Rabbi Claude's Scribbles

Iyar - Made in Heaven Psalms 30:12 (12) You transformed my lament into dancing, you undid my sackcloth and girded me with gladness תהילים ל ׳: י ״ ב (יב) הָפַ֣כְתָּ מִסְפְּדִי֮ לְמָח֪וֹל לִ֥י פִּתַּ֥חְתָּ שַׂקִּ֑י וַֽתְּאַזְּרֵ֥נִי שִׂמְחָֽה׃ It is awfully confusing being Jewish! One minute we're spending our time in fasting remembering the impending fate of the Jews in Shushan over the Fast of Esther and the next, we are trying to inebriate ourselves to the extent that we can't tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai! Another case in point:  We are currently marking the deaths of 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students during the Omer, yet, in less than three weeks, we will be (in non-lock-down years) dancing around bonfires marking Lag Ba'omer. And even after the sombre period of the Three Weeks which culminates in the saddest day of our calendar - Tisha B'Av, we recover enough gusto and spirit to mark th

Harold Wilson famously said, “A week is a long time in politics” and although he was referring to the hustle and bustle of daily life in Westminster during the 1960s, he could not have known that his words would come to be so meaningful half a century later. It’s also true that the idea of summing up a week as being an agent for change is historically accurate.  We don’t need to look further than our Torah to inform us of what can be achieved in this period. Indeed, the very first chapter in Bereshit demonstrates how much the Almighty managed to do in a mere six days before He put his feet up for the first Shabbat Shluf! If we set read the Torah without pondering on how long each of the ‘days’ of creation lasted and for the sake of this discussion assume that it was a week as we know it, I don’t think even the great Harold Wilson could have imagined how effectively he could transform a ‘political week’, when compared to what Gd decided to do one Sunday ‘morning’ a long, l