Terumah #2

(Shemot 25:1-27:19)

Godliness from Inside Out
Eitan Rubenstein, 5766

This week Parashat Terumah begins a cycle of Torah readings stretching from the end of Exodus through the beginning of Numbers almost exclusively concerned with the rituals of the Mishkan, God's dwelling-place amongst the Jewish people. Much like the lists of "begettings" in Genesis, these parshiyot are often numbing in their meticulous description of a reality far removed from our own. I hope in this derashah to inaugurate the Mishkan-cycle with a basic reflection on the paradoxical nature of building the Mishkan in particular and of Jewish religious life (and perhaps human life in its entirety) more broadly.

The basic meaning of the Mishkan can most easily be grasped through its foil: it is precisely opposed to a theology that imagines God as above, beyond, and outside - the theology, for example, of Dante's Divine Comedy, where the center of the universe is Hell, with the surface of the Earth surrounding it, and God's realm on the far extremities of existence, "outside" everything and everyone. Plato, in his Republic, uses similar imagery, where humanity is trapped in a cave, while the philosopher separates from them and rises up to the sun, which represents goodness, coming from the outside.

The first, and to my mind most important, aspect of the Mishkan is its layered nature. At its core stand the two tablets of the covenant, given at Sinai. They are housed in a wooden box. This box is in turn covered with gold, completing the אֲרוֹן/ark. A solid gold כַּפֹּרֶת/covering is placed directly over the אֲרוֹן, and two cherubim are perched above it. A פָּרֹכֶת /screen, embroidered with cherubim, separates these from the rest of the Mishkan, which contains the שֻׁלְחָן/table and the menorah. A second screen separates the Mishkan proper from its courtyard, which contains the altar upon which sacrifices are offered. Interestingly, in the Torah the name "mishkan" is used for the building's ceiling, which is itself built of four layers and again decorated with cherubim.

I hope this list conveys the onion-like structure of the Mishkan, an impression which is enhanced by the order of the Torah's description: the first five items detailed are the Mishkan's implements - the aron, kaporet, cherubim, menorah, and shulhan, moving from inside to out. Afterwards the Torah describes in turn a series of five separations: the ceiling (its inside two layers), the roof (its outside two layers), the walls, the parokhet, and then a second screen separating the Mishkan from its yard. In a final move outwards, the Torah follows its pattern, first describing the altar and then the walls separating the courtyard from the rest of the Jewish people's encampment.

The Mishkan's concentric structure is not exhausted at its own walls, however; the Jewish people's encampment in the desert is laid out in relation to it. The first and second chapters of Numbers prescribe this urban planning in two steps, again from the inside out: first, "The Levites are to reside around the Mishkan...and to guard it" - "וְהַלְוִיִּם יַחֲנוּ סָבִיב לְמִשְׁכַּן הָעֵדֻת...וְשָׁמְרוּ...", and immediately afterwards, "The Israelites are to camp around the Mishkan, at distance. On the East side...On the South...On the West side...On the North..." - "יַחֲנוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מִנֶּגֶד סָבִיב לְאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד יַחֲנוּ...קֵדְמָה מִזְרָחָה...תֵּימָנָה...יָמָּה... צָפֹנָה..." (Numbers 1:53, 2:2-25). This expansion of layering is not only physical; it spills over the boundaries of organizing space and speaks to the organization of an entire social order around the Mishkan: proximity to the Mishkan becomes a powerful image for membership in the Jewish people. On a social level, this organization becomes an exclusive hierarchy, an image which is disrupted in later texts.

Underlying all of this concentric geography and sociology is the idea that God dwells in the center of the Mishkan, and in the interior of the Jewish people, as the beginning of the parashah says, "I will dwell within them" - "וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם" (Ex. 25:8). In the world of the Mishkan, God is found further and further inward, by moving through layers and arriving at a core.

I want it to be clear how integral this theme of centrality becomes in the theology of our Torah and Rabbis. Put most directly, the Mishkan described in parashat Terumah embodies a theology in which God is found within, rather than beyond. In the gemara, Rav Yosef sees this as the basic dynamic of revelation: "The Holy Blessed One ignored all of the world's great mountains and chose to descend to Mount Sinai [rather than lift the mountain heavenward]" - "הקב"ה הניח כל הרים וגבעות והשרה שכינתו על הר סיני" (Sotah 5a).

In Berakhot, the Talmud analogizes the soul to God in five ways, two of which are, "Just as God fills the entire universe, so too does the soul fill the body....Just as God is found deep within, so too is the soul found deep within" - "מה הקדוש ברוך הוא מלא כל העולם - אף נשמה מלאה את כל הגוף...מה הקדוש ברוך הוא יושב בחדרי חדרים - אף נשמה יושבת בחדרי חדרים" (Berakhot 10a). Rather than depicting God as outside the universe, God is within, and explicitly analogized to the presence of the human soul.

This last point is particularly important because it allows the Torah and the Rabbis following it a way out of the hierarchical theology of the Mishkan in which only Moses and Aaron could experience the full power of God's presence. When the center is shifted away from a single geographical location to an idea of interiority, each human being becomes her own center, radiating around herself a set of concentric circles defining her universe.

The Deuteronomist offers what has become the most famous, and abused, formulation of this kind of God-dwelling-within. In Parashat Nitzavim, God says the following to our people (Deut. 30:11-14):

כִּי הַמִּצְוָה הַזֹּאת אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם לֹא נִפְלֵאת הִוא מִמְּךָ וְלֹא רְחֹקָה הִוא: לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא לֵאמֹר מִי יַעֲלֶה לָּנוּ הַשָּׁמַיְמָה וְיִקָּחֶהָ לָּנוּ וְיַשְׁמִעֵנוּ אֹתָהּ וְנַעֲשֶׂנָּה:וְלֹא מֵעֵבֶר לַיָּם הִוא...כִּי קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד בְּפִיךָ וּבִלְבָבְךָ לַעֲשֹׂתוֹ:
The commandment which I command you today is not beyond you; it is not far. It is not in the heavens, so as to say, "Who will ascend for us to the heavens to take it for us and tell it to us, so that we may do it?" It is not beyond the sea....This thing is very nearby you, in your mouth and your heart, to do it.

Torah, and by extension God, are present within and not beyond.

I would like to make one concluding remark on the structure of the Mishkan, which translates what I have been saying from abstract theology into something much more practical and real. Up until now we have dwelt on the fact that the Mishkan understands the center of the Jewish people's universe to be at their center. But, according to this, there is a second question: why build a Mishkan at all? Why not simply leave the Tablets and cherubim, naked in all their glory, in the center of the Jewish people?

Put differently - if God, the soul, and reality are found at the center of things, why do we construct around them Mishkanot, bodies, and how can these boundaries simultaneously cut us off from what is inside and be Godly? Lurianic Kabbalah escapes this tension by denying that boundaries and separations are in fact Godly - the internal "spark," they say, is an object's Godly essence, while the shell that surrounds it is evil and must be shattered.

But neither the Mishkan nor our lives can be understood that way. Just as not only the ark but also its coverings are covered in angels, so too not only our minds but also our bodies are created by God. And here is the crucial point - these coverings are neither opaque nor transparent: it is not that they block off access to their interiors, nor are they simply translations of it; they exist on their own right and have a deep, but nearly-inarticulable relationship to it.

This is true of a whole list of things: a soul embodied in a physical body, a personality robed in an appearance, a thought expressed in language, values expressed in laws and stories, God clothed in the world on the one hand and Torah on the other, form brought out by content. For each of these, the outside garb is ambivalent - it is simultaneously a boundary and an expression. Because the tablets and cherubim alone would be naked and powerless, just as a disembodied soul or ethics without actions.

Here the Mishkan can stand not as an intricate, archaic architectural wonder but a simple, straightforward expression of the human (and Divine) condition. And it is my sincerest wish that this coming week, each of us will be able to align our outer coverings with our inner truths, opening the paths both in and out between us and others, between us and God, and between us and ourselves.

Shabbat shalom.