Parshat Vayakhel Shabbat Morning Three Times, the Torah Describes
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Parshat Vayakhel Shabbat Morning Three times, the Torah describes the details of building a mishkan , the portable sanctuary in the desert. First, God’s commands us to build it, back in Terumah . Then, Moses reports to the people about God’s command. Finally, in Vayakhel-Pekudei this week, we read a report on what took place. There is finality to this last telling. Over and over again, over a hundred times, the Torah punctuates its description with the phrase: Ken Asu . Thus they did. Or ken asa . Thus he did. The Israelites were commanded to build a mishkan , a sanctuary, and they responded. Betzalel was to lead them. Ken Asu . Thus they did. Ken asa . Thus he did. While leyners might be frustrated by Vyakhel-Pekudei, architects must love it. A blueprint, set to music. And while some others might be frustrated by these repeated tellings, the plodding nature of architectural detail, this year I find myself marveling at the fact that the Israelites made it this far. Building something like a mishkan is a commitment. It meant that they were ready to explore their relationship to the invisible God in new ways, and in lasting ways. While the Israelite camp might have been nomadic, in completing the mishkan they announced: “We are here to stay. Such as it is, this is home.” I imagine that it was hard for the Israelites to reach this point of commitment and stability. I wonder if in their private conversations, among friends, they toyed with leaving, abandoning this God for more accessible deities. Forging a new path, a new drama, in a different direction. Just freed, how easy could it have been to commit to one reality? In historical terms, life today is relatively unstable. Commitments are harder to come by, and more easily dissolved. There was a time in the not so far past that futures were more easily anticipated. You would grow up in a community, get a job there, have a family, join a synagogue or church, and live. Our generation is more transient and less bound to one place, one thing, even one person. What are the statistics? Over ½ of marriages end in divorce. People change jobs, on average, every 7 years. Families are spread throughout the country and the globe. In my extended family, there is one set of cousins--3 siblings. The eldest lives in Israel with his family. The middle in Australia with his. And the youngest in Monsey, NY with hers. The parents remained in South Africa. The story used to sound so strange, but it doesn’t anymore. Home is a permanent word, but with temporary connotations. We are much like the Israelites, before the mishkan was built. Lacking true physical and spiritual rootedness. But perhaps longing for it more and more… Debbie Chapel, a writer, describes this sense. After listing all of the homes she lived in as a child and as an adult, she notes “I was homeless, spiritually lost, a refugee from my past. In my ‘homes’ and in my religion, I didn’t belong…” She contrasts her experience with that of her husband whose parents still lived in the home where he was born. “My husband and his siblings would pile into their childhood home for Passover and remark, ‘Oh, Mom, you changed the wallpaper in here!’ or ‘Does Mrs. Segal still have that vicious dog.’” Such an anecdote seems oddly quaint to our ears, and yet also desirable. When Debbie and her family moved to a new community, they decided that that would be their home. They told friends to write this address in pen, they planted herbs in a garden, not in containers, and they joined a congregation. In the book, Finding a Spiritual Home (Rabbi Sidney Schwartz), she tells her story, and describes how this congregation came to be home for her. She loves the communal singing, and the embrace of spiritual and intellectual discussions there. She realized that it could be her home, and she took the steps to make it so. Permanence, and commitment, is a decision. What does it take for someone to make the leap that Debbie did, to go from seeing every locale as a potential place to live to committing to one? To make a shul a home? How do you eliminate the “all” to focus on the “one?” How do you decide to love, to commit, to anchor, when beyond every cresting wave is another intriguing possibility? We attempt it with people, with spouses, knowing that though our feelings will fluctuate, our commitment is firm. What are the criteria that make one’s community one’s home? 1 For some people… it’s the people. Rabbi Barry Katz relates that when his parents and their friends decided to start a shul in their up and coming neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, they wanted Jewish friends for themselves and their kids. They wanted to recreate the Jewish ghettos that they had been raised in and have a Beit Knesset, a place to gather, be it for Saturday evening dances or the occasional service. The people they surrounded themselves with became their home. Other people look for a shul primarily for education. They realize that there is something that they don’t know and they want to know it. Sometimes this is child focused- you want your kid to become Bar/Bat Mitzvah and want them to know the traditions of our people, perhaps better than you do. Other times an adult will come in with a very clear question: How do I learn to read Hebrew? What does Judaism say about the afterlife or tattoos or child rearing? Some come in through the back door. Ostensibly they are joining the shul for the kids or for the High Holiday seats, but deep down they want to know. They are tired of being a visitor in shul. They want it to feel like home, but they are uncomfortable in the new territory. And then one encounter seals the deal, makes it seem beshert . An invite to a Shabbat meal, a warm conversation with a member. Watching the community dance to welcome Shabbat. If we listen carefully to current demographic trends, increasingly there are people who will say that they are seeking more than community or education. They want something that’s hard to put into words. A place that reflects lofty values worth aspiring towards. A connection to something larger, something beyond, solace, a refuge from a world that can seem foreboding, a home not only for their children, and their mind…but for their soul. No matter what the reason, most American Jews join a synagogue at some time in their lives. But more and more, many do not remain members of that or any other synagogue for the long haul. Some would say that it’s the synagogue’s fault- if only the synagogue had better programming, a more compelling rabbi, a larger social hall then I would have stayed connected. Others find that the thing that drew them in is no longer important. Many people tell me that they are just not drawn in by institutionalized religion. They find it suspect in someway, inauthentic. Real religion, they say resides in the heart. And if that’s true, who needs a shul? In order to grow and nourish a shul, we need to be able to answer that question with eloquence and clarity. The Israeli poet, Yehudah Amichai, captured this sense of inner religion in a piece entitled, Poem Without an End. He describes his visit to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem where he sees a synagogue carried to Israel piece by piece from Italy. At the Museum, they’ve rebuilt it to show visitors a piece of Jewish life from the Diaspora. Inside the brand-new museum Inside the museum there's an old synagogue. a synagogue, Inside the synagogue inside it is me. me, Inside me inside me my heart. my heart, Inside my heart Inside my heart a museum. a museum… Amichai was not observant. He might have seen this exhibit as quite appropriate: a synagogue in a museum, a relic of something dusty. But his poem reveals his attunement to the Jewish heart and soul. The heart encases the shul, which in turn encases the heart. You unwrap community and you find an individual. You peel away the layers of the individual, and at her core is community. And in this unending unfolding, there is mystery, too, something unsolved. We might call it God. One of the treasures of Temple Beth Am is its sense of intimacy and heimishness within the structure of a large synagogue. In the many rooms and venues that prayer takes place within these walls, we share our spirits generously, and we share Shabbat fully. We sense that our experiences here can be a source of long term inspiration. I am looking to build even more opportunities to share spiritual moments together, as an entire community. Because I believe that inside here—not this room or that, but inside this entire place— we find our hearts. And within our hearts, resides our community. 2 One of the messages of Vayakhel-Pekudei for me is that there is kedusha, holiness in the buildings, the institutions, the hierarchies of faith. It is not always present. But it can be. It is always just around the corner, waiting for us to beckon it, and create it. There is room and need for individuality and idiosyncrasy in faith. And within certain boundaries, there is room for creativity in religious behavior, too.