From the Physical to the Spiritual

This week’s Torah portion is Terumah, which means a portion, gift, or contribution. God spoke to Moses and asked the Israelites to make a freewill offering of all the materials that would be needed to build a portable place of worship in the wilderness, as the text says, “so that I may dwell among them. (Ex. 25:8)” God then gives precise instructions for the design of the Tabernacle and its furniture, including a golden ark to house the tablets of the Ten Commandments, a golden menorah as tall as a person, a gold clad table that looked like a baker’s rack, to hold 12 special loaves of bread; and a copper altar for sacrifice, and many other items. We had been slaves in Egypt, possibly as long as 400 years.

We had built cities for the Pharaoh; but now, as pointed out by Rabbi Denise Eger in the Women’s Torah Commentary, we were being asked to embark on a different kind of building. As we constructed the Mishkan, the dwelling or the Sanctuary, we would be using the freewill gifts, ordinary building materials, and transmuting them into something holy. As Rabbi “Tarphon points out in the Talmud (Avot de Rabbi Natan 11, The Torah Revealed by AY Finkel), “You can see how highly regarded labor is, for God did not cause the Shechinah to rest upon Israel before they did work. Of course, we were building community as we were building the Tabernacle. We were building the traditions of Judaism itself, and we were taking the mundane that with our pure intentions and labor we were able to sanctify it. The Lubavitcher Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, wrote that, ”Man’s task is to incorporate material existence into God’s dwelling”. Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk wrote about the difference between God’s creative process our ours. He explained that God created something from nothing, which he expressed by the Kabbalistic terms Yesh, something, from Ayin, nothing. Our work is the reverse of God’s: we take yesh, the material and turn it into the spiritual. How is this done?

There is a famous commentary on Terumah by the sage Malbin, Rabbi Meir Lev ben Yeshiel Michael, from 19th Century Russia. Malbin wrote, “It says Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among or in them. Each person is to build God a Tabernacle in their own heart, for God to dwell in.” We are meant to create holiness from both of these directions, from the material to the spiritual and also the spiritual to the material. Finding what some have called the God within is discovering our moral compass, our inner holiness, and a reverence for what we can create. Taking that inner guidance and applying it to the physical world completes the work. Rabbi Arthur Green has written, “God’s presence in this world depends upon the depth and sincerity of human desire.”

It is up to us to bring God’s Presence into our world. Only we can create the conditions for God to be manifested in the material world, in human life. We can work from within: from the inner to the outer, and from without: from the outer to the inner. Ideally we should work from both directions: realizing God’s Divinity within ourselves and making all our work, our words, and deeds, into a tabernacle of peace, justice and goodness. As we sang at the Song of the Sea, “This is my God and I will enshrine the Eternal. (Ex. 15:2)” When there is a Tabernacle in our hearts and in our outer lives, God can truly dwell among us.