. This is how they explain the fact that the Beta Yisrael celebrate all the holidays mentioned in the Torah, but not Hanukkah. The Maccabean Revolt took place over 400 years following the Babylonian Conquest of Jerusalem, so the Beta Yisrael wouldn't have known about it.

On the other hand, the Beta Yisrael celebrated a holiday around this time of year which no other Jewish community in the world celebrated - the Sigd, which is a combination of Yom Kippur and Shavuot in a way. On Yom Kippur there is personal introspection and request for forgiveness of sins which is then followed by 50 days of communal introspection. This culminates, on the 29th day of the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, in a day of fasting followed by joyous celebration. In 2008, the Sigd was added to the list of Israel's national holidays.

There are quite a number of descriptions of how the Sigd was celebrated in the Gondar Province of Ethiopia where most of the Beta Yisrael lived. It's a mountainous region, and the descriptions share how on the morning of the Sigd the entire community would fast and then climb to a higher altitude. There, they would listen to their religious leaders, the Kessim, read excerpts from the Book of Nehemiah that describe how Ezra the Scribe gathered all the returned Babylonian exiles in Jerusalem each week, to read to them from the Torah. Then the Beta Yisrael would break their fast with breads and stews and beer. During the remaining hours of the day they would celebrate joyously with singing and dancing until it was time, at dusk, to descend back to their villages.

At this point, I shared with the class that we will be re-enacting our own Sigd Festival on the Isaiah campus this coming Sunday, November 12th. I reminded them of how we've already begun to prepare for it by learning about the Beta Yisrael proverbs and writing skits based on four of them. I described how after the community broke their fast, they sang and danced all afternoon in joyous celebration of the Torah and our Covenant with God. Since our Sigd Festival on Sunday will take place during our regular Sunday session, we'll obviously be re-enacting a very abridged form of it, but a joyous one, nevertheless.

In order to give the students a taste of the music and dance of the Beta Yisrael, I shared two brief YouTube videos - the first shared a Beta Yisrael drum circle, and the second shared a shoulder dance - the Beta Yisrael borrowed both from their African neighbors. We all had a lot of fun copying the beat of the drums on our tables and then standing up to try to follow the dancers performing the shoulder dance (it's not as easy as it looks!).

Then I shared a YouTube of a Sigd Festival that took place in 2009 in Israel (one year after it became a national holiday there), to give the students an idea of what the Sigd Festival looks like. The video shows a group of Beta Yisrael leaving Pardes Hannah in the early morning hours, going by foot (for elderly and disabled by bus) "up" to Jerusalem where they continued the celebration with other Israelis.

When the lights came back on in our classroom, Ella and Kyra, my two wonderful Avodah T.A.'s, handed out a packet to each student. The packet consists of a copy of the Ge'ez alphabet and a sample quotation from the Book of Enoch. We read the transliteration of a line from the sample, noting that several words were very similar to Hebrew (e.g., the Hebrew word for blessing is "b'racha," and the Ge'ez word is "barakat"). A final page of the packet shared common Amharic greetings, which we all practiced on each other. We'll be greeting each other at the "top of the mountain" at our own Sigd Festival on Sunday with these phrases.

Our final activity of the session was to prepare a special treat that the Beta Yisrael eat to break their fast - Dabo Kolo. These have been described as "flat peanut-shaped" pieces of sweet dough, and it's hard not to like them - in fact, students in previous years have gobbled them up!

Since it's somewhat tricky getting the dough to the right consistency, I prepared it at home. Each student took a golf-sized piece and rolled it and kneaded it a bit.

Then they had to roll it into a long "snake" form, about 1/2" thick. It was tricky, since the dough is very elastic and kept "shrinking" each time it was rolled out.

Eventually (after a couple of minutes or so of rolling), the dough stopped "shrinking."

Then it was time to take an ordinary pair of scissors and cut the "snake" into several pieces about 1/2" thick.

Each piece would become a "Dabo Kolo" (literally, "sweet bread" in Amharic).

After the pieces were cut, you had to press down on each with your thumb to create the "flat, peanut" shape.

Each student developed his/her own style for pressing the dough.

Once the pieces of dough had been "pressed," they were placed in a plastic bowl.

The bowls began to fill up very quickly.

Pretty soon, once everyone developed his/her own rhythm, the tables were busy with students rolling the dough, cutting it and pressing it. Thankfully, I had prepared a lot of dough. For the final 20 minutes of our session, before going up to the Sanctuary for tefillah, there was a Dabo Kolo assembly line at each table. By the time we went upstairs, there were 11 plastic bowls filled to the brim with Dabo Kolo waiting to be fried on a hot pan.

The Dabo Kolo has now been fried by me at home (with a few pieces missing - I had to taste a few and for a very important second  opinion my husband, Peter, had to do the same!). And still there is so much more left for us to enjoy when we "break our fast" at the top of our Isaiah campus "mountain" this coming Sunday.

Now, there is just one more project to complete to be ready for our Sigd Festival - making posters to serve as backdrops for the "Proverb" skits which the students will be acting out. We'll make these posters during our two weekday sessions. Stay tuned!