TERUMAH
TERUMAH 5783
Terumah, Donations (Exodus 25-27:19) is the first of two “detour” parshiot after Chapter 24 ends with Moses going up the mountain. The next thing in the narrative that is going to happen is Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets to see the people dancing around the Golden Calf. We know this, yet the next two parshiot delay this drama, giving us instead a very priestly, that is to say, highly detailed account of the physical structure that will house YHVH in this parsha, and then a discussion of priestly clothing in the next one.
This parsha is a fundraiser’s dream as everyone seems to blithely give all the gifts needed for the construction without any memorial plaques.
Chapter 25 is the description of most of what’s covered inside the tent at the top right, (see picture below) including the ark where the tablets with the laws will be placed once Moses comes down the mountain with them. Chapter 26 details the fabric covering of this area. Chapter 27 discusses the rest of the tabernacle, including the sacrificial altar and the bronze laver (that contains the water for washing).
I want to explore four themes.
How do we take the revelation from the wilderness back to the village?
The importance of sacred space in Judaism
The difference between this approach to altars and the approach we’ve seen prior to this
The connection of mishkan and shekhinah
How do we take the revelation from the wilderness back to the village? This is a hugely important question. Personally, having revelations in the wilderness is the easy part, not that it is easy. But with proper spiritual preparation, fasting alone in the wilderness for multiple days will tend to produce visions. But bringing them back to the village and putting them into practice? That is much, much harder. I can’t count the visions or insights I’ve had in the wilderness that have, over time, dissipated because I didn’t have a way to express and implement the lessons from them.
The interpretation and ways to implement visions of the young and middle aged are properly the role of elders. But we live in a world with an incredible shortage of spiritual elders. Oddly enough, I’m not sure that our ancestors in Exodus were in any better shape. Who are the spiritual elders that we encounter in this text?
A friend of mine answers this question of integrating spiritual insights by saying that you need a practice, a beloved community and a mentor. I completely agree that you need a practice that you can wholeheartedly follow. Our text gives us multiple sorts of practices with a vast array of laws of personal conduct and around offering sacrifices. Once we were exiled from the land, and it was heading this way even before the exile, we have two kinds of demands. One is to follow the law in great detail. This has become the path of orthodox Judaism. The other is the demand for ethical action, articulated in the phrase tikkun olam, the repair of the world. This has been a core touchstone of the engaged liberal community that mostly doesn’t find deep meaning in following laws.
A mentor sounds wonderful. If you are orthodox and have a Rabbinic lineage you follow as embodied by the particular Rabbi of your shul, that works. If you are Hasidic and have a Rebbe or for the really small number of people who follow a non Hasidic Rebbe such as in some segment of the Renewal Community, that works as well. For the rest of us, Jewish spiritual mentors are really, really, really hard to find, in part because our seminaries aren’t designed to train spiritual mentors. The Liberal Jewish community does not select Rabbis based on their spiritual prowess.
A beloved community sound wonderful, and something with which I have always struggled. There’s a famous Jewish joke about a guy rescued a few years after a crash on a desert island. His rescuers find that he’s built two temples, and puzzled, they ask him why. He points to one and says that’s the one he attends, and the other is the one that he wouldn’t be caught dead in. If you have a beloved community, consider yourself blessed.
I also believe that clarity about the meaning of the revelation makes a huge difference. I left my first vision fast knowing I needed to address my being Jewish, but I had no idea what that meant or how to do it. This is where elders came into play in indigenous societies and perhaps why my friend calls out the importance of mentors.
The Hebrew people have a specific challenge. How do we bring the revelation we just experienced on Sinai with us in our journey to the promised land of Canaan? YHVH provides part of the answer when he says bring me with you. “Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” (25:8) Build a mishkan, a portable sanctuary, and bring the divine with you from Mt. Sinai to Canaan, and here are the instructions for the building of the divine structure in mind numbing detail.
If you have ever experienced a revelation in the wilderness or some kind of really significant insight, what has worked and what has not in bringing it back to the village, to your everyday life? Do you have a practice, a beloved community, a mentor? What, if any, is the relationship of these to the revelation in the wilderness?
Sacred space is hugely important in Judaism. The mishkan described in this parsha is the forerunner of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was conceived as an axis mundi, the centerpoint in the world connecting the underworld, the middleworld and the upperworld (heaven). The temples were a focus of Judaism for about the first third of our history as a people. Then the land of Israel as a whole became a focus of our dreams in exile. When Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, desperate to save the Jewish people from the tide of antisemitism in Europe, proposed settling in Uganda for a new Jewish state (as if nobody lived there—the proposal being typical European colonialism), the people, observant of law and non observant alike, shouted him down and insisted on our ancestral homeland. The Western Wall, as the only remnant of the Second Temple, is highly revered and is a place that appeals to secular and religious Jews alike.
But there are those within Judaism who reject the importance of sacred space. There’s a certain tension around having a UNIVERSAL TRUE GOD OF THE ENTIRE WORLD, and privileging one particular place over any other. We’ve had plenty of leading thinkers who haven’t so much denigrated sacred space as who think that we have moved past the particularism of a particular place.
This rejection of place can be found in the thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-72), a highly revered and influential thinker. Let’s briefly look at the introduction to his book The Sabbath. The book begins with an attack on the idea that a deity could be associated with a particular place and a denigration of mountains and rivers as mere things (pp.4-6). He contends that pantheism is a religion of space (p.4). Heschel then argues “To Israel, the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature, even though physical sustenance depended on the latter.” (p.7) and “Judaism is a religion of time, aimed at the sanctification of time.” (p.8). Finally, “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. (p.10, italics in original)
I would not deny the importance of sacred time in Judaism or in general. But I would argue vociferously both for the general importance of sacred space and for its place in Judaism. I would emphatically argue against a view that sets time against space and privileges time over space as something inert. I believe that land and mountains and rivers are alive. I would argue that if we want to reclaim a sense of being indigenous, that sense must include an uplifting of local sacred space.
We have many examples of the importance of sacred space in Biblical Judaism. The details of the mishkan are a testimony to the reverence our ancestors felt about sacred space. The closing line of the Mourner’s Kaddish is Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu which should be translated as “He who makes peace from the high sacred places, he will make peace on us.” My Jewish Learning, to give one example, mistranslates bimromav as celestial heights because they can’t conceive of sacred high places. We see the sacred high places throughout the book of Judges, Samuel, Kings and we’ll see it later when the prophet Balaam blesses us after being paid to curse us in the book of Numbers. The sacred high places were often associated with sacred groves and the Goddess, which I think is part of why this idea of sacred space is problematic and/or gets suppressed in Rabbinic Judaism.
It is easy to lose sight of sacred space in our mobile modern lives. Almost all of us do not live somewhere where we go to particular holy areas to celebrate rituals, and none of us live our lives surrounded by widespread agreement that certain places are sacred; the Black hills may be sacred ground for the Sioux, but they are a tourist destination for far more people. The place where I did my vision fast in Vermont was not far from a snowmobile trail.
What’s your experience of sacred space? What makes it sacred? If you have ever connected to a sacred place, imagine that this was a regular part of your life and the lives of everyone around you. How would that change your life?
The approach to the altars in this parsha is just wildly different than the approach to altars up until now. We’ve seen numerous examples of ad hoc altars, built on the spot to offer thanks to the divine. This is true from Abraham to Moses (Exodus 17:15). A mere few chapters earlier, Chapter 20 concludes with “build me an altar of earth…and if you make me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stone.” (Exodus 20:24-25). Compare that to the altar of Chapter 27 with a specification of wood, width, length and height, horns on the corner overlayed with copper, a description of all of the utensils needed for the altar and how to make the poles for the altar, because this is a portable altar (27:1-8). Or the description of the ark, which while not an altar, also demarcates sacred space and is a way of remembering the divine presence. The ark is described in great detail in 25:10-21.
These different approaches to altars mark a difference between a spontaneous celebration of the divine and a settled and elaborated celebration. It’s part of the ancestral answer to how to bring the relatively spontaneous and unstructured spiritual experience of the wilderness into the village. The elaborated altars are seen as part of being grounded in a place—remember that while the action in Exodus takes place in the wilderness, it was written by priests who were relatively urbanized and describes a village or city religion, rather than a wilderness one.
The practice of building altars is being reclaimed, though these altars are usually household ones rather than the kind of temporary altar that Wilderness Torah builds during Sukkot to circumambulate as we pray for rain. Perhaps we can think about these different kind of altars by analogizing them to praying in an elaborate, ornamented place of worship compared to a more spontaneous and more individualized place.
Are you moved by either kind of altar? How does it impact your spirituality?
Mishkan and Shekhinah share the same Hebrew root. Mishkan is the word that is usually translated as tabernacle and Shekhinah is the word that usually means the feminine aspect of the divine. So grammatically, if no other way, this dwelling place of the divine is connected to the female aspect of the divine. I think this is an intriguing connection. One way to think of this is that the transcendent aspects of the divine embody male energy and the indwelling aspects embody female energy. Kind of like the “father sky and mother earth” imagery that comes from Native American thought.
True confession: whenever I read about transcendent divinity, I get it intellectually, but emotionally and in my body it always feels distant to me and kind of irrelevant. But talk about the sacred earth and everything resonates from my fingertips to my toes and into the holy earth. I don’t want to argue that the way I respond is the way people should respond. If you can worship a transcendent God without screwing up the more than human world that our very physical life depends upon, Kol HaKavod, as we say in Hebrew, more power to you.
I’m sure proponents of transcendent divinity can adduce arguments against earth based Gods, perhaps centered on issues around universality, the greatness of the cosmos as a whole or the possibility of redeeming the imperfections of the physical. But exactly counter to Heschel when he writes of religious experience that “What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight, rather than the place where the act came to pass” (The Sabbath, p.6), I think that the moment can only be separated from the place because we are alienated from the earth. And a rather large part of our spiritual task needs to be to reconnect with the earth—and that has to be done through connecting with particular places; it can’t be done as a generalization.
Does the connection of mishkan and Shekinah speak to you? How? What about transcendence vs indwelling?
QUESTIONS
If you have ever experienced a revelation in the wilderness or some kind of really significant insight, what has worked and what has not in bringing it back to the village, to your everyday life? Do you have a practice, a beloved community, a mentor? What, if any, is the relationship of these to the revelation in the wilderness?
What’s your experience of sacred space? What makes it sacred? If you have ever connected to a sacred place, imagine that this was a regular part of your life and the lives of everyone around you. How would that change your life?
Are you moved by either kind of altar? How does it impact your spirituality?
Does the connection of mishkan and Shekinah speak to you? How? What about transcendence vs indwelling?
