This week’s Torah portion is Terumah, which means a voluntary portion or contribution. It also means to separate or lift up. God instructs Moses about the design for the building of a holy sanctuary. The Torah says, “And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. ” (Ex. 25:8) God tells Moses to ask the people to contribute the materials with which to build a portable sanctuary to accompany them in their travels through the wilderness. After the revelation, the giving of the Ten Commandments, the people will have a place to draw near to God. It marks the beginning of Jewish ritual, a substitute for the direct love and devotion of the Revelation, an answer for the longing felt by the Israelites after their peak experience of being in God’s Presence.
The first Torah portion in Genesis, B’reisheet, speaks about this longing. The parable of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of Knowlege in the Garden of Eden describes humanity receiving consciousness. With consciousness comes a realization of our separateness from each other and our separation from God. The expulsion from the Garden can be seen as a metaphoric way of describing our longing: the hole each of us has in our hearts because of our separation from wholeness; our separation from union with God. It is simply part of the human condition to have this longing. A feeling that things used to be better, that we used to be smarter or more complete.
We are told by our society to satisfy this longing with money, by buying things, by eating well, living well, and of course, by sexual gratification. We are urged to find the perfect person who can satisfy all our needs and desires. But these methods of addressing our longings are fundamentally mistaken, since the longing is partly, and perhaps mostly - spiritual, and they cannot be satisfied permanently by any one person or by sensual pleasures alone.
In Exodus, God gave the Israelites a way to find their way back to union with God. The S’fat Emet comments on the verse from Song of Songs, I am dark but beautiful (I:5). This speaks of our duality, a human body whose desires may be wayward, and whose actions may be mundane, but whose soul is glorious. The giving of the Torah with its commandments, urging us to use our energies for goodness and righteousness, gives us a plan by which we can be guided by the longings of our souls and not by the needs of our bodies.
The sanctuary that was created by the Israelites was many things: a community building exercise, a make work project for people with nothing to occupy themselves, a labor of love, a place to sacrifice, a place to gather. It was not the place of God’s dwelling, but rather a symbol of God’s Presence among them. Right at the start, it served a symbolic function.
There is a beautiful commentary in Jewish tradition that the building of the sanctuary describes an inner task and not only an outer edifice. Chassidic rabbis like Malbin taught that each one of us is to build a sanctuary for God in our own hearts; or to put it another way, to separate a little bit of our hearts for God. Just as coming to this synagogue on Shabbat brings balance to the week, so building a tabernacle in the heart balances us as people: it balances the acquisitiveness in the messages we are sent from the larger society and legitimizes the promptings of our souls. Making for ourselves an inward temple is not merely a metaphor. It is conscious inner work without which no spiritual growth is possible. Setting aside part of ourselves, lifting that part up, to the grade of the holy, reestablishes our connection to God by enlisting our emotions to make the connection tangible and real. Just as we experience longing as feeling, so too, we can experience our union with God in feeling: feeling happy within ourselves, contented with the great blessings God bestows upon us, and guided by the unseen hand that causes our lives to work out and gives us new spiritual opportunities each day. Giving the voluntary gift of ourselves is truly all that we have to give. A tangible, physical gift is but an outward expression of the love from within. May we separate a part of ourselves, lifting ourselves up, higher than we are, higher than we believe ourselves capable of being, to give this gift of ourselves, in love, to God. As we give to God, we also become more capable of giving and receiving love from others. Through our giving, may we be blessed by the turning of our human longing into the realization of our connection with the Divine, the source of all life and being.