JBD – Jews of the Melbourne CBD is now on LinkedIn. Follow us here.

Shabbat starts on Friday at 8:15pm and ends on Saturday at 9:16pm. The weekly Torah portion is Bo.

Mincha is now in recess for the summer and will resume after DST ends. Join the WhatsApp group for any updates.

Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at 1.20pm at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: strata titles. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.

Thought of the Week with thanks to Annette Charak

In this week’s Torah reading, we read of the last three plagues and the institution of Pesach, both as the Jewish people should mark it on leaving Egypt and as it is to be celebrated going forward.

Following the tenth plague, the Jews stand on the threshold of freedom. And Moshe stands before them to speak, but not about freedom and not about what they face in that moment. Instead, he talks of a future time. And he talks about parents’ duty to educate their children, to tell their children the story, our story and to make it personal. Don’t just tell it, re-enact it, internalise it as their own.

Rabbi Sacks explains why this is Moshe’s focus at this intense moment of redemption: “because freedom is the work of a nation, nations need identity, identity needs memory, and memory is encoded in the stories we tell.” The story of those who came before us is a powerful link between the generations. The story we hear becomes ours and we then pass it on as a sacred heritage to the next generation, forging a new link. As Rabbi Sacks writes, “We are the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and identity begins in the story parents tell their children.”