Mazal Tov to Colin Golvan QC, for his Queen’s Birthday award of AM, for significant service to the law, to legal education, particularly support for Indigenous students, and to the arts through governance and philanthropy.

Times: Shabbat starts tonight with candle lighting at 4:49pm, and ends Saturday night at 5:51pm. The weekly Torah portion is Korach

Mincha in the CBD: Whisky and Kugel Fridays is on today at 1pm using the SMS system to confirm numbers. Friday mincha is going into recess and will resume on 20 July. Mincha (Mon-Thu) continues next week at 1.00pm with the SMS reminder.

Study: The Wednesday shiur & lunch continues this week at Billing Bureau, following 1.00pm mincha.

Thought of the Week with thanks to Rabbi James Kennard. Chumash commentator Rashi explains that there were many ideological strands to Korach’s rebellion against Moses’s leadership, as described in this week’s Torah reading. One was a cry of egalitarianism – “All the congregation are entirely holy (Rashi: all heard directly from God at Mount Sinai) and why do you make yourself ruler over the assembly”. Yet other causes of Korach’s dissent were far less populist. He was affronted by his exclusion from the hierarchy that Moses had appointed over the Levites, claiming that he had a better claim to the princeship of the sub-tribe than his cousin who had been given the role; he believed that the Levites should have the same roles as the Cohanim in the Tabernacle; and he was joined by Reubenites, seeking to restore their rights as the firstborn tribe.

Then, as now, rebels galvanise the masses with their calls for equality, which actually cloak their desires for something very different – power for themselves.