• Table For Five
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Why does the Torah spend so much time describing a structure that was temporary?

Table for Five: Terumah

In partnership with the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Edited by Nina Litvak & Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist

And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst. -Ex. 25:8

Rabbi Gershon Schusterman, Author, “Why God Why?”
 
G-d instructs Moshe to launch a fundraising campaign to build a home for G-d so that He can live, not only in *it*, but also in *them*, in the sanctuaries that are in the heart of every Jew. G-d wants to live in our homes and in our hearts. He doesn’t want to be a guest invited only on holidays and lifecycle occasions but wants our homes to be His home too. 
 
G-d’s sanctuaries were the two Temples which were eventually destroyed by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, in 422 BCE, and Titus, the Roman general, in 70 CE. One might ask: How could the all-powerful G-d’s home be destroyed? It should have been impervious to any destructive forces! 
 
If G-d’s sanctuary is in the Jewish heart, when the Jews strayed from Him and assimilated, they displaced G-d from their hearts and homes. G-d no longer had a home in Jerusalem, leaving His Temple an empty, vulnerable façade. Since the exile, we continue to yearn for G-d and our return to Zion. We want G-d to be conspicuously revealed again in our homes and in His Temple sanctuary. 
 
While the final Temple will be built by Mashiach—Rashi, Sukkah 41a, says it will be built in Heaven and put into place by Mashiach—it will happen by the rebuilding of the temple in our hearts. Our collective accumulated worship, observance, and self-sacrifice since 70 CE has been building the Final Temple. The time is imminent for the final renaissance of Jewish life.
 
Rabbi Tal Sessler , Temple Beth Zion
 
Sanctifying the mundane is a hallmark feature of Chassidic philosophy. According to Chassidism, God is imbued with a metaphysical longing to dwell in the quotidian realm of everyday worldly activities. We are summoned by the Almighty to spiritualize the acts of eating and drinking through the articulation of blessings – mindful articulations of gratitude and cosmic awareness. We even have a benediction for expressing thankfulness for the proper functioning of the body, which we recite after using the bathroom. The insight that a prime goal of Jewish spirituality is to sanctify mundane activities is not unique to Chassidism. A leading rationalist thinker, Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, famously states in his seminal work of Kabbalisitc ethics known as “The Soul of Life,” that the spiritual vocation of the Jew is to become a walking breathing temple for the divine presence to dwell therein. This spiritual insight articulated by Rabbi Chaim, poignantly captures the perpetual meaning of our verse. We become a temple, a cosmic vehicle for the divine, when we make seminal contributions for the amelioration of the societal and metaphysical state of affairs. This is known in the academic scholarly literature as “theurgy,” which means – the human capacity to affect the celestial realm by performing spiritual acts in the material world. Buddhist mindfulness is very popular nowadays, and mindfulness is also a cornerstone of various contemporary psychological modalities. Long before spiritual mindfulness became commonplace in contemporary secular society, it already permeated Jewish spiritual practice, as exemplified in our verse.
 
Kira Sirote, Author of Haftorah Unrolled
 
Before there was Sefaria and other databases, there was a book called the Concordance, which lists all the words from all the verses written in the Tanach. But there’s no book or database that lists the words that are NOT written, the words that one would expect to see, and we’re so used to them not being there, we don’t even notice.
 
“They shall make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell within it.” That’s the verse we should expect to see. We’re building a Mishkan, a dwelling, and it should say that G-d intends to dwell there, in this dwelling. But – instead of “I will dwell within *it*” it says, “I will dwell within *them*.”
 
The Torah spends a long time describing a structure that was temporary and objects that are long gone. If the objective had been to dwell within it, the entire enterprise would have been ephemeral and meaningless. But the goal was to dwell within the Jewish People, and that goal is eternal.
 
The sanctuary of Jewish life is based on the sanctuary of the Mishkan.
The synagogue, in Halacha, is referred to as “Mikdash Me’at” (“mini sanctuary”).
The light of Torah – symbolized by the Menorah.
Our homes on Seder night – reenactments of the altar, which also had to be free of chametz.
The Holiest of Holies of a Jewish marriage – “when they are worthy – the Shechina (Presence) dwells within them.”
 
We have built Him sanctuaries, and He dwells in our midst.
 
Rabbi Ari Averbach , Host of the Moral Courage podcast
 
It’s easy to believe in God at Mount Sinai. Thunder and lightning and the booming voice of the Divine. In fact, it would be impossible to question God’s existence at that moment. Like questioning the existence of the mountain itself, or of your hand in front of your face. But once we left, once Mount Sinai became a memory, there is a tinge of wondering if it was all a dream. Did we really see the thunder? Did the Creator of the Universe speak to me directly?
 
How do we carry this moment with us, not just through the desert, but through our lives? We keep a little reminder of that ethereal awe. We use the nicest materials – gold and silver and lapis – to build a communal centerpiece, because God knows we need something shiny.
One generation turns to the next. The people who walked through the parted sea, who were present for revelation, who tasted the manna, themselves became memories. For the next several hundred years, they still had the Mishkan as a reminder, to gaze upon in their moments of curiosity.
 
But now, for most of Jewish history, even the sacred home for God is just a memory, a story passed down between generations. Rereading this powerful line of Torah, we see that God did not need a small sanctuary to be carried through the desert. That is not the home for God. In that moment, we became the sanctuary. We are the eternal home of God.
 
Shlomo Yaffe, Rabbi at Congregation B’nai Torah, Springfield MA
 
The actual Hebrew for “In their midst” is “Betocham” actually “within them.” Numerous commentators have quoted an earlier source -lost to us- that reads “It is not written within it, but within them -within each and every one.” This exegesis is logical because the verse begins with the singular “a sanctuary” and ends with the plural “within them.” Hence, we understand that the existence of the general, public sanctuary is a function of the collective mosaic of all those “private sanctuaries.”  
 
The Mishkan, the mobile sanctuary which is the subject of our verse, was built by the Jewish people during their journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel out of a broad range of precious materials and rendered beautifully by profound craftsmanship.
 
In this Sanctuary the whole range of mineral, vegetable, animal materials – rendered by profound human artistry come together for the purpose of making a “Dwelling Place” for G-d. Everything G-d created has the capacity to reveal Divinity – if we are willing to find it. 
We experience this in the myriad ways Judaism asks us to elevate our bodies, homes, our commercial and social life and our families through fulfilling the mitzvot that relate to each of those. This includes the ability to use every aesthetic skill not merely for art as an end in itself but as means of limning the Infinite source of all within the finite, by dint of the unique gifts of talent G-d has given to each of us.

With thanks to Rabbi Gershon Schusterman, Rabbi Tal Sessler, Kira Sirote, Rabbi Ari Averbach, and Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe

Image: Image: Model of the Miskhan in Timna Valley Park, Israel

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