Parashat Terumah
Ex. 25:1-27:19
God’s creation of humanity in the Divine image is God’s final act in the creation account which opens the Torah. While it is difficult to comprehend how the physical and spiritual configuration of humanity models God’s understanding of God’s self, this statement expresses a belief that there is a reciprocal correspondence between the human and the divine. God and humanity are bound to each other.
What is essential to humanity is essential to God. What God needs, humans need. What people desire, God desires. The relationship between the human and the divine forms the center of our spiritual searching.
In the context of Parashat Terumah, which presents the detailed instructions for building the Mishkan, the portable desert sanctuary, God and humanity seek a sense of intimacy with each other. We want to live in God’s house and God wants to dwell in our midst.
Some of our most beloved Psalms powerfully express our wish to abide with God. In Psalm 27, the psalm for the High Holiday season, the psalmist’s only desire is to spend a lifetime dwelling in God’s abode, contemplating God’s gracious nature. Psalm 23, the Shepherd Psalm, ends with the hope that the author’s time in God’s house extends indefinitely. Despite our awareness of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual failings and limitations, we still seek the safety, comfort, and reassurance of God’s presence.
In Parashat Terumah, which introduces a lengthy body of material describing the building of the Mishkan, God’s holy place, and the spiritual activities that took place within it, we see that despite our stubbornness, rebelliousness, and lack of vision, God desires to dwell in our midst. This holy place, whose plans God reveals to Moses, will be a place for the Israelites to gather, to seek forgiveness for their sins, to offer thanksgiving for their blessings, and to celebrate sacred moments of communal and personal life.
While our memory of the Exodus and the years of wandering are preserved in sacred legend, the image of God dwelling in the midst of the Jewish community has remained a powerful metaphor describing our sense of God’s immediate presence, the Shekinah, in our lives. Although the Mishkan (the Tabernacle) and its successor, the Beit HaMiqdash (the Temple in Jerusalem), the physical expressions of this metaphor are long gone, Scripture offers descriptions of these structures that allow us to find those moments of intimacy with God it considers fundamental to the human experience.
Through shared language, Scripture binds together God’s Creation of the World and Israel’s construction of God’s house. Rabbinic literature expands on this insight in Midrashic descriptions of the Mishkan, as a microcosm, a miniature representation of the great world in which we live. The reciprocal relationship between God’s work, in Hebrew, melakhah, building our home, the great world within which we live, and our labor, also called melakhah, erecting God’s home, the small world
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contained within the Mishkan, provides the framework of activities that we avoid on the Shabbat, the weekly celebration of the miracle of Creation.
Through Jewish imagery and Jewish practice, the Mishkan retains its special place as God’s house within our hearts and the heart of our community. Jewish tradition describes our homes, our synagogues, and our schools as small sanctuaries. Our spiritual practices aim to direct our focus on the mishkan within us. The ethical and moral implications of our life choices are to reflect the presence of the God who seeks a dwelling place in our midst. Our internalized memory of the Mishkan, a model of the physical world God created as our home, directs us to preserve the holiness of creation.
Our reading of the building of the Mishkan asks us to take seriously the biblical understanding of the reciprocal nature of the divine-human relationship. The fundamental questions asked of us are twofold: What do we need to do to build a home for God within the social world of humanity? and What do we need to do to live within the physical home God built for us?
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God's house and God's creation - Jewish Community Voice
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