Two Minute Torah Podcast

Terumah 5769 by Rabbi Bill Rudolph

Shalom,

I am Rabbi Bill Rudolph, rabbi of a large Conservative congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, a close in suburb to our nation’s capital. I spent more than half my life on or relating to college campuses – 13 years in my own undergrad and grad studies including ordination, then 23 years working with Hillel on campuses in Michigan and in the international center. And now I lead a quiet existence in my second rabbinic career, as a shul rabbi for a congregation of 1000 families, 800 lawyers among them, and I get to spend a great deal of time doing what I love best, which is teaching Torah.

This week’s Torah portion, is called Terumah. It commands the Israelites who have just begun wandering in the wilderness after the exodus to build a portable sanctuary – the mishkan - for worshipping God in their time in the wilderness. Many chapters of the book of exodus are devoted to construction of the mishkan and what goes on in it.

The rabbis ask the obvious question: Why did [God] command the building of the tabernacle, as if God needed a dwelling place or could be contained in any physical space no matter how large we could make it. The rabbis offer many answers to this question. One answer, suggested by commentators both ancient and modern, is that the Tabernacle is to be understood not in the context of God's needs, as it were, but in Israel's. The tabernacle is the place where we can train ourselves in piety and appreciation and self discipline and community building. All that is for us, not God.

Malbim, a nineteenth-century European exegete, takes a different, more metaphoric approach and this is the one I like best. The Torah, he says, is not just talking about our building an actual, physical place of worship. Rather it is suggesting that what we have to build is that and more, the more being a different kind of tabernacle in the recesses of our hearts, so that we ourselves become a Sanctuary for God and a place for the dwelling of God's glory." Each of us should become a Temple (bayit) for God: each one of us should be preparing an altar upon which to 'offer up,' as it were, all aspects of ourselves to God's service." Later tradition would call this a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary. That is, a sanctuary is what we are charged not only TO BUILD (and Exodus tells us how) but also TO BECOME – each of us a small sanctuary in which God would happily dwell and in which we are offering ourselves to God’s service.

That is my wish for all of us - that we become - each of us - a mikdash me’at, a miniature sanctuary, each of us a soul in which God would happily reside, each of us a soul that serves God with all our heart and with all our might.