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Mincha continues at  1.00pm at A-P GF/459 Collins, using the WhatsApp group to confirm a minyan each day.

Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at 1.10pm at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: dividing common property. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.

Thought of the Week with thanks to Mandi Katz.

This week’s Torah reading offers two very different visions of what lies ahead for Israel. In Bechukotai, adherence to the covenant will bring blessings and bounty, both spiritual and physical, described in evocative detail. But violation will result in suffering and desolation – depicted in some of the most brutal imagery in the Chumash.

The language that speaks most powerfully to me is positive and the final blessing on the path of faithfulness provides a particularly striking image: “I am the Lord your G-d who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from your being slaves to them, and I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk upright”. In this blessing we see the idea that freedom from slavery allowed the Hebrews to stand upright, with dignity and self-assurance, and that accepting the yoke of Torah will bestow similar dignity and agency.

Modern commentators see in this verse a beautiful and powerful paradox; in the context of a passage that is unrelenting on the need for obedience, an ideal is presented of a person who stands up with dignity and a strong sense of self.

Rabbi Shai Held sees this as an expression in this portion that what G-d wants from us is “not servility but service”. He writes: “one can hardly overstate the centrality of obedience in the Torah … yet it is vital to recall that obedience is not obsequiousness.” In this paradigm, the lowliness of our mortality before G-d is indisputable but it is not the whole story – we are also required to stand tall and have a strong sense of our worth and dignity, to meet the challenges of living decently in the world.

Held sees echoes of this model in the language of the psalmists who express profound piety, but also speak of their pain and suffering, and even disappointment in G-d, and whose cries are not regarded as problematic but are accepted in our tradition as essential to faith – living in covenant with G-d requires obedience but also self-assertion and the courage to express our needs and even expectations