Terumah 5772/2012
“You can take it with you”
Rabbi Neil A. Tow©
The conference I attended last week is a living memory, it pulses inside with music, with ideas, friendships, even with the clear air and scenery of an old growth forest around a lake in northwestern Connecticut.
But there are no souvenirs that I take home, except perhaps my papers and some recordings. There are no postcards or keychains, no stuffed animals or montage videos.
We want to bring back tokens of an excellent trip, a positive experience, whether near home or across the ocean. We want to bring back a token since we cannot fit the Eiffel Tower into our carry on.
But we can take it with us – we have to think differently about how we remember and preserve the energy, learning, and message of our experiences.
We are still standing at Sinai – the fire on the mountain, filled with God’s Presence, only recently has become smoke as it wafts back up to heaven. And now we receive instructions: Build a portable holy place!
Since we can neither take Mount Sinai nor the experience of standing at Sinai itself on our pack animals through the wilderness, we need to take something tangible that represents that experience.
Now that God has called us mamlechet kohanim ve’goy kadosh, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, the Ramban teaches us that we require a dwelling place for the Shechinah, for God’s Presence, that we can carry with us: something that will add weight to our shoulders but will lighten our burdens by keeping the feeling of Sinai alive through the 40 years of wandering ahead of us.
We might say that it is pathetic that the direct revelation of God to the entire nation in the same moment requires reinforcement. One Sinai moment should last for many lifetimes! Umberto Cassuto teaches that we seem to feel that the link with God has been broken now that we are preparing to leave Sinai and move toward the Holy Land, and so we see in the language of the building instructions echoes of the spirit of Sinai.
We see then that the Mishkan teaches us to think differently about memory. It teaches us to hold journeys, learning, and relationships holy -- and in our individual and communal memory -- in a way that recharges these events and ideas. We need to find ways to re-engage ourselves in that which we want to recall so that what we have acquired will continue to impact us.
One lesson that a great teacher from Jerusalem taught us at last week’s conference came from her experience as a yoga student. There was a discussion in the yoga studio about how the teacher measures the success of the students. Listening to this story, we called out possible answers, “how far the student can stretch”, quality of the poses. The real answer is compelling, “The measure of success in yoga is how many good deeds the students are doing outside of class.” The good deeds are the vessels that recharge the learning in the class.
For us, translate good deeds into mitzvoth, this week, may we have the ability to take some of what we experience and learn this Shabbat and stretch it into the new week by doing a mitzvah for ourselves, our families, for the community – and come join us again next week to recharge your spiritual batteries.
