Letting God In: Parshat T'rumah

 

 

When you long for God, what's the relationship between failing and succeeding? This past week's parshah, T'rumah, offers an answer.

"And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell [shachanti] among them. Exactly as I show you--the pattern of the Tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings--so shall you make it." (Exodus 25: 8-9)

The Mishkan is what often gets called the Tabernacle, which (besides being a swear word in French!) is a wholly inadequate translation of an amazing concept. Mishkan is from the same root as Shekhinah, and that root means to be present, to dwell...even, to be a neighbor. 

The Shekhinah is God's indwelling presence on Earth. The Mishkan is its mailing address.

But the people of Israel sent a letter to the wrong address before!

Golden Calves and Golden Earrings Cannot Mend This Love of Mine

According to Rashi, the great medieval Biblical scholar, the story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) is out of chronological order in the text. It actually occurred before this week's instructions on how to build the Mishkan. In some ways, it's a failed attempt to do the same thing.

Why did the Israelites build the Golden Calf? 

Not because they had suddenly become idol worshippers! They didn't think God was the statue, or was captured in the statue. Rather, they build the Calf as a throne for God's presence to descend upon and live among them. 

(Building, as my friends in #ParshaChat on Twitter have pointed out, is what Israelites do. In Egypt, they built entire store cities for Pharaoh. It's tribute, and it's putting their talents into action.)

And why did they need reassurance that God was in their midst?  

Because after Sinai, they had been overawed by God's voice, to the point where they implored Moses to listen to God for them and bring back the message. And at this point in the story, Moses had gone up Mount Sinai and hadn't been seen for forty days and forty nights (the biblical expresssion for "it seemed like forever").

So, on this reading, the Israelites built the Golden Calf out of the same longing for God that would later lead to their building the Mishkan. What's more they build it out of one of the key ingredients called for in this week's parshah: gold, taken out of Egypt. In their eagerness to feel God's presence among them, they rip off their gold earrings and tell Aaron to melt them down to make a place for God.

It doesn't work. It's a disaster. Moses, when he comes back down the mountain, ends up grinding the Golden Calf to powder and making them drink it--like a colonoscopy prep--to flush the impulse out of their system.

No Calf, No Mishkan?

Why does Rashi rearrange the order of the stories? It's not necessary: as Avivah Zornberg points out, other commentators like Nachmanides see the sequence in the text as just right. What's the point of saying that first the Israelites built the Calf and only later the Mishkan?

Sometimes, it seems, it's necessary to try what doesn't work in order to attempt what does.

Sometimes, we aim to slake our longings by having a Lover we can control, who will always be there for us even when we are not ecstatic about them. We build the image of our Lover out of our own imaginings and not what pleases them. But that is self-love, born of fear, and we grow up: we learn better.

A wonderful midrash says that when God commands "And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them," those words among them don't mean in the midst of the camp. The words mean in the midst of each person. 

Building the Mishkan according to instructions means taking the same longing for God and fulfilling it in a way that doesn't try to keep God there, but rather, lets God in.

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I'm reading through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's amazing commentary on the biblical Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture. Each chapter expounds one of the portions we read in the synagogue weekly. It's slow going because it is so rich with insights. To keep on track, I will post at least one insight weekly between now and mid-March, when (God willing) I finish the book.

We will do what? And hear what?

One of the most famous quotations from the Torah comes up in this week's parshah, Mishpatim. Most of the parshah focuses on the follow-up to the Ten Commandments, the nitty-gritty of what God wants the Israelites to do in everyday life. Toward the end, though, we read in Exodus 24:7:

Then he [Moses] took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, "All that the Lord has spoken we will faithfully do!"

The Hebrew here is na'aseh v'nishma: literally, "we will do and we will hear." You can see that the translation I quoted chose not to give us the word-for-word meaning, and I can't blame them. Because honestly, what does that mean, "We will do and we will hear"? And why in that order?

Bring it on!

One answer might be that the Israelites have heard the commandments and they're all fired up to do them. Hearing from God face to face at Mount Sinai just blew them away. If that was the end of the conversation...it might have been the end. 

 

But hearing from Moses, in detail, how they could act from day to day in a way that pleased God--that excited them. It made them feel it was humanly possible.

On this reading, "We will do" all of the commandments given us in parshat Mishpatim. But is that all? Does God want more from us? We're ready for more: "we will hear" whatever God still wants to require from us. Bring it on!

We've been doing what good people do. We want to do what good Jews do.

Rashi, the great medieval commentator, interprets Exodus 24 in a surprisingly different way. He says it's out of chronological order and that it actually happened before the revelation at Sinai. 

In that case, what covenant did Moses read to the people? His answer: the books of Genesis and Exodus, up to that present day. And what covenant? The Noachide Laws that (according to Jewish tradition) apply to all human beings, Jewish or not. (This is the Jewish idea of Natural Law, by the way: deduced not by logic but from the text!)

So, on Rashi's reading, na'aseh means that we will keep on doing those things that were a normal part of being a decent person before. V'nishma means that we, the Jewish people, will do those things that make us distinctive, too, which are just about to be revealed to us at Sinai, in last week's parshah and in this.

First we commit, then we understand.

There's yet one more reading, and this one appeals to me. Imagine that Rashi is right, and the conversation between Moses and the people takes place before they stand at Sinai, not after. Then "We will do" is a pledge for an uncertain future. Before we hear what God wants us to do, we commit to the relationship with God. Only then are we in the right state of mind to hear and appreciate it.

What's more, "we will hear" is not a one-time event. As history goes on, we will continue to hear the word--by studying Torah in light of current circumstances and hearing what it has to command us today.

Whenever Jews gather in synagogue on a Saturday morning and chant the weekly portion from the Torah scroll, one by one, seven of us come up to say a blessing. That blessing thanks God "who gave us God's Torah and also "who gives the Torah." Right here, right now. Because a committed people cannot let the words lie on the page. Over and over, we must find new ways to understand.

 

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I'm reading through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's amazing commentary on the biblical Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture. Each chapter expounds one of the portions we read in the synagogue weekly. It's slow going because it is so rich with insights. To keep on track, I will post at least one insight weekly between now and mid-March, when (God willing) I finish the book.

The Talmud and the Internet, by Jonathan Rosen: a review

Growing up in Pittsburgh and attending the pretentiously titled School of Advanced Jewish Studies, I took a bite of Talmud. Not even a mouthful: just enough to taste. And it has nourished my curiosity forever.  Read this book if you want to whet your curiosity too.

Like me, author Jonathan Rosen finds the form of the Talmud even more intriguing the intricacies of its content. It's the original hypertext.

The Mishnah is at the center of each page, a set of oral traditions about how to read and practice what we find in the Torah that were finally written down between 180 and 220 CE by Rabbi Yehudah haNasi to keep them from being forgotten. The Gemara comes below, giving four centuries more of debate about what how those traditions make sense and what they really mean. More commentaries are arranged at the bottom and along the sides: the medieval scholar Rashi and his disciples especially. That's not even getting into the entirely separate books that comment on the Talmud, from Maimonides' Mishneh Torah to the latest one hot off the press.

As Rosen points out, these commentators hold lively discussions, even when one of them is rebutting another who's been dead for centuries. They don't confine themselves to any genre. Legal discussion rubs shoulders with etymology, moralism with fable. They remind him (and me) of nothing so much as weird and unpredictable discussions on the Internet--especially the more unbridled Internet of 2001, when this book was published.

Rosen is both incisive and evocative when he makes the case that Talmudic discussion is the lifeboat of the Jewish people. When the destruction of the Temple by the Roman empire cast Jewish life adrift, it was in these discussions that we made our home.

Rosen is elegiac when he looks at 21st-century Jewish life, changed forever by both the Holocaust in which some of his grandparents died and the acceptance of the Jews into secular society, and of secular society into Jewish identity. Can we find ways to transmute our existence in new circumstances as the creators of the Talmud once did? Or will the culture that he and I hold dear fade into memory? Or both?