top of page

Pekude – A thought for the week by Mike Lewis

This weeks’ Parsha is sometimes called the Accountants’ Sedra because it is like an audit, covering the many verses devoted to the building of the Mishkan. It is “signed off” only when God enters the tabernacle in a cloud. But, when the community is to move on, the cloud goes outside the camp. In the Torah we read:

 When the cloud lifted from above the Tabernacle, the Israelites went onward in all their journeys

A community, in Hebrew, can be described as an “edah”, with a collective identity, a” tzibbur”, a community come together for prayer (with a minyan) and a “kehilla”, a collective identity with a diverse mixture of people. The Tabernacle is portable; our personal identity travels with us. To be a Jew is to be on a journey.

It is not only the momentous moments of our lives that matter. The revelation at Sinai was a moment of ecstasy. However, it is not grand gestures but small, repeated displays of love and caring that cement a relationship in our families and also with God. What we do whilst on our own journey, for our own family and as a community, is important.  Day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year we have the opportunity to take those small steps to bring God into our lives.

0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Vayechi is the last Parasha of Bereishit. Winston Churchill used the phrase “the end of the beginning but not the beginning of the end” after the Battle of Britain in the 1940’s. It could well apply t

The Joseph story fills the last 4 chapters of Bereishit. This week, Vayigash, is the longest of them all. In the Torah scroll there are no paragraph breaks since we read Miketz last week. We continue

How do we maintain our Jewish identity in a strange land? That has been a question that resonates throughout our history. There are times when we consider our own land is estranged from us! On Shabbat

bottom of page