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This week we read two portions. This happens sometimes, due to certain vagaries in the Jewish lunar calendar. These two parshas really do make up one unit: The summary of all that was built for and installed in the Tabernacle. Moshe instructs the people to gather and bring all the material needed for the construction, they respond generously, and the work is completed. The parshas include a long list of all the construction materials and details of the Tabernacle itself, the vessels, and the priestly garments. One of the vessels described is the ‘Kiyor’, the sink, or basin, to be used by the priests to wash their hands and feet in the course of their work in the Tabernacle. The Bible presents us with a somewhat cryptic description of its construction: “And he made the sink of bronze, and its pedestal of bronze, with the mirrors of the women who congregate, who congregated at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting”. Who are these women? Where and why are they congregating? Why were their mirrors used to construct the basin?

Rashi brings the following fascinating answer from the Midrash: “The women of Israel were in possession of mirrors, which they used when they beautified themselves, and even these they did not withhold from donating to the Tabernacle. And Moshe rejected them, for they are made to serve the evil inclination. God said to him: ‘Accept them, for these are dearer to me than all the rest, for it is with them that the women raised many congregations [this is the meaning of 'the women who congregate' in the verse] in Egypt. When their husbands were tired from their labors, the women would go and bring them food and drink and feed them, and bring the mirrors with them, and each one would look at herself and her husband in the mirror and tempt him, and say ‘I am prettier than you’, and thereby arouse their husbands’ desire for them, and they would be together, and the women conceived, and gave birth …’. And the sink was made of them, for its function is to make peace between husband and wife, by giving water from it to the woman suspected by her jealous husband of having been unfaithful [during a ritual known as the 'Sotah' ceremony].”

Moshe’s argument with God is interesting. Moshe objects to using the mirrors in the Tabernacle because he sees them as serving the evil inclination; women use them in order to put on their make up, to make themselves beautiful. God does not contradict Moshe; that is, basically, what the mirrors were for. However, he points out that the evil inclination is also the mechanism which creates, ultimately, human beings, and specifically, against all odds, a Jewish people. The husbands, enslaved in Egypt, were crushed, beaten, and therefore unable and unwilling to reach out to another human being, and certainly unable to imagine a future for people as yet unborn. The wives, using the engine of the evil inclination, manage to do both - reach out to and interact with their husbands, and, thereby, create a future for the seemingly defeated Jewish people.

To better understand the difference of opinion between Moshe and God, I think we should look at the specifics of what Moshe saw in these mirrors, and what God saw in them. Moshe objected to them as being unfit for inclusion in the Tabernacle. What he saw, according to Rashi, was mirrors in which women looked at themselves when applying their makeup, an essentially narcissistic behavior. God, on the other hand, was focusing on a different mirror, a mirror in which there were two people, a wife and a husband, playfully celebrating each other’s beauty. The “I am more beautiful than you” line which the wives used in this story, takes the inherent narcissism and self-absorption of a woman at her vanity table applying makeup, and cleverly turns it into a way to communicate, to reach out to another person. God is of the opinion that the mirrors, the token of that interaction, are precisely, more than anything else ["these are dearer to me than all the rest"], what belongs in the Temple.

Just as the food and drink which the women brought to their husbands represent a communication, an offering, and, therefore, a sanctification of sorts of the physical - something which is uniquely appropriate to the Temple - so, too, the way the mirrors are used in the story in Egypt represent a sanctification of the sexual. They represent an intimacy which brings strength, joy, and comfort to one’s partner. An intimacy in which one reaches out to another individual, and beyond, to unborn generations. The question, “what do you see when you look in the mirror?” is a question about how we understand our physical selves. Moshe’s answer is not wrong; when all I see when I look in the mirror is a physicality (and therefore a sexuality) that is essentially about oneself and one’s own pleasure - as symbolized by a person looking at herself and only herself in the mirror - that is ‘the evil inclination’, and should be rejected. God, on the other hand, sees the women who, when they looked in the mirror, saw not only themselves but, rather, saw themselves in relationship to another. God, therefore, wants the Temple to celebrate that; a physicality and a sexuality that is about two people, that is, in fact, about many people - ‘congregations’, the progeny of an intimate relationship between two individuals.

When the women congregate at the entrance of the Meeting Tent and offer these same mirrors, they are again attempting to use the physical in order to achieve spiritual goals. The fact that, in the Temple ritual, the sink acts as a mediator between a couple that has lapsed into a mode of jealousy and suspicion (when the waters of the sink are used as part of the ’sotah’ ritual which can reunite the two), makes the choice of the mirrors for its construction particularly appropriate. It is by seeing themselves together in these mirrors, as a couple, as their foremothers and forefathers did in Egypt, and not as separate individuals with separate, narcissistic desires and needs, that the troubled couple may find peace, and be reunited.

 
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This week’s portion is called Tetzaveh, which means ‘you should command’. The word appears in the first verse of the parsha - “And you shall command the children of Israel, and they shall bring to you pure olive oil, beaten, for light, to place as an eternal light.” The Rabbis take notice of the word “command” here (and in a handful of other places in the Torah), and point out that the phrase “speak to” or “tell” the children of Israel is much more common when God tells Moshe to communicate something to the Jewish people. Why is this specific request, to donate olive oil to be used in the menorah in the Temple, prefaced by the phrase “command the children of Israel”, rather than the more usual “tell them”? A number of solutions are offered, and I’d like to focus on one, suggested by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the midrash.

Shimon bar Yochai says that the word “tetzaveh”, which is, by the way, a form of the word mitzva - commandment, is used when the commandment being discussed entails an expense, a loss of money - when it will cost you something to do the particular mitzva being taught; in this case, the price of the olive oil. In such cases, people need to be especially encouraged, motivated, in short, commanded, to perform the act, as reaching into one’s pocket to perform a religious obligation is especially onerous. Unless they are clearly commanded, people will easily ignore these expensive mitzvot, and not do them.

With this explanation, Shimon bar Yochai sets up an interesting tension between the demand to do God’s commandments on the one hand, and concern for one’s financial situation on the other. It would seem that people who would otherwise be perfectly happy to do whatever God tells them to do, and fulfill the mitzvot of the Torah, find it hard to do so when it gets a bit too expensive. When you think about it, this almost borders on the anti-Semitic: the Jewish people can be counted on to do God’s will, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. When it does - buying olive oil, or animals to sacrifice - they need to be cajoled, threatened, ordered, into obeying.

In The Merchant of Venice, in the climactic courtroom scene, when Shylock realizes that all his money and property are about to be taken from him, he says:

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

Shylock understands that money, especially for a landless Jew in the middle ages, was necessary to sustain and guarantee life. Of course, this attitude is not specifically Jewish - everybody needs to make a living - though one could argue that some Jews, living under the kind of pressure Shylock experienced, got very good at accumulating money. People must work hard to earn money, as money is the way we acquire food, shelter, clothing, the basic necessities of life, and, of course, all kinds of other good things. So, when Shimon Bar Yochai tells us that we need some extra pushing whenever a mitzva costs money, he’s not being cynical about Jews (or people in general) and money. Rather, he is pointing out the very real strain that a religious commitment can put on one’s basic need to earn a living. He is also telling us that the Torah wants us to privilege our religious commitment, and buy that fine olive oil for the Temple, even if it costs more than we think we can afford or would like to pay. This position would clearly seem to argue for a set of values which sees our religious commitments as more important than our material and financial well-being: we are meant, to some degree, to sacrifice one for the other, to reach into our pockets and place our religious and communal responsibilities above our financial bottom line.

I can not help but think about something Rabbi Avi Orlow said to me a while back (this is not an exact quote): being a fully functioning modern Orthodox Jew today - with the relatively large family, school tuition, camp costs, synagogue dues, the demands to give charity, high cost of kosher food, etc. - essentially means that being orthodox equals being wealthy. Now, if this is the case, it would seem that part of the Jewish world (and I think the Orthodox do not have a monopoly on this mind-set at all) has taken the message of Tetzaveh - mitzvot cost money, and you must sometimes make financial sacrifices to do God’s will - very much to heart, but, rather than using it as a reason to develop a less materialistic world view, it has used it as a way to encourage people to become wealthy, to make being wealthy a value, because, after all, it really does cost a lot of money to be a good Jew.

I also can not help but think about the recent reverses many Jewish - and non-Jewish - not-for-profits have experienced, and what that will mean for the Jewish and general communities; it does not bode well for the health of our community and it’s institutions. As the parsha understands, money, and lots of it, is absolutely necessary to do all kinds of mitzvot, and money is disappearing at a remarkable rate.

I don’t really have a ‘big finish’ here. The issues of materialism, and the place of wealth in our world, are complicated, and, as I have pointed out above, one could argue that Tetzaveh both encourages and discourages placing a premium on material wealth - we need to have the money that we are willing to give away for a mitzva.

 
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This week we begin the long description of the building of the Tabernacle - a portable Temple - by the Israelites in the desert. The Torah, over the next few parshas, will go into great detail about the materials used and the vessels and furnishings that were fashioned for this movable holy place. In this week’s parsha, Truma, the process begins with a simple commandment: ” And God spoke to Moshe, saying: ’speak to the children of Israel and take for me an offering (in Hebrew a ‘truma’ - hence the name of the parsha) from each individual whose heart moves him to give, take my offering.’” The Torah then briefly describes the essential materials which are to be given for the project by the people of Israel: gold, silver, brass, types of cloth and animal skins, oil, spices, precious stones, all of these must be brought by the people. God concludes this first, organizing commandment by saying “And they shall make for me a Temple, that I may dwell among them.”

I would like to share with you some Rabbinic commentaries on this last verse, and see what we can make of them. One of the most famous comments on this verse, and in fact on the entire project of building the Tabernacle, is rather late; as far as I can tell it is post-Talmudic, and first appears among Kabbalists in the 13th century. There is also a source for it in the Zohar, whose origin is a matter of dispute. This comment is based on the following question: shouldn’t the Torah have said “And they shall make for me a Temple that I may dwell in it” - in Hebrew “b’tocho” - rather than “dwell among them” - “b’tocham”? Isn’t the point of building a Temple for God that He will dwell within its holy confines? The inference drawn from the Torah saying that God will dwell “among them” is that God dwells, through the construction of the Tabernacle, not in the building itself (which, after all, would imply a corporeality on God’s part with which we would not be comfortable), but, rather, that through the act of building a Temple, God actually dwells among the people.

This idea is presented in a variety of ways by a number of sources. Some have Him dwelling in our hearts, others in our bodies, or simply among the people. Whatever the specifics are, this is a powerful idea, and I would like us to keep it in mind as we look at the next two sources, which are Talmudic in origin. In Avot d’Rabbi Natan, the Rabbis look at our verse and point out that the words “And they shall make for me a Temple that I may dwell among them” can be read as implying that it is the act of making the Temple, rather than the finished product, which invites God’s presence. The people of Israel, by the act of making a Temple, will cause God to dwell among them - again, not in the Temple itself, but, perhaps, among those who worked to build it for God - the same “they” who build the Tabernacle are the “them” among whom God will dwell.

From this we learn the importance of work - “Rabbi Tarfon says: great is labor, for even the Holy One Blessed Be He did not cause his presence to dwell in Israel until they did work, as it is written “and they shall make for me a Temple that I may dwell among them.” In a similar vein, the Rabbis, in Tractate Temura, point out that the words “for me” in the phrase “and they shall make for me a Temple” would seem to indicate that the work, once done, belonged to God - the labor done by the Israelites in the making the Temple is owned by Him. How is this so? The same way that any work done by one group of people can come to belong to someone else - because He paid for it; the people who worked on the Tabernacle were entitled to take their pay from the sanctified material in the Temple treasury. They were not asked, or commanded, by God to work for free; he purchased their labor. This Midrash would seem to teach us that all work, even - perhaps especially - the work done to build the Temple, deserves to be, and must be, paid for. The Temple becomes God’s, and God’s presence can then be with the Jewish people, only when He lives up to the very human value of paying for a job well done, and actually purchases it.

It seems to me that, taken together, these Midrashim are all pulling us in a specific direction. The Temple is seen by these statements as, first and foremost, the product of human activity, and therefore, a repository of human, rather than divine, concerns and values. The big question that is traditionally asked about the Temple is this: how can we imagine that we can build a building, no matter how large, how ornate, how magnificent, which will actually house God? As King Solomon said about the Temple which he built, “Can God truly dwell on the earth? The heavens, and the heavens above the heavens do not contain him, nor will this house which I have built.” These Midrashim answer this question, and, in doing so, turn on its head the very idea of a Temple. Rather than being about God and the impossible notion of a house for Him, the Temple really is about us, and our efforts to include the divine in our lives. And the way in which we accomplish that is by the very activities, and values, which are honored by the Midrashim we saw above - the value of work, and, stemming from that, the importance of paying for work which has been done by others. By telling us that God really dwells among us, and not in the Temple, the Rabbis are telling us that it is to ourselves, and our actions, that we must look if we are to understand what the presence of God really means.

The locus of God’s presence, the place of sanctity, is not the building, the finished product, standing apart from the hours of toil put into it by the people of Israel. It is, rather, those hours of toil, and God’s recognition of them, that is the real Temple, the true place where God chooses to dwell. I cannot help but compare this to the great cathedrals of Europe. The product of the labor of countless generations of nameless individuals, their grandeur seems to somehow render insignificant the vary labor that went into their construction. It is the cathedral itself, in all its magnificence, which is the point, and not the labor, duly paid for and appreciated, of the thousands of faceless individuals who actually brought the cathedral into existence. The Temple, rather than crushing into insignificance the human perspective, rather than subsuming human effort into a divine structure which ultimately surpasses and negates the relevance of the very effort put into the making of that structure, instead emphasizes, and privileges, the human concerns which were involved in the construction of the Temple.

These Rabbinic statements remind us that, rather than belittling human concerns and efforts, the Temple underscores their importance. The Temple doesn’t transcend human values and aspirations, it reaffirms them, and presents them to us as the true location of sanctity. In the every-day activities of working and being paid for your work, the Torah finds the presence of God. This lesson finds its ultimate expression in the tradition which tells us that God, in fact, does not dwell in the Temple, in a place which has a life and importance of its own, divorced from the very people who constructed it. Rather, he dwells, “among them”, in the very warp and woof of human effort and enterprise; He dwells within our efforts to create a place of holiness, and not in some holy place which stands separate from those efforts.