Life moves apace and I am already looking to the next moment on our Jewish calendar, as is our way. Pesach is at the end of this month.
This week’s portion Ki Tissa sees the Golden Calf and Moses (and God’s) ensuing fury. Afterwards, after he’s gone back up Sinai to collect the second set of tablets, Moses is alone with God and asks to see God’s presence, it’s a beautiful request.
In the end he’s hidden in the cleft of a rock and is told, for his own safety, he’ll see just the back of God.
I think of this actually as anticipating Passover.
Why? When former bishop Richard Holloway left his faith because of its empty promises he nonetheless talked of the beauty of “the ritualistic aspect, the way that each day is marked out for a particular purpose, so that we will regularly have appointments with spiritual ideas”.*
Boy, I loved this. And of course our festival year is replete with appointments with spiritual ideas. Whether it’s seeing God in these small dates in our diary, in the seder, the service, the feeding of others. It’s all bound up in the moments that matter for us.
Let All Who Are Hungry Come and Eat, we’ll say on Seder night and before it. This year maybe in as many languages as we can muster. So, if you have customs and minhagim in your families you’d like to see added to our FPS seder and services, do tell me. Let’s expand our appointment with spiritual ideas for everyone.
Rabbi Rebecca
*Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt by Richard Holloway Canongate Books 2012
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