Shabbat Terumah

Written by Andrea Zanardo Friday, 27 February 2009

Our little son Dov is already one year old. He stands up, sometimes leans on the bookshelf’s lower part. He is beginning to walk, and enjoys it. More than anything else, Dov loves to tricycle.  He sits on the saddle, starts running, lifts up his feet, and smiles, as the tricycle brings him to some corner of the house. Dov and I love to play hide-and-seek. I hide, crouching behind the armchair, and call his name out loud; he searches all over the room, slowly on his tricycle, till the moment he discovers me. Our eyes meet, we smile. Then I pretend to run after him while he goes as fast as possible on his tricycle; suddenly he turns right and stops, looking up to Abba, me. Our eyes meet again, we laugh.

To hide, to call out loud; to seek, through several attempts; to discover in unexpected places. Then to smile in an outburst of joy. Isn’t this the same pattern as our relationship with God? We might think that to express this relationship through a family routine is typical of a middle class, bourgeois Jewry. We might think also that this kind of relationship with the Holy that comes in touch with the daily life, through the glance of a child’s eyes, is part of our contemporary Buberian sensitivity. Isn’t this too personal a way to understand out our relationship with God?

Indeed, Parashat Terumah suggests that it isn’t. The Children of Israel are commanded to build a Sanctuary, with its tabernacle, to contain the two stone tablets of the Decalogue; with its decoration, furniture and appurtenances, whose intricate symbolism stimulated countless exegetical fantasies; and with its borders: roof, curtains, and enclosures. These are meant to separate the tabernacle from profane space, to delimit the space where the presence of God is manifest, and where the relation with the Eternal One can take place. Indeed, a great length of this parasha is devoted to explain how the Sanctuary has to be built, while just one verse is devoted to explain the reason why such a building has to be built. We find it in Exodus 25:8, ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם, “Let they make a Sanctuary that I may dwell among them”. As Menahem Mendl of Kotzk famously explains, the text does not say: “in it”, in the Sanctuary itself, but “among them”, among the Children of Israel. Each person must build the Tabernacle in his own heart, then God will dwell among them (1).

Some parts of the Tabernacle are composite: the roof consists of layers of  different material, meaning that each of us relates with God in a different way. Some other parts, like the golden menorah, are to be made from a single block, which is a powerful exhortation to integrity. The same pure gold overlays the inner and the outer side of the ark; it means that our interior, individual, devotion must be of the same material of our external, social, actions. Such a Tabernacle is an enduring one. It has been carried by the Children of Israel in their hearts during the journey in the wilderness. It came together with us in the Exile, when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. As we all know, that Temple was very different from the portable Sanctuary carried in the desert. Each generation builds different places of worship according different needs.

We have notions about the building of the Sanctuary, enough to figure out what the exterior must look like, but this parasha does not say anything about what happened behind these curtains. Not a single word of this parasha explains what took place in the deepest section of the Sanctuary, where God, who is supposed to be everywhere, used to become manifest in a particularly intense, and maybe temporary, way. We just know that a building, a place exists; we do not know what happens inside. This text is totally mute about the modalities of the relationship with God. Menahem Mendl of Kotzk would say that we are commanded to build our inner Sanctuary and we have some instructions about the process, but we are left without words to explain what would happen there.

As the Sanctuary was surrounded by curtains, delimited by enclosures and roof, our interior Tabernacle is built deeply in our hearts. Sometimes it is impossible to find the proper words to explain what is going on down there. So we employ images, metaphors, analogies like the one I began with: the relation between father and child. And we remain uncertain where God exactly is, whether in the protective look of the father, or in the joyous glance of the child, or in the enduring, continuous, unspoken relationship between different generations.