Parashat B’hukkotai

Friday Night Shabbat Services are tonight at 7 PM.

Shabbat morning services are a week away, June 11.

Shavuot services will be Sunday June 12 at 10 AM. Come celebrate the giving of the Torah – Chag Matan Torah with us.

But Before Then: Beth El’s Annual meeting is this Sunday June 5 at 4:45 PM. Come hear all about the shul happenings and have your say, while enjoying a delicious kosher BBQ. To help please bring paper goods, kosher drinks or consider a small donation to help with costs. Also, you may come early and help cook.

Tuesday June 7 at 6 PM, the sisterhood will meet at Beth El for a planning meeting for the coming year. All ideas are welcome.

Candle lighting in Austin is at 8:11 PM

Cantor Ben-Moshe’s weekly message:
This week we read Parshat B’hukkotai, the end of the Book of Leviticus. This parshah contains one of the two tochechot, passages of rebuke, in the Torah. Traditionally, this passage as well as the one in the Book of Deuteronomy are read very quickly and in an undertone, so as not to put an emphasis on the punishments attendant upon disobedience to God’s laws. “Fire and brimstone” preaching is simply not part of normative Judaism. We are enjoined to walk in God’s ways out of love, not out of fear. “V’ahavta et Hashem Eloheikha”-“And you shall love Hashem your God”-this is the model for our relationship with the Divine. May we go about all of our business in the spirit of love, for God, for humanity and for all of Creation. Shabbat Shalom.
Hazzan Yitzhak Ben-Moshe

NEW AC UNITS FUNDRAISER
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Rabbi Peter Tarlow’s weekly Parasha from the Center for Jewish Latino relations:
Mixing the practical with the spiritual.
This Shabbat, we finish the yearly reading of the Book of Leviticus. We find the weekly section called Bechukotai starting in Leviticus 26:3 and going until the end of the book.
This section once again deals with a myriad of ideas and concepts, and once again, the text in the subtlest of ways takes us to the theme of balancing the ideal with the practical, the need for holiness with that of economics.
Although not openly stated, Leviticus teaches us in this final chapter that one who lacks idealism becomes nothing more than a human machine and one who lives only by one’s idealism is a fool. Life requires a balance of idealism and the practical, of an understanding of the need to balance one’s friends’ requests against the desires of one’s enemies. The text teaches this important and real life lesson in a number of ways.
For example, we read the subtext of the proper usage of time. If we examine the opening verse we find that it reads “Im-bechukotai telechu/If you will go (through time) by means of my statues”. The verb “telchu”, derived from the root h-l-ch), means “to go/walk and often has a temporal sense. Is the verse teaching us that as we travel through time we are expected to increase our knowledge base even though our time on Earth may be limited? Is this the reason that the classical rabbis understood education to be food for the soul? They emphasized that we must be good stewards not only of our physical resources but also of our temporal resources.
In these final chapters we note that the idealism of the holiness code can only exist if we are both spiritual and practical. To love we must also be strong enough to defend ourselves. Are the results of a lack love cynicism and of too much love is collective suicide?
Leviticus is a book based on the concept of “kdushah”, which means a combination of “that which we sanctify by separating from the rest, that which we make special, or that which we utilize with care”. This final parashah then summarizes the book’s theme by teaching us that as we travel down the path of time we must carefully manage our physical and temporal resources, our spiritual with our economic resources. The weekly parashah teach us that we dare not mismanage any of these or the consequences will be curses rather than blessings. These are important words to consider in an election year. What do you think?