The passive phraseology (“six days shall work be done”) could suggest that work must not become a dominating obsession leaving no time for cultural or spiritual activity; work must not rule our lives to the exclusion of everything else. If we are able to find the right balance and keep work in its place, work thereby becomes a means and not an end.

There is a further possible explanation. Saying “six days shall you work” and “six days shall work be done” shows us that there are two issues, the worker and the work. The worker must not expect to rest on the Sabbath day or any other time unless they have earned the rest by work. But the nature of the work is also important. As the sages point out at the end of Tractate Kiddushin, one’s work must be clean, constructive and honest.

An extra dimension comes with the second sidra, which not only informs us how well the work was done but adds that there was an inspection and accounting. Everything was checked and double-checked and only then (actually in next week’s reading) could the Tabernacle ritual begin.

On a personal note I have to say that I saw the tremendous wisdom of this procedure – plan, implementation and inspection – when Jerusalem had a bad winter one year and we turned on our reverse-cycle air conditioning to get some extra warmth, and the air conditioning unit blew up. We had been away when the work was done on our apartment and did not know until that moment that not everything had been double-checked before the contractors left. Maybe we had presumed too much, maybe we hadn’t. Still, we should have remembered that the Torah has both Vayakhel and P’kudei.

A. The source is Kiddushin 20a. In the literal sense it probably means that an employer is at his/her workers’ mercy. The workers know the business cannot continue without them, and they can be tempted to exploit this fact. That is why Jewish law has strict rules designed to prevent workers taking advantage of their employer. They have to work efficiently and energetically and not waste their employer’s time or money. But at the same time the employer must not take advantage of an employee. A boss must not behave like a tyrant or bully, believing (and telling the staff) that their and their families’ lives are in his/her hands and they have to accept what he says or else they’re out.

Labour/management issues are central to Jewish ethics. Neither party is permitted to exploit, cheat or undermine the other. The employee must not feel like a slave; nor, in the colourful rabbinic phrase, is it right that the employer has the feeling of having acquired a master. Both parties need each other. They should feel they are partners, crucial (and appreciated) parts of a team. The question of who pays the wages is not the main issue. Armies need generals; they also need privates. Teams need captains; they also need players. Orchestras need conductors; they also need instrumentalists. Schools need teachers; they also need pupils.

The alpha and omega – or alef and tav – of good labour/management relations is the way they speak to one another. It must always be with respect, propriety and restraint. The Jewish model is Boaz and his reapers in the Book of Ruth; when Boaz came into the field he said, “The Lord be with you”, and they responded, “The Lord bless you” (Ruth 2:4).

As a warning to a boss who speaks to the staff in a high-handed fashion and throws his weight around, Jewish ethics would quote another passage in the Talmud, “Whoever shames his fellow human being in public is as if he has shed his blood” (Bava M’tzia 58b).

In today’s economic climate, when CEOs take away huge salaries whilst retrenching large numbers of staff, there is also a stern warning in the Book of Isaiah, “Woe to those who join house to house” whilst God “looks for righteousness (tz’dakah) and behold, a cry (tz’akah)” (Isa. 5:8,7). A CEO or employer who does not heed the cry of the members of the staff team is like “those who have ears but do not hear” (Psalm 115:6).

The first thing that has to be protected if a business is facing difficulties is the staff. The last thing a CEO should want is a multi-million personal pay packet; as the Yiddish phrase says bluntly, you can’t sleep in two beds at once or eat two meals at the same time. So what if other CEOs are taking out massive salaries? If there is spare money around, the moral thing is to use it for the benefit of the whole staff team.

A. Deism: belief that God is completely beyond the universe.
Theism: belief that God is both within and beyond the universe.
Pantheism: belief that God is identical with Nature.
Panentheism: belief that everything is in God.

Each concept has its own history and its own proponents. Deism and pantheism are problematical for Judaism. Chassidism tends towards panentheism.

Maimonides (Moreh N’vuchim 1:54) prefers to understand “ways” as “attributes” or “qualities”, but we are still not certain why the question is raised at this particular point in the history of the Exodus. It does not help us very much to re-affirm that the Biblical stories are not necessarily in chronological order – Ein muk’dam um’uchar baTorah (Pes. 6b etc.) and hence the historical context may be somewhat irrelevant. Most readers would rather see the Torah as a connected story. Think only of the Akedah (Gen. 22), which specifically says, “And it happened after these things” (the events related in chapter 21).

Bearing this in mind, it is likely that in our chapter the leader, embarking upon a long relationship with the led, is anxious to know how to govern the people. Since Moses has been appointed by the Almighty, he needs to know which qualities the Divine Master utilises in managing His world so that the earthly appointee can exercise his own responsibility according to God’s wish and policy.

This explanation fits in with God’s promise, “All My goodness shall pass before you” (Ex. 33:19). The view of Maimonides is that God is about to give Moses a bird’s-eye view of the whole world, about which the Book of B’reshit says, “God saw everything He had made, and behold it was very good” (Gen.1:31). Seeing the world would allow Moses to get a glimmering of where Israelite history – and his own career – fitted into the Divine picture. It is also possible that “goodness” can be taken literally and that God was about to show Moses the moral principles that had to be followed on earth in order to make the world worthy of its Creator.

The text goes on to say that God has a place where Moses can stand and see, not God Himself, but the traces He leaves in history. If that place is Sinai, it once again suggests Moses getting a picture of the world as God wants it. If “place” is metaphorical, as Maimonides believes can be the case, it refers to God Himself. One of the rabbinic names for the Almighty is HaMakom, “(He who is in every) place”. In this light we can understand the text to be another reference to God’s nature and qualities.

One further problem, though the issues we have discussed are far from exhausting the content and message of the parashah. In verse 20, God says, “No man can see My face and live”. Yes, we know that God has no bodily form or physical characteristics, and words like “see My face” cannot be taken literally. But “face” can be applied to God in a spiritual sense, as the priestly blessing (Num. 6) makes clear. God’s “face” = His favour. No man can “see” His “face”? The idea is that no human can fully perceive God’s ways; our human intellect is limited. It also means that no man can fathom how God runs His world and on what basis He makes His decisions. Thus the text says, “I will be gracious to whomever I will (choose to) be gracious”. We can yearn to know and understand all the details of the Divine mind, but we are asking too much.

A. A person was studying a page of the Talmud. A friend saw what he was doing and noticed which page it was. A week later the same friend came by and was astounded to find that it was still the same page that was open. “Haven’t you moved on?” he asked. “Moved on?” came the reply; “Why should I move on? I like it here!”

Now something which actually happened to me when I was a professional youth worker. When a group of teenagers objected to the conventional Shabbat services because they were boring, they said they wanted to create their own service. I said, “Go ahead!” They sat and thought and planned and got busy. One suggested this change, another suggested that one. Eventually they were ready to conduct their service. I said nothing aloud but I grinned inwardly when the service they produced was identical to the standard Shabbat service!

Both stories show you get used to certain ways of doing things and in time they define who you are and what you stand for. Changing the Siddur has been tried in non-Orthodox movements but without dramatically better results than the prayerbook of tradition. True, they have shortened the services and brought in more vernacular prayers, but if they had worked from within the halachah they could have found halachically sanctioned ways of addressing the same issues. In some cases they have changed the theology, for instance by rejecting references to a personal Messiah, resurrection of the dead and the rebuilding of the Temple, but on most of these questions their own adherents are apathetic. Recent attempts to rework the Siddur have tried to be gender inclusive, though I cannot see how it is an improvement to refer to God without Biblical terms like “Father” and “Lord”.

We are moulded by our history and tradition, and if this is how Jews have always spoken of God it is part of our identity.

A. Arizal is the name popularly given to Rabbi Isaac ben Shlomo Luria, 1534-1572. Because his ancestry was German, Ashkenazi is often added to his name. Hence Ari is the initials of Ashkenazi Rabbi Yitzchak, though it could also be Eloki Rabbi Yitzchak, “the divine Rabbi Yitzchak” or, as a nickname, Ari meaning lion (of the kabbalists). Zal is the abbreviation for zichrono livrachah, “his memory be a blessing”.

One side of the Luria family settled in Poland, the other in Israel. Isaac Luria’s father was told by Elijah the prophet that his son would bring kabbalah to the world and save the Jewish people from suffering. Shlomo, the father, died when Isaac was a child and the family moved to Cairo where they had rich relatives. There Isaac was already writing rabbinic works as a young age; at 15 he married his patron’s daughter. Acquiring a copy of the Zohar, the handbook of the mystics, he spent long periods studying kabbalah in seclusion. Some years later he moved to Tz’fat (Safed) and took over kabbalistic leadership from Rabbi Moses Cordovero. His disciples included Rabbi Chayyim Vital, who like Luria taught that to come close to the Divine Presence one has to love all human brings. Luria insisted on strict compliance with Torah ethics, including the prompt payment of workmen. There are several Sabbath z’mirot composed by him.

Luria died in 1572. He left little written work; his ideas flowed forth so freely that it was hard to systematise and record them. His disciples collected and embroidered the facts of his life and gathered and disseminated his kabbalistic teachings. In liturgy, Luria preferred the Sephardi tradition and enriched it with his mystical interpretations. His liturgical and other practices were adopted by the Chassidim and the Ashkenazi kabbalists.

He wore a clerical collar. He appeared to be a priest calling on Christians to rise up against the Jews. I suspect he was not a real priest at all, but a dressed-up actor; clerical collars are easy to buy, and easier to borrow. A real priest, whatever his view of events in the Middle East, would not be so foolish as to peddle such anti-Christian sloganism.

“Anti-Christian”? Surely the name for this is antisemitism!

But it is anti-Christian too. It ignores the fact that after centuries of
Jewish suffering, a series of official church statements has unambiguously repudiated the accusation of deicide. It takes no account of the fact that after centuries of careless misrepresentation, Christian scholarship today rejects the claim that it was Jews who killed Jesus.

No real priest would be so ignorant as to be unaware of these developments.

And no real priest would shoot himself in the clerical foot by denigrating the Jews.

A “priest” who can find nothing good to say about Jews and would presumably prefer them all to lie down and die is doing no-one a service.

To be fair, he would have to deny himself the benefit of all the ongoing
Jewish contributions to civilisation. He would have to rewrite history,
leaving out Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as tests and treatments for syphilis, diabetes, convulsions, malnutrition, infantile paralysis and tuberculosis discovered by Jews.

He would have to live without the movements in art, music, literature,
philosophy, science, medicine, law, media, education, democracy and commerce developed by Jews.

Naturally he would have to manage without the Scriptures, the Psalms and the Ten Commandments; without monotheism, love of God, love of one’s neighbour and love of the stranger; without the sanctity of life, the dignity of all human beings; the concept of the Messiah…

And to go in for really serious denigration of Jews, he’d have to give back the Jew Jesus too – and Christianity itself.

No – whoever he is, he can’t be a real priest, and what he says can’t be Christianity.

Article from 2002.

A. The Queen of Sheba was probably the most famous Biblical queen, but she was not Jewish. Hers was a prosperous realm in south-west Arabia, and when she “heard of the fame of Solomon because of the name of the Lord”, she paid a visit to Jerusalem and was amazed at his wisdom and his magnificent palace. The story, told in I Kings 10, is embroidered in apocryphal and rabbinic literature and in Josephus.

Some of the Jewish queens in the Bible, such as Michal, the wife of David, were not highly regarded by history. Others, like Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, were considered as outright wicked women.

Post-Biblical Jewish queens had a better reputation. Two in particular who were referred to in Talmudic literature were respected for their piety and political abilities, such as Salome Alexandra (Sh’lomtzion), who ruled Judea in her own right from 76 to 67 BCE. Her husband Yannai had supported the Sadducees at a time of great tension with the rival Pharisees. 50,000 people lost their lives in the struggle, according to Josephus; to mark his victory the king had 800 of his opponents crucified and many of the surviving Pharisees left Judea to save their own lives. The king himself did not survive for long. Stricken with a mortal illness, he urged his wife to make peace with the other side. She not only brought back the Pharisee exiles but ruled so wisely in her own right that the nation was calm and at peace, and there were such wonderful harvests that the grains of corn were said to be as big as olives. Her brother, Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach, ensured that the Pharisees would support her, and he is credited with “restoring the Torah to its ancient glory”. Because of Salome’s piety the sages regarded her as having saved Judaism.

The second famous Jewish queen was Helen, wife of king Monabazus of Adiabene. Sympathetic to Judaism, she and her family helped the Jews to stand out against Rome. Helen herself became Jewish towards the end of the last century BCE, as did her son, Izates. Deciding on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she brought with her a number of golden gifts for the sanctuary. However, she found the country in the grip of famine, and the queen and her son, who was now the ruler of his country, imported food to alleviate the starvation. Five of her grandchildren came to Jerusalem with her to learn Hebrew and be instructed in Judaism. On her death she was interred in Jerusalem, as was her son the king, who had died shortly before. The rabbis had a high opinion of her courage and determination and recorded that one of her descendants was a student of the great Rabbi Akiva.

A. The original custom was that only the first person called to the Torah would say the opening blessing and the last one called up would say the closing blessing. Those called up in between would not say a b’rachah. Hence the person called up last had a special privilege.

Two other explanations are possible. The last person called up had the additional honour of rolling up the Torah and so he was doubly blessed. In addition the final aliyah is the one through whom the Torah reading becomes complete. By way of analogy, think of the rejoicing when on Simchat Torah we rejoice at the completion, not of merely one section, but of the whole Torah.