This week’s Torah portion, Behar, introduces the economic and agricultural laws of the sabbatical and Jubilee years. These different cycles introduce a period of rest for the land, an interval during which the land is not cultivated and the fields lie fallow, but they also introduce ways to free people from cycles of debt and indentured servitude.

The opening of this week’s Torah portion, Emor, describes the special expectations that pertain only to the members of the priesthood. In many ways, it continues to elaborate on the themes of holiness that we explored last week, but with a new twist: the priesthood must be holy because they are the ones who offer the sacrifices, which are explicitly likened to food.

This week’s Torah portion, Kedoshim, articulates the central theme of the book of Leviticus: what does it mean to be holy? In Judaism, holiness or sacredness centers around the idea of making distinctions, of marking certain things as separate and thereby marking them as important.

In the holiday cycle, we are emerging from the story of the Exodus, the story of collective redemption. As Jews, this is arguably our central narrative. We recall it every Shabbat, during kiddush. It is the story that tells us about what it looks like to become a people living in relationship to God. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that immediately emerging from this collective narrative, we read a Torah portion, Acharei Mot, that reminds us of our own personal responsibilities.

This week’s Torah portion outlines an extended purification ritual, involving sacrifices, herbs, bathing, and shaving, ending with the afflicted person providing a guilt offering (a special kind of sacrifice). For many modern readers, these rituals may feel inaccessible. They speak in intense detail about afflictions we are not familiar (or which make us squeamish), about sacrifices we not longer practice, about categories (such as purity) that many of us no longer think in. And yet, I think the message of these texts is profoundly resonant.

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial period of lockdown, a lot of Jewish thinkers were talking about this week’s Torah portion, Tazria, which describes how to handle cases of tzara’at, a skin affliction often thought to resemble leprosy. The remedies it prescribes sound a lot like our modern experiences of quarantine.

This week’s Torah portion, Shmini, provides the basis for the many of the most well-known laws of kashrut, namely the prohibition on consuming specific types of meat. Interestingly, it presents those prohibitions in two different ways.

Everyone told me that finding ways to connect the Torah portion to a recipe and an interesting story or kid-based activity would get harder the further we got into the text. Sure, Genesis and Exodus are filled with interesting stories, but what about Leviticus? What was I going to do?

This week, we begin the third book of the Torah, Vayikra or Leviticus. This week’s reading includes many details about the various sacrificial offerings. However, there’s one element that might be especially interesting to share at your Shabbat table: the commandment to offer salt with the sacrifices.

This week’s Torah portion, Pakudei, continues to discuss the decorations in the tabernacle, and I was struck by this description:

"On the hem of the robe [for the ephod] they made pomegranates of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, twisted. They also made bells of pure gold, and attached the bells between the pomegranates, all around the hem of the robe, between the pomegranates: a bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate, all around the hem” (Ex. 39:24-26).