…the dignity of being able to say, “I helped build a house for God.” The Creator of the universe was giving His people the chance to become creators also – not just of something physical and secular, but of something profoundly spiritual and sacred. Hence the unusual Hebrew word for contribution, Terumah, which means not just something we give but…
…three verses of Bereishit ch. 2). The making of the Mishkan takes hundreds of verses (Terumah, Tetzaveh, part of Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei) – considerably more than ten times as long. Why? The universe is vast. The sanctuary was small, a modest construction of poles and drapes that could be dismantled and carried from place to place as the…
The shock is immense. For several weeks and many chapters – the longest prelude in the Torah – we have read of the preparations for the moment at which God would bring His Presence to rest in the midst of the people. Five parshiyot (Terumah, Tetzaveh, Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei) describe the instructions for building the Sanctuary. Two further…
…fiftieth years with their release of debts, manumission of slaves, and the return of ancestral property to its original owners, restored essential elements of the economy to their default position of fairness. So the first principle was: no one should be desperately poor. The second, which included terumah and ma’aser rishon – the priestly portion and the first tithe, went…
…is what He meant when He said: “Let them make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell (veshachanti) among them” (Ex. 25:8). It is from this verb that we get the word Mishkan, “Tabernacle,” and the post-biblical word Shechinah, meaning the Divine Presence. Applied to God, as discussed last week in parshat Terumah, it means “the presence that is close.”…
The parsha of Terumah describes the construction of the Tabernacle, the first collective house of worship in the history of Israel. The first but not the last; it was eventually succeeded by the Temple in Jerusalem. I want to focus on one moment in Jewish history which represents Jewish spirituality at its lowest ebb and highest flight: the moment the Temple…
The Parsha in a Nutshell After the sin of the Golden Calf, Moshe gathers the people together and teaches them two mitzvot. First he tells them about Shabbat, and then about the making of the Mishkan. A few weeks ago in parshat Terumah we read the instructions for building the Mishkan, and now in parshat Vayakhel the people follow the…
The sequence of parsiyhot that begins with Terumah, and continues Tetzaveh, Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei, is puzzling in many ways. First, it outlines the construction of the Tabernacle (Mishkan), the portable House of Worship the Israelites built and carried with them through the desert, in exhaustive and exhausting detail. The narrative takes almost the whole of the last third…
Pekudei – in fact the whole cluster of chapters beginning with Terumah and Tetzaveh and culminating in Vayakhel and Pekudei – is an extraordinary way for the book of Exodus to end. The rest of the book is a tempestuous story of the Israelites’ exile and enslavement and the confrontation between the ruler of Egypt and the man he may…
…NYU as well, over the coming semester and beyond. Just one quick thought to introduce. In this week’s parsha, Terumah, we have the mitzvah of tzedakah, of giving to an institution, something I’m speaking about a lot these days, about the collecting for an institution of Torah. Terumah, though, means to raise somebody up. The mitzvah of tzedakah is unique,…