Parashah of the week: Behar-Bechukkotai

The great Rabbi Dov Ber, also known as the Maggid of Mezrich, once observed that “an animal walks with its face to the earth, for earthiness and materiality is all that it knows. Man walks upright, for man was born to gaze upon and aspire to the heavens.”

Having been born in the 1960s, into a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family, I was fortunate enough to have the option of “gazing upon and aspiring to the heavens”. And I thankfully took it, studying for a BA in theology at Oxford and later teaching it, my mother’s (unrealised) fears that it would lead to my entering the Church notwithstanding.

But most people — especially women — are not born to salaried contemplation. It is the job of a domestic cleaner, for example, to allow those with access to more prestigious vocations and careers to get on with those (or put their feet up) in houses that have been scrubbed, polished and tidied for them.

It is not, of course, a crime for a busy person to employ someone to come in once or twice a week to clean the house. Even so, Leviticus 26: 13 prompts us to think carefully before referring to her (usually), without using her name, as “the cleaner”.