This past week during Shabbat services, we discussed the weekly torah portion, Terumah. Terumah means “gifts” and it refers to the gifts that the Israelite people were called upon to bring so that, collectively, they could facilitate the construction of the mikdash, “sanctuary,” from the word for holiness, or, alternatively, mishkan, “Tabernacle,” from the word for dwelling place.
This mikdash or mishkan would travel with the people in their wilderness wanderings on their way to the promised land, serving, as scholar Nahum Sarna puts it, “to make perceptible and tangible the conception of the indwelling of the Divine Presence” in their midst, “to which the people may orient their heart and minds.”
In other words, the sanctuary would serve as a physical albeit transient and transportable reminder that God’s presence dwells betocham “among the people” (Exodus 25:8). Not betocho—in it; not dwelling in the sanctuary. The sanctuary serves a physical, visible reminder that God’s presence dwells among the people.
But why would they/we need such a thing? Surely one of the first religious ideas we learn in Hebrew School, and of which our ancestors must have had some understanding, is that God dwells everywhere. M’lo hol ha’aretz k’vodo, “The glory of Adonai fills the earth,” we say each day in our liturgy, taken from Isaiah 6:3.
So why would our ancestors need a visible reminder of this?
One discussion participant cited the powerful story of the Seer of Lublin, an 18th-19th century Hasidic rebbe from Poland, as rearticulated here by Rabbi David Wolpe:
When he was a child, the seer of Lublin lived near a forest. Almost daily the young boy ventured off into the woods by himself. His father, who was basically a tolerant and understanding man, didn’t want to interfere with his son’s daily excursions, but he was concerned because he knew that forests could be dangerous.
One day the father pulled his son aside. “I notice that every day you go off into the forest,” he said. “I don’t want to forbid you to go there, but I want you to know I’m concerned about your safety. Why is it that you go there, and what is it that you do?” “I go into the forest to find God,” was the boy’s simple response. His father was deeply moved. “‘That’s beautiful,” he said. “And I’m pleased to hear you’re doing that. But don’t you know? God is the same everywhere.” “God is,” the boy answered, “but I’m not.”
In Judaism, traditionally we try to make space for God in our lives. To, through our actions of love towards our fellow and of ritual sanctity, help to reveal God’s presence in the world. As the Source of Creation from which we flow, the idea is, it is incumbent upon us to be in tune, and aligned, with the Sacred.
But it’s not easy. The world is filled with complication and noise and distraction. How do we see through to the underlying Holiness of it all?
Jewish tradition makes space for the need to be intentional about the physical and visual prompts (mezuzot, for example), devices (tallitot and tefillin, for example), and spaces (everywhere from our SHS sanctuary to the woods and in between) that might facilitate our getting in the head-, heart-, and soul-space to carry this out, even if that means changing things up to get us in the right space to do so.
After all, even if God isn’t different under these circumstances, we are.
