Exodus Cycle Six Terumah

Terumah

Rising From the Mishkan

There’s a student in my creative writing class. He has cancer. He’s 33 and doesn’t smoke. But he did work in a chemical plant for six years and was exposed to non-mishkan type toxins.  I can't say how he feels. I'm not him. But I'm watching him fade. It's so sad. 

This is just one example of a mishkan breakdown.  No doubt, if the house is toxic we won't last long.

In Torah the mishkan remains beautiful despite a cycle of sad mishkan break-downs and lock-downs  wherever we look. There are chemical plants like the one above, jails, military compounds, family homes, you name it where the happenings are far from holy.

We don’t allow the Torah-mishkan to be diminished in our hearts though. We hold onto the blue-print.  I guess the question is what to do now. What does Torah teach us? How do we deal with our holy-mishkan in a hurt-mishkan world? 

First,we need to see who we are: We are a mishkan-driven people and this is good. We yearn for perfect transmission and healing and we do what we can…despite the hurdles…to make the mishkan real. As beautiful as it is though it can’t stand alone. That’s because it's a step on the path. It’s a step that we want to honor and sanctify and that we must (in all reality) build upon. The objective is to move up from the symbol while holding its holiness in our hearts. This is Torah-in-flow. 

Let’s look at the parsha. Terumah instructs the building of this sacred house in which we can store the ark of testimony. There, God says He will speak to Moses from the space between the two cherubim. There is exquisite sensuality here. Hooks join with tapestries, poles move through rings, lights erupt from a menorah, horns decorate the altar. As has been shown by Arthur Green and many great rabbis, the mishkan symbolizes our community and each one of us. Therefore, to know God, to know ourselves, to connect to God from between those cherubim we study temple after temple, prophet after prophet, rabbi after rabbi, ourselves, our hopes and dreams.  We pray. We pray a lot. We prophesize about the mishkan.  We write teachings about the metaphor of the mishkan.  We want to feel it, hold it, know it, be it. We want to allow it to house our consciousness.  This yearning is elegant and guttural, joyous and real.

 In the end however what we see is that the mishkan, just like revelation at Mt Sinai,  is holy but not the last stop on the road.  It’s one more way that God  desperately tries to get through to us, one more symbol of the transformation of God’s transmission. This is (actually) good news. This means we are an evolving people loved by an evolving God.

Let’s look at this evolution quickly. In Genesis God creates us. He blows his spirit into us. He gives us flesh, a bandage for the soul. We are wrapped up in our physicality. Our very form (you would think) should enable God to transmit to us. Well, we know what happens. We have to say goodbye when we use our new found solid-state-of-being for reasons outside of God. We get kicked out of Eden. And fast.

Now let’s jump ahead to Exodus. This is when God feels He can get through to us on Mt Sinai. He tries again. This time though He tries to transmit to us through the mitzvoth and the tablets. He even convinces Moses to help. It’s a great plan. It would be perfect. Too bad we lose patience after forty days and try to make a deal with other gods. The golden calf doesn’t act as a great replacement considering the fact that we literally end up eating it. 

What happens next? What does God do next to transmit His radiance?  He finds a way to come into our most sacred space...our homes. 

We must build the mishkan.

The mishkan will help us to feel comfortable. There will be  continuity, inter-connection, sensuality close to erotica, substances that can pass through fire, layers of protection, colors. All of the substances in fact will be born of us, will be pulled from our hearts. This place will never be gone for forty days. It will travel with us. It will be a house created by God (and by us) so God can be here on earth. It will be a secure place where we won’t be frightened, where we won’t slip into doubt and pull back (again). 

Let’s quickly look at the word nidvah (Ex 25:2).  This is an important moment in the building of our home. It refers to how we access the materials.  I believe that all translations (going back to Talmud and Mishnah) point to the translation as the act of giving, of gifts. Why then (I ask) is the word natan not there instead? Natan is used often in Torah to show the act of giving.  If we look closely we see that nidvah can ironically also be translated as slander.

Here’s a way to look at it: The shoresh dalet vet heh (slander) can easily be in the 3^rd person plural future. Of course, if we add a nun and then drop it we then get a four letter shoresh (nun dalet vet heh) that infers gift. The heh of course in both instances is dropped because that's what happens with a lamed-heh verb. What I don't understand is the added nun near the end. It doesn't work for either verb. It can be noted though that if we use a teaching from R Tuviah in Lekach Tov we can assign gematria to the nun. In that case it would represent the 50th of the 50 gates to God. Perhaps if we move through the dichotomous interpretation of nidvah we too will be like Moses and pass through 49 of the 50 gates. This remains to be seen.  In any case,contextually, the line would read either "Take  an offering (to Me) from all men who will (continually) bring slander to his heart. You will take my offering." or " Take an offering (to Me) from all men who will (continually) bring gifts to his heart, You will take my offering." 

 Nidvah therefore can go both ways. This analysis is backed up by Rashi’s well known commentary. Rashi says that Torah is not linear, that the gilded calf  happens before the mishkan. Within this one word (nidvah) therefore and/or in this line in Torah we are reminded of  the darkness in our human condition, our repentance, our faith and our dedication to God’s transforming sparks of transmission. (Sfat Emet).

One again the question: How do we deal with our holy-mishkan in a hurt-mishkan world?

I see the mishkan. But given wars and poverty and selfishness, given the golden calf all around us,  we have to admit we may need to start to see the mishkan in Terumah as we view Revelation at Sinai. We may need to see the mishkan as  a catapult for (once again) a new place-of-transmission beyond (yes) that same old gilded calf . But what? What (we ask) could be more intimate than the mishkan? Maybe we should look at one important element so conveniently left out of the parsha. Maybe the incense altar was left out so we could approach it at a later date.

The incense altar, there with its essence and beyond-boundary reach as it raises all to a place of intimacy…The incense altar there with its wafting snakes of consciousness and sweet-smelling connection…perhaps this is where we should now look with faith. Maybe we can slowly…ever so slowly…begin to trust in the foundation enough to focus on an abstract in-the-mind and in-the-heart rise to God.  Of course, we must continue to work on the mishkan. We all know that this work is eternal. But we can give a bit more attention to the ephemeral, the intangible, the radiant unknown and the heightened. We can focus a bit more on the God-abstraction of love, the gate of love, the 49th... one away from the Divine. We can allow ourselves to cycle up with the incense and to be catapulted by the mishkan itself.  It's safe. It's all right.  It's love (after all) that will heal us and finally close the hellish chemical plant. It's love.