Parashat Truma

AND LET THEM MAKE ME A SANCTUARY THAT I MAY DWELL AMONG THEM.

(Shemot 25: 8)

 

And it is written, and grant you peace (Bamidbar 6: 26) -

The Shulamit - a nation in which dwells perpetual peace, for it says, and let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.

The Shulamit - a nation into which, in the future, I will grant peace, for it says, I will grant peace in the land (Vayikra 26:6).

The Shulamit - a nation unto which I will, in the future, extend peace, as it is written, For thus says the Lord: I will extend to her peace like a river (Isaiah 66:12).

(Bereishit Rabbah 66:2)

 

It does not say that I may dwell in it, but rather among them, in order to teach that the Shekhinah [Divine Presence] does not rest upon the Sanctuary because of the Sanctuary, but rather because of Israel - for the Temple of the Lord are these [these good ways mentioned in the previous verse] (Jeremiah 7:4).

(Tzeidah La-Derekh as quoted in Prof. Nechamah Leibowitz's Iyyunim be-Sefer Shemot, p. 353)

 

He commanded each person to build a Temple of the chambers of his heart, that he should prepare himself to be a tabernacle for God and a fortress for His mightiness to dwell in, and also an alter on which to offer up all the parts of his soul, until he devotes his soul to His glory at all times.

(Malbim Shemot 25:8)

 

If you follow my laws (Vayikrah 26:3)... I will establish My abode in your midst (26: 11). If we meditate upon these verses, two things will become clear to us as absolute certainties:

1. The meaning of that I may dwell among them goes way beyond the mere indwelling of the Shekhinah in the Tabernacle. In reality, it refers to God's immanent closeness among us with the fulfillment of the covenant between Him and Israel, which is revealed when His protection and blessing influence the flowering of life for the individual and collective.

2. That being said, God does not allow His Shekhinah, His protection, or His blessing to rest upon us by the building of the Tabernacle and its pains-taking maintenance, but rather, by the sanctification of every aspect of our private and public lives for the sake of keeping His commandments. This was not demonstrated only by the historical events of the destruction of the Sanctuary at Shilo, and of the two Temples in Jerusalem; Scripture itself speaks of it clearly and with explicit warnings...In any case, Scripture proclaims that I may dwell among them will occur in the wake of let them make Me a sanctuary. Therefore, the sanctuary is but an expression of the more general role whose fulfillment is the condition for the indwelling of the Shekhinah in Israel to be assured.

(R. Samson Raphael Hirsch on Shemot 25: 3-8)

 

 

And Let Them Make Me a Sanctuary That I May Dwell Among Them

Chana Mann

Dedicated to the memory of my mother and teacher, Batya daughter of Yehezkeil and Chana Cohen, may she rest in peace, who passed away on Rosh Hodesh of Adar Aleph, 5763 - She oversees the activities of her household and never eats the bread of idleness (Mishlei 31: 27)

And let them make - great is work, for even the Holy One Blessed Be He did not rest His Presence upon Israel until they worked, for it says: And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. (Avot DeRabbi Natan 11:1)

The midrash from Avot DeRabbi Natan teaches us that the resting of God's Presence upon Israel in the wilderness was contingent upon their active participation in construction work, each in accordance with his strength and abilities.

Even at the very outset of our journey through the world, the Torah teaches us the great value of creative work: And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation which He had one. (Bereishit 2:3).

The NeTziV, in the introduction to his commentary, Ha-Emek Davar, writes:

That is, to explicate and make new inventions utilizing the nature of creation as much as possible...And we already made clear that it is a positive command of the Torah to observe and to perform all of the words of the Torah. To observe and to perform means to explicate the Torah and create new interpretations of it as much as is possible. For that is the commandment upon man to act and bring forth the forces of nature from every thing, for that is God's glory.

According to the NaTziV of Vilozhin, our function is to continue the work of creation begun by God.

The value of work finds expression in our parasha in connection with the question, why did the Torah have to go into such elaborate detail in its description of the Sanctuary? Why could it not just say that the children of Israel did everything that God had commanded Moses? The first time that God commands Moses about building the Sanctuary appears in the beginning of parashat Terumah: "And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper... Exactly as I show you - the pattern of the Sanctuary and the pattern of all its furnishings - so you shall make it" (Shemot 25: 1- 9). The second time, in the beginning of parashat VaYakhel, Moses relays the commands to the children of Israel in almost the same words and details: "Moses said further to the whole community of Israelites: This is what the Lord has commanded: Take from among you gifts to the Lord, everyone whose heart so moves him shall bring them - gifts for the Lord: gold, silver, and copper... So the whole community of Israelites left Moses' presence" (Shemot 35: 4-20). There is a disagreement regarding the date on which the commands mentioned in our parasha were given; Rashi applies the principle that the Torah does not always relate incidents in chronological order, and believes that the commands were given after the episode with the golden calf. However, it seems that RaMBaN is closer to the plain meaning of the text. He claims that the commands were given to Moses before the golden calf incident took place, but he only relayed them to the Israelites after God agreed to forgive the sin of the golden calf:

And he told them the subject of the Tabernacle which he had been previously commanded, before the breaking of the Tablets. For since the Holy One, Blessed be He became reconciled with them and gave Moses the second Tablets, and also made a new covenant that God would be in their midst, He thereby returned to His previous relationship with them, and to the love of their "wedding"... even as He said, And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. Therefore Moses now commanded them all that he had been told at first. (RaMBan Shemot 35:1, Chavel translation)

However, the plain meaning of the text gives us reason to question RaMBaN's comment that, "He became reconciled with them and... He thereby returned to His previous relationship with them." It seems that the picture was much more complicated, as Ibn Ezra wrote: "The point of the whole section is that before the affair of the calf God said to Moses, And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. And when they made the calf, He said, I will not go in your midst (Shemot 33:3), and when Moses pleaded with God, He told him that the Shekhinah would rest upon the tent, which was Moses' tent..." (Ibn Ezra Shemot 33: 14)

Moses' tent, i.e., the Tent of Meeting, already existed outside of the encampment: Now Moses would take the Tent and pitch it outside the camp, at some distance from the camp. It was called the Tent of Meeting, and whoever sought the Lord would go out to the Tent of Meeting that was outside the camp... The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another (Shemot 33:7,11). Within it were deposited the Tablets had brought down from Mount Sinai and placed in the Ark (so explains RaMBaN in his comments on Devarim 10:11).

When comparing the opening section of parashat Terumah with that of parashat VaYakhel, we discover, along with the almost exact parallelism between the lists of materials, a salient omission from Vayakhel, i.e. a key verse is missing: "And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them". It would be possible to explain this omission against the background of the great rift arising from the sin of the golden calf, if it occurred between the two events. It seems that the plain sense of the text follows Ibn Ezra's suggestion that Moses was not at all sure if the commands regarding the Tabernacle would still be put into effect. On the one hand, God already had a dwelling that contained the Tablets of the Covenant (the Tent of Meeting=Moses' tent located outside the camp), which allowed Him to dwell close to his only chosen one, Moses. On the other hand, there is no record of the cancellation of the commands regarding the Tabernacle. Moses decided to exploit the ambiguity, and acted as if nothing happened, commanding that the Tabernacle be built. As the Sages said, "his opinion agreed with that of God" - Moses built the Tabernacle on his own initiative, but also wanted this to agree with God's opinion. (These ideas were partially influenced by Gad Eldad's article in Megadim, issue 32, 5760.)

One of the fundamental principles taught by Sefer Hahinukh is that, "a person is affected by his own activities" (Mitzvah 16). Moses hopes that the physical work of building the Tabernacle would open the hearts of the Israelites to their Father in Heaven, and that they would become worthy of having the Shekhinah dwell among them, but at this stage he was unsure and could not tell them with certainty, "let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them", as God had promised before the sin of the golden calf.

Thus was completed all the work of the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting. The Israelites did so; just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so they did... Just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so the Israelites had done all the work. And when Moses saw that they had performed al the tasks - as the Lord had commanded, so they had done - Moses blessed them (Shemot 39:32, 42-3).

It is mentioned three times that the Israelites did everything that God had commanded, and there is no doubt that the Torah wanted to emphasize the matter of the work's completion in accordance with God's commands. However, Moses remains unsure of whether God would dwell among the Israelites after the Tabernacle was built, and he blessed the people of his own initiative. Rashi explains:

They said the words that conclude "The Prayer of Moses" (Tehillim 90: 17): May the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us - i.e., "May it be God's will that the Shekhinah may rest upon the work of your hands." They invoked this blessing and not another formula because during the whole seven days of the installation when Moses was setting up the Tabernacle and officiating therein and dismantling it daily the Shekhinah had not rested upon it and the Israelites felt ashamed, saying to Moses: "O, our teacher Moses! All the trouble which we have taken was only that the Shekhinah may dwell amongst us, so that we may know that the sin of the golden calf has been atoned for on our behalf. He therefore said to them... (Rashi on VaYikrah 9: 23, Silberman translation, which elaborates upon Rashi's comments on Shemot 39: 43)

To Israel's good fortune, God was placated by the Tabernacle's construction, as demonstrated by the fact that the Holy One Blessed be He personally commanded its ritual dedication: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: On the first day of the first month you shall set up the tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting" (Shemot 40: 1-2).

However, it seems that, in contrast to RaMBaN's view, Israel's relationship with God was only restored after the construction of the Tabernacle was completed.

If we return to the beginning of our parasha, we can now see the connection between let them make Me a sanctuary and that I may dwell among them as a conditional promise, or as describing the reward for the fulfillment of a positive commandment, but it is also possible to understand it as a deeper psychological-theological statement: A person who engage in creative work and building is opened up to new worlds, to new experiences, and to new channels within his soul. Through those experiences and channels he can connect himself with God and open himself up to the divine, he can open a door for the "spirit of God sweeping over the water" (Bereishit 1:2) to enter his soul.

The making of the sanctuary was an act of making according to God's command, but in addition to this it was also skilled, creative, work.

D. W. Winnicott, an English psychoanalyst, emphasizes the importance of creative work for living a meaningful life: Life is worth living or not according to whether creativity is or is not a part of an individual person's living experience... to be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of existence... creativity indicates that he who is, is alive (Living Creatively, pp. 39-40).

Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook ztz"l emphasized the connection between human productive work, which originates in the depths of the soul, and the experience of faith:

A person can only acquire a virtuous characteristic from within himself, from his inner essential being, and not from something outside himself, for contingent circumstances cannot bring true happiness. But aren't the Torah and the commandments the essence of happiness - and they come to a person from the outside? But when we consider it we discover that each person can only get from the Torah and commandments that which is already hidden deep inside him. But even ore than this - in a more general sense, man encompasses all of existence, and the Torah and commandments, which are the essence of the laws of existence, are also included in it. When he attaches himself to them, he is connecting with his own essence, for all his essence belongs to the source of his existence - to God, the source of all being… (From Hadarav, personal selections collected from the writings of Rabbi Kook)

Creative human activity, which allows people to connect with their inner being, is a condition for meaningful living and the construction of a sanctuary for holiness within their souls.

Hannah Mann is a psychologist who lives in Kiryat Shemonah.

 

 

 

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