Divrei Torah/Torah Talks

When I was in 5th grade, my family began attending services at the recently formed Fabrangen Havurah, in Washington DC. It was a member-led community that had no rabbi, although there were a number of rabbis and learned lay people in it.  I was actually the first young person to have a b-mitzvah at Fabrangen, way back in 1976, a personal point of pride! Ten years later, when I moved back to DC after college, I started going to Fabrangen again.

Every Shabbat morning at Fabrangen, after the chanting of the Torah portion from the scroll, the entire portion was read aloud in English by members of the community. Every week, without fail, no matter which Torah portion. During the juicy, action-packed Torah portions, this was great.  But then we’d get to the latter part of the book of Exodus, and the action came screeching to a halt.  We’d spend a half hour or so reading the excruciating details of the instructions for building the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in the desert, every verse about every thread, every plank, every last item that went into its construction.

To be honest, it was pretty tedious and boring (and only got worse when we got to the book of Leviticus). But then something revelatory happened. Arthur Waskow, who was one of the founders of Fabrangen and had been my childhood Torah teacher, was in town a few months after the huge National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. That march was a transformative event, and I feel privileged to have been there. It was 1987, and the AIDS epidemic was ravaging the gay community. At the march, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed for the first time. It included 1,920 individual panels, covering a space larger than a football field on the National Mall. Each panel memorialized someone who had died of AIDS, and had been made by those who had loved that person, and they were all sewn together into one unbelievable, massive, incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking quilt.  

A few months later,  Arthur was giving a d’var Torah at Fabrangen. After we had made our way through the details of one of the Torah portions dealing with the building of the Mishkan, Arthur reflected on having seen the Quilt at the National March. He shared how he had listened to people who had made a square for the quilt talk about the process, the loving detail with which they described each thread, each gromet, each color that had gone into its construction. And then, he said, he realized that this is why we have such an endless amount of detail about the Mishkan in the Torah. The people who built the Mishkan, who constructed it and tended it, had that much love for it. Every thread, every plank, every gromet, had a purpose, and was appreciated.

That d’var Torah stuck with me as I headed off to rabbinical school a few years later. Now I found myself moved by that part of the Torah that had seemed so pointless and boring. I immersed myself in the story of the Exodus, and I was struck by the fact that over a third of that book – our foundational narrative as a Jewish people – is devoted to the building of the Mishkan.  

Now, we have holidays to celebrate the other peak moments in the Exodus story. At Passover we celebrate the liberation from slavery; at Shavuot we celebrate receiving Torah at Mt Sinai. But we don’t have the Mishkan anymore, or its successor, the Temple in Jerusalem, and no rituals or holidays to celebrate it. Yet the Mishkan remains an integral part of our foundational Jewish story.  So what is its meaning for us today?

Which brings me to our Yom Kippur Torah portion, the ancient rituals of the Biblical Yom Kippur. These rituals centered around the High Priest, who oversaw the workings of the Mishkan, which was a sacred tent, essentially, which housed the Ark of the Covenant, a golden box that held the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. The ark was in the innermost part of the Mishkan, the Kodesh Kodashim, Holy of Holies, and only the High Priest – and Moses – were allowed into this innermost sanctum. The outer section of the tent was called the Kodesh, the Holy, and it contained the golden menorah, and a table with bread. Finally, outside of the tent itself, but within the courtyard of the Mishkan, was the altar, where sacrifices of grains and of animals would be offered.

Our reading this morning detailed the yearly ritual cleansing of the Mishkan, which would become defiled by the collective transgressions of the High Priest, his family, and the entire Israelite community. There was a ritual cleansing of the altar, where the sacrifices were made, a cleansing of the tent itself, and also a ritual cleansing of the Israelites, whose sins were sent off into the wilderness, symbolically carried on the head of a goat. 

According to the Torah, the Mishan was literally and figuratively at the center of the Israelites’ communal life.  As they traveled through the wilderness, they camped by tribe, arrayed geometrically around the Mishkan, which stood at the center of the camp.

But what, exactly, was the point of this holy structure? When Moses first receives instructions for building the Mishkan, in Exodus chapter 25, God says, “They shall make for me a holy place, so that I may dwell among them.” This verse is key. God does not say, “Make me a house so I can come live in it,” as was apparently the case with other Near Eastern temples, which would contain a bed for the god to sleep in. The Mishkan was NOT a house for God. There was no bed. Instead, the Mishkan was a structure that in some way made it possible for God’s Presence to dwell within or among the Israelite community.

While in rabbinical school, I pondered what this might mean from a Reconstructionist perspective. Following Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s understanding of God not as a Big Person, but as a Process or a Power that, in his words, “makes for salvation” – that is, a Power in the universe oriented towards the ultimate liberation of all people – I wondered what it might mean to create a structure in which that Power might “dwell among us.” And this is when I came to a realization about why the book of Exodus culminates with the building of the Mishkan. What if this physical structure was intended as a representation of the social structure that the Israelites were supposed to create? This would be why, instead of a bed for God, what lived inside the Holy of Holies were the 10 commandments – instructions for building a holy society.

As inheritors of these texts about the building of the Mishkan, the question for us then becomes: What kind of social structures would allow the Power that Makes for Salvation, the Godly processes of love and justice, to become manifest among us?  And how are we to build them?

And now I had a new appreciation of the seemingly endless details involved in the building of the Mishkan. If this portable sanctuary in the desert represents the society that we are called to construct, then there must be something we can learn from the narrative about how it was built.

That story deals with two things that are fundamental to any society: work and wealth. The creation of the Mishkan is the first real work that the Israelites are asked to do after they are liberated from slavery, and it is probably no coincidence that both of these work experiences involve construction.  

In Mitzrayim (the Biblical name for Egypt), the Israelites are tasked with building miskenot, garrison cities. They are coerced, brutalized and forced to build without the proper supplies. They are set against one another: some Israelites were selected as foremen, charged with making their people fill unrealistic production quotas, and beaten when they failed. This work is portrayed as not just physically exhausting but also spiritually degrading, so that when Moses arrives with a message of liberation, the Israelites at first cannot hear his message, because of kotzer ruach, a beaten-down spirit.

The building of the Mishkan comes as a redemptive corrective to this oppressive experience. At Mount Sinai, Moses calls the entire community together and gives them instructions. And the Torah tells us that the whole community went out with “uplifted hearts” to bring the necessary materials, and to do the creative work. Weavers, wood-workers, craftspeople skilled with precious metals, the people who shlepped the materials for the artisans – the entire community came together to do this holy work with a spirit of willingness and generosity.  

The medieval commentator Nachmanides adds that these workers, who only a few months before had been constrained to the drudgery of making bricks, now had knowledge of all sorts of skilled craft-work. He teaches that in the process of constructing the Mishkan the former slaves discovered talents that they never knew they had. This was libratory labor, in direct contrast to the oppressive work of Mitzrayim: work taken on in response to a holy call rather than being brutally imposed; a construction effort that brought the people together versus one that split the community apart; a model of work that nourishes and uplifts the soul, in contrast to work that crushes it. 

And just as the Mishkan was the first thing the Israelites were called on to build since leaving Mitzrayim, it is also the first thing they are asked to pay for. They do so in two ways – a system for contributing to a communal project that forms the basis of our CDT dues structure! Each adult Israelite is told to bring a half-shekel as a contribution for the upkeep of the Mishkan. The Torah says, “The rich shall not pay more, and the poor shall not pay less.”  So presumably this half-shekel – a weight of silver – was an amount accessible to everyone. It was the completely equal way that each member of the community “bought in” to their responsibility to maintain and support the Mishkan.

When Moses comes down the mountain to start the building project, we read about the other way that the people contributed. With the spirit of nediv lev, a generous and willing heart, each Israelite brought whatever they had – from the riches of precious metals and fine linens to more simple gifts like goat’s hair. They all brought so much that Moses had to say “stop, we have more than enough!”

From the story of paying for the Mishkan, we at Dorshei Tzedek learned a few lessons for financing our own community: first, that everyone is equally bought in as a member through the payment of our “half-shekel,” which we strive to make an accessible amount. Second, that people of different means should pay what they can above the half-shekel, and this makes up the sliding scale portion of our dues. And finally, we hope that this  all will be done in the spirit of nediv lev, of a generous and willing heart, and that those who are able to give over and above their dues assessment each year will be moved to do so. 

I am beginning my 27th year with Dorshei Tzedek, and this marks CDT’s 33rd High Holydays. Over these years, we have been engaged in the hard, holy work of building a Mishkan, a communal structure in which we can make manifest a whole array of godly qualities. It’s involved a lot of work by a lot of people, effort that has often, in my experience, allowed our members to discover and develop talents and abilities that they may not even have been aware they harbored within them – whether learning to chant Torah, getting up the courage to make a shivah visit to a stranger’s home, gaining the skill of running a committee meeting, learning how to run a religious school, taking on the holy work of  sheltering and welcoming immigrants, organizing to win legislative battles with GBIO, and so much more.

It’s involved a lot of people giving of their time, their energy, and their material resources. And although I’m biased, I’d say that what we’ve managed to create is pretty beautiful, a sacred structure indeed. And just as the Israelites did in their construction project in the wilderness, we’ve been building our Mishkan in a wilderness of sorts, a sometimes hostile environment. We live in a dominant culture that imagines individual freedom as constrained by the collective, rather than empowered by it. Our modern wilderness reveres the material, and fosters the lie that happiness can be measured by the marketplace. We are distracted by social media, divided up by algorithms, constrained by systems of oppression that we did not create but function within.

Living a Jewish life, and building a values-based Jewish community that is not insulated from the world around us but inclusive of it, is not an easy task. We need one another to do it, we need a community of Mishkan-builders to allow godliness to dwell among us.

As we head into this new year of 5784, I hope we can keep before us this image of building the Mishkan. With so many problems in the world, it is easy – and often necessary – to focus on all that we need to oppose. We need to oppose the rise of autocracy in the United States and in Israel. We need to oppose laws that terrorize trans people and make abortion inaccessible. We need to mightily resist racism and antisemitism. We need to fight against the ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank and the demonizing of immigrants here in the U.S. We need to resist climate change denial — and on and on and on.

There is so much to fight against. And yet – we also need to be clear on what we are trying to build. The fight against all the evils in the world can be exhausting and dis-spiriting. But the holy building project of creating something new, something different, is what can energize and inspire us. Building the Mishkan reminds us that another world is possible.

In a beautiful piece that he wrote recently about the meaning of the Mishkan for trans people, our very own Earnest Vener teaches: 

“The Mishkan is the great creative work of the Israelites in the Torah. A sanctuary created for journeying and ongoing personal and communal revelation. The revelation received on Mt. Sinai is symbolized by the ten commandments, laws chiseled into sturdy stone tablets. The Mishkan houses those tablets but extends beyond them, providing a larger tent with space for ongoing discovery, new truths, and transformation. The imagery of laboring to create a space for sacred listening is resonant with trans experience. We vision, design, craft, and tweak as we construct our realities and bodies, becoming our own sacred dwelling places.”

To which I say, amen. May we be blessed, in 5784, to continue our sacred construction project, finding sanctuary for ourselves and for others we invite in; visioning and constructing new realities for ourselves as individuals and as a collective. And may our efforts to build a bigger Mishkan, a society, a world, in which every living being is protected and loved, may those efforts bear fruit. May we continue to envision together and take action for a new reality in Israel/Palestine; for a Commonwealth in which workers’ rights and dignity are honored; an America which acknowledges and repays its debt to Indigenous peoples and African-Americans; a world in which humans live in harmony with, instead of in mortal opposition to, the wellbeing of the planet. 

And in the moments when this very hard work starts to feel like drudgery, we can remember the creation of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt, we can remember the Israelites’ building of the Mishkan, and honor our labor, honor our own contributions, each one necessary, each one a sacred gift that helps Godliness dwell among us. Va’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham, “Make me a sacred dwelling place, that I may dwell among you,” God told Moses. May we respond to that call with uplifted hearts, in this new year.

Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Yom Kippur 5784