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Shabbat starts on Friday at 5:39pm and ends on Saturday at 6:35pm. The weekly Torah portion is Tazria.

Join us for a special Pre-Pesach lunch & shiur with Rabbi Travis
Tues, 16 Apr at about 1.10pm (after 1pm mincha)
Ainsworth Property – Ground Floor South Tower, 459 Collins St
Discover “The Most Important Halacha in Shulchan Aruch” and learn to turn tough days into blessings! 🍽️📖

Mincha 1pm at Ainsworth Property – GF/459 Collins continues Mon-Thu. Join the WhatsApp group where we take a count to confirm each day.

Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at about 1.10pm (after mincha) at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: vendor finance agreements. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.

Thought of the Week with thanks to Annette Charak.

This week’s Torah reading opens with a discussion of the ritual status of a woman who has given birth. After giving birth to a boy, the woman is ritually impure for seven days, and for 33 days after that, she is in a state of “blood purification”, a term whose meaning is unclear. If the woman gives birth to a girl, the time periods are each doubled: she is ritually impure for 14 days, followed by a 66-day period of “blood purification”.

Commentators have given various explanations for why the mother’s impurity last longer when a girl is born. The Maharsha (1555-1631) ties the mother’s longer period of impurity after giving birth to a girl to the mother’s worry that her daughter, too, will one day experience the agonising (and dangerous) pain of childbirth.

Samuel Balentine, in his 2003 commentary on Leviticus, similarly suggests that “a woman’s loss of blood at childbirth leaves her in a weakened condition that… makes her susceptible to illness and potentially to death. The same threat applies to her daughter, who as a mother-to-be will one day share the experience of losing some of her life in order to bring life into the world.”

Rabbi Shai Held concludes from this that, in giving birth to a daughter, “a woman brings into the world another person who may well skate uneasily on the often very thin line between life and death. This amplifies anxiety about the boundaries between life and death and thus lengthens the mother’s period of impurity.”