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Shabbat starts on Friday at 4:52pm and ends on Saturday at 5:52pm. The weekly Torah portion is Bamidbar.
Shavuot starts on Sunday night: candlelighting at 4:51pm, then Monday after 5:52pm; Yom Tov ends on Tuesday at 5:51pm.
Mincha continues at 1pm at A-P GF/459 Collins Mon-Wed, and Thu 1.45pm at L1 Capital using the WhatsApp group to confirm numbers.
Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at 1.10pm (after mincha) at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: King Herod. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.
Thought of the Week with thanks to Rabbi Dovid Gutnick.
The etymological connection between the Hebrew word for desert, midbar (מדבר), and dibbur (דבור), meaning speech or utterance, offers a profound insight into the transformative experience of the Jews in the wilderness. It was precisely by entering that desolate midbar, a place utterly devoid of the clamour and distractions of settled life, that they were able to achieve a state of unparalleled receptivity.
As Erica Brown so beautifully articulates, “There is something about the expansiveness and simplicity of the environment (of the midbar) that makes people contemplative and aware of their insignificance. The enormity of the terrain highlights our smallness and often, in place of fear, religious awe arises”. This stark emptiness, this humbling vastness, created the perfect resonance chamber for the Divine Dibbur, the very voice of God manifesting at Sinai in the giving of the Torah. To quote Avivah Zornberg: “Precisely in this silent, unmarked place, the voice of God will resound.”
Yet, we also discover another profound connection between Midbar and Dibbur in the inverse: the development of their own voice. The Zohar indicates that the slavery in Egypt had robbed the Israelites of their faculty of speech.
Even Moshe, suggested he was deficient in articulation: “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue”. This is the insidious effect of persecution: it silences you, preventing you from truly telling your own story while trapped within another’s oppressive narrative. But with the exodus and their entry into the midbar, the Jews began to reclaim and discover their authentic voice. This is why the entire Pesach experience so powerfully emphasizes Lesaper and Lehagid – to tell our story.
Shavuot, a festival whose very backdrop is the wilderness or desert, occurs immediately after the parshah Bamidbar (“In the Desert”). This guides us to use this sacred time to intentionally withdraw from the incessant clamour that so often stifles our ability to authentically hear and speak. We enter the Midbar to attune ourselves to the Divine dibbur that continues to reverberate from Sinai. From that place of profound listening, we shall, in turn, cultivate the expression of our own authentic dibbur, enabling us to speak the Divine message, a new story of truth and hope, to a world so desperately thirsting to hear it.