Dvar Torah - Terumah - Mishkan in the Heart

Parshat Terumah 5774/2014

Superbowl Sunday is as close to a national holiday as a sporting event can be in this country.  Last year, over 108 million people watched the game, that’s a full third of the population of the entire country.  In the last (2012) presidential election, it’s estimated some 126 million people voted.  It’s nice to know that the democratic process wins out against a ground game of carrying a ball over a line without getting a klop on the kop, regarding participation, albeit by less than 20%.  Clearly, there is something about this event that attracts attention, the question is whether it has anything to do with the football game.

The remainder of Sefer Shemot, the Book of Exodus, offers us a similar question.  The bulk of Exodus now will describe the design, creation, and assembly of the Mishkan, a portable Holy Place where the priests will minister to God’s Presence with prayers and sacrifices as the Israelites wander from place to place in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.

Despite the lengthy and precise description of each part of the Mishkan, from the walls to the pegs, the structure is meaningless and empty until the tail end of the Book when God’s Presence fills it.  The same is true of anything we build or create.  Until we build the bookcase, it’s just a big door jamb.  Until kickoff, the Super Bowl is just an occasion for socializing, tourism, and entertainment.  And, by the way, after the game is over.  The winning team returns home to its city where, often, citizens celebrate them with a big parade and hoopla downtown.  I wonder why we can put up a big parade for a football team and there’s not much chance for military veterans returning from service in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to walk down the street to cheers and thanks?

As God begins to explain the design of the Mishkan, God says, “Ve’asu li mikdash ve’shachanti betocham.”  “Let them make for me a holy place and I will dwell amongst them.”  We expect God to say, “Make me a holy place and I will dwell in it, betocho instead of betocham, in them.” But God does not say that.  The Chen-Tov explains that we should not think that the most important parts of the Mishkan are its planks and the various items inside.  Rather, the people should know that their first responsibility is to purify their hearts, purify from the inside, so that the Shechinah, God’s Presence, will live within them, within us.

We’re supposed to build the holiness and spirit within ourselves first, and then that overflows into how we relate to others and to the world.  God teaches us this lesson that the later thinkers put together by example, from the beginning of thinking about the Mishkan.  The first thing that is described is the Ark, the place where the Holy Presence will be, the innermost piece, rather than any of the walls or supports that surround it, creation from the inside out.

We see that the journey of faith asks us to take not a ‘leap of faith’ but rather a ‘leap of trust’.  If we can open to the possibility that God can and will guide us, and like a trust fall be willing to allow ourselves to be carried, then we just might be able to let go of much of the stress and tension of living that comes from our need to measure and control.  No doubt, God asks the Israelites to build a Mishkan and to measure out each piece to the cubit.  There is value in precision, delicacy, and care in all human endeavors. 

But, we are not God.  We don’t have God’s eternal vision, and so we can choose God as our guide, our shepherd, just like in Psalm 23, God is my shepherd, and I lack nothing.

Putting trust in God, making God the ‘head coach’ as it were, could be a lot like realizing that, maybe, in the end, the Superbowl really is not about the game but about the community of friends and family who get together to watch, that it’s the people, and our hearts, that make the day special, the players who have gutted it out all season to get to this point, the soldiers defending our freedom who are watching from tents and barracks abroad, these are what are important.

As the great Rabbi of Kotzk said, “Each of us must build a Mishkan I our hearts, and God will live there.”

Dvar Torah Mishpatim - Why do good things happen to good people?

Mishpatim 2014

The recent New York Lottery commercials are worthy of attention.  They portray lottery winners who have leisure time to think about questions, nothing important, just musings on the world whose answers will not make much difference for anyone.  In one scene, a man driving a car on the highway thinks of the question, then shrugs, shakes it off and continues his pleasant drive.  The answer does not matter because the question never really mattered in the first place.

Now a different question, one that comes from real-life, not the imaginary world of the lottery winner.  I visited someone in a hospital, at the time she was 78, and having a hard time of it.  She described how she struggled with health issues when at the same time her older sister, did not have any significant health issues at all, smooth sailing in comparison.  This woman was, is, a good person, caring, loving, a good friend. 

And so in this situation we feel compelled to ask, as we have many times before, why do bad things happen to a good person? 

But that’s not the question that came to mind in that moment.  In that moment there was a new question, one that I’d never given much though, if any, at all:  Why do good things happen to good people?  Bad things happening to bad people, no moral problem there, that’s justice, measure for measure.  Good things happening to bad people, that’s a lament, does not make sense to us.  Bad things happening to good people, a more serious and despairing lament.  Good things happening to good people.  That’s the way things should be, right?

Or, to be more precise, it’s the way we hope things should be, the way that makes the most sense to us.  But then we get into choppy waters.  What is good for one person could be evil for another.  Does the level of reward have to match the level of good?  What if one person gets a better reward for the same good?  And if we go back to the lottery example, assuming the winner is a good person and does good things, what happens when the reward creates more problems than it could have solved.  There are many stories of lottery winners whose lives become more difficult rather than less.

Another issue, what about the neutral?  Many days are neither good nor bad, not better or worse than any other day.

The premise of our parsha, mishpatim, the continuing revelation of laws and teachings from God about how to infuse the world with justice, that evil and wrongdoing should be punished, that we should strive to maintain the integrity of society, of the family, by ensuring that those who suffer the death, pain, insult of others should have a way to achieve justice, recompense, and support.  It says very little about a person’s character, focusing more on our behavior.  Other passages in the Torah explain the rewards that come to those who do good in God’s eyes, but not this one.  This passage is about responsibility, about holding people accountable for their behavior. 

If we are accountable, then we have some reassurance of a level playing field, some reassurance that making our best effort to do what is good will make all the consequences in our parsha meaningful only as matters to reference for background knowledge.  If we are accountable to God, and to ourselves, then we can live in the hope that the world we create through every action will radiate with holiness, that each of us will be a living ner tamid, a living eternal flame, full of an animated spirit that is strong enough to recognize that we cannot avoid living in a world of good and evil, pleasure and pain, and a spirit sensitive enough to glory in the good that we experience and to never leave anyone alone in his or her suffering.

The irony in the New York lottery commercials then, is this, if the winners are free to think about and work on anything, then why not put energy into what is meaningful, what is important, and what can make a difference.

Think of it this way, the way someone once explained to us while our kids were playing at the Duck pond playground.  She said that, for her, good health, the ability to live out life fully was more than enough, she did not need lottery winnings at all, she already had won.  We are here together this Shabbat, to sing, to celebrate, to listen, to learn, to rest, to grow.  What a privilege, what a blessing, what a gift.  What good during the week to come can we take from this moment?

Shabbat Shalom