Two Minute Torah Podcast

Vaykhel-Pekudei 5769 by Cantor Robert Scherr

Shalom. I am Cantor Bob Scherr, the Jewish Chaplain for Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

When the Book of Sh'mot began, we—b'nai Yisrael—were in Egypt, far from our home. We became enslaved by a Pharaoh who feared us as outsiders. We cried out, and were rescued by a God called I will be who I will be. As this Sefer closes, we experience the imminent presence of God in the Tabernacle, that portable space that would fill with Sh'china. Though once we were suffering in the restrictive straits—mitzrayim—now we experience God wherever we might wander.

In Sh'mot we first encountered God in miracles—a flaming bush, startling plagues that afflicted the Egyptians, the splitting of the waters so we could pass from slavery to freedom, the revelation at Sinai. After Sinai, we learned that it is through God's teachings that we know in our hearts and minds of God's presence, even as our ancestors' eyes beheld the cloud settling over the portable Tabernacle.

We learn in this week's par'sha that we not only receive from God, but we are empowered as givers: kol n'div libo y'vi-eha t'rumat Adonai tells us that our hearts and our possessions create our relationship with God. The text repeats this idea of n'div lev, I believe, to emphasize that we must respond not just to what God does for us, but our hearts are becoming attuned to what we can do for God. Kol chacham lev yavi-u v'asu; we apply our wisdom and our skills toward bringing forth God's presence among us. We were given the tasks of building and carrying the Tabernacle so that we always would know that we help bring God's presence into the world by the works of our hands as well as our hearts. It is the ideal that later would be expressed in the last verse of the 90th Psalm: “May the pleasantness of My Master our God be upon us, and the work of our hands established for us; may the work of our hands be established” (Ps. 90:17). As human beings, we can partner with God, for God's sake, to make the Divine Presence always imminent in our lives.