Here we go! Five weeks in a balloon of intensive involvement with the construction of the Mishkan, starting now with Parashat Terumah. A balloon, it seems, since we’ve just been at Sinai and receive an entire corpus of civil and criminal law with which to found a society in Eretz Yisrael, and we’re told we’ll be accompanied by Hashem’s angel on the way, so you’d think the next stage would be to set off.
Not so fast! The Mishkan and all it entails and implies for the life of the people of Israel will be our subject clear through until the third parashah in B’midbar (!), when we finally do get going. This Mishkan, the most elaborate construction project undertaken by humanity to date as recorded by the Torah (the Tower of Babel was aborted, and the Egyptian store-houses merely required a huge supply of adobe bricks), allows us to fulfill our promise as created in the image of Hashem. Hashem creates a world, and we, imitating Him, create a symbolic world.
But for now, we’ll leave aside the powerful spiritual associations of the Mishkan and turn the focus on beginning of the parashah: the gathering of raw materials.
Hashem says to Moshe: Speak to the children of Israel, that they take for Me an uplifted-donation; from each generous-hearted man you (pl.) shall take My uplifted donation.
That’s how the parashah begins, followed with a list of thirteen types of raw materials to be collected. At the end of the list, the dispensation of these materials is indicated:
And they shall make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell within them. In accordance with everything which I am showing you – the form of the IndwellingHouse and the form of its furnishings/utensils, and thus you shall do.
One might think that regarding something so central, so indispensible for the life of Am Yisrael, everyone, bar none, would be obligated to participate in its construct. And, at first, that’s how it seems: Speak to the children of Israel, that they take… No one is excluded. And yet, right afterward, we read: From each generous-hearted man whose heart volunteers him. Evidently, we were wrong; it’s only those moved by spirit who are tapped to give. No external compulsion is to be used, not even a Divine command.
In fact, the Talmud indicates there are actually three separated collections, reflecting the three usages of the word terumah in the opening verses – and the initial collection of the raw materials is the voluntary one.
But doesn’t that mean that some people will be left out, and will not have a part in the Mishkah? And what about us, who live at such a temporal remove from the Mishkan – what part can we hope to play in a construction which brings out the image-of-G-d within us?
Let’s look at what the term “generous-hearted”. The Hebrew is asher yidvenu libo. “whose heart volunteers him”. The heart is the core of the person. Whether we take it literally, to mean “heart”, or we understand it figuratively, to mean “mind”, or “spirit”, as it often does, there is no doubt that the heart is, well, the heart. It is the source of a person’s being, his will, his sense of self. So what the heart wills and wants IS the substance of one’s life. The heart can hardly want except for what it is – and so people always want for themselves. How can we want otherwise? It’s not just cynical to say that altruism is ultimately motivated by a selfish concern for our image, more real to us in some ways than our very bodies. So how can actually truly give anything to anyone, without some existential string attached?
On the other hand, what do we HAVE that we can give? If we are serious when we say that “The world and its fullness belongs to Hashem”, then, with David, we must say, “Give Him what is His, for you and what is yours is His”. So, what is it precisely that we own that we CAN give to Hashem?
When we give something truly, we’re really giving it back to where it ultimately belongs. Everything we have, everything we are, is on loan. When we acknowledge that everything is Hashem’s, and not ours, then that acknowledgement is a giving over of our very selves to Hashem. We thereby emulated Hashem, Who wills His overflowing essence to spill out into the beauty of creation. We can actually give anything of our own, except this spilling over into the acknowledgement of Hashem – and even THAT ability – that act of seeming free-will – is a gift of G-.d.
So we build the Mishkan NOT so much with gold and silver and copper, etc., but with and from our freewilling self-giving – the deepest, rawest material of the universe.
And that is why it says, at the end of the passage quoted above, “And thus shall you do”. Those dangling words, seemingly out of place, are explained by Rashi to mean “For future generations”. Rashi truncates the Talmud’s interpretations of those few words – there understood to include the making of the implements for the Temple in the time of Shlomo – to allow the following understanding:
When we give ourselves fully to one of Hashem’s mitzvot, when we pour into it our everythingness, WE become the raw materials, beyond the constraints of time and space, from which the Mishkan, that is, Am Yisrael, is ever being constructed.
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