1. Exodus: T’rumah

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Gifts.  That’s what t’rumah means.  God tells Moses to tell the Israelites to bring gifts, specific gifts, but only if they are moved to do so.  Then God gives very specific instructions for building the tabernacle with these gifts.  Being in the business that I am, one day I will build a model of this tabernacle.  It’s just too tempting to not do it.  My son explained that a cubit is the distance from your elbow to your fingertips.  So I’ll scale a cubit down to maybe an inch or so and see if I can lay out this tabernacle.  Maybe I’ll just draw it in CAD.  That would be fabulous.  Then I can model it in 3D and add all of the colors and textures God requires.  One day, when I have a lot of free time.

The thing that struck me in reading this parsha is the portability of so many of the pieces described.  Plus the whole thing is a tent which is pretty portable in itself.  I think this is significant.  I know that everything is significant in the Torah, but I think this is especially significant.  I think God wants us to be able to carry our beliefs with us easily and always.  I think God wants us to carry Him with us.  I don’t think that God wants us to go to Him.  He wants to come to us.  He wants us to have a place to receive Him.

When I look at some churches I see magnificence, hugeness, greatness beyond man.  I see a place that one goes to experience the holy.  Or to try to find the holy.  But what I feel is small and insignificant.  Certainly not worthy of a meeting with God.  I don’t see God.  I don’t feel God when I am in a place bigger and more fancy that the greatest palace. 

I feel God in small quiet places.  I see God in the faces of my children, in the loving look in my husband’s eyes.  I feel God when my Jewish community comes together to take care of one another.  The tabernacle that God describes is filled with precious metals and stones, but it does not seem magnificent.  It is not bigger than a neighborhhood.  It is based on the length between a man’s elbow and his fingertip.  It is human scale…a place for us to receive God.

I seem to remember Howard Roark building his “temple to the human spirit” on a scale smaller than the churches of the day and being condemned for doing so.  Maybe it’s time to re-read that book….

1. Exodus: Mishpatim

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Mishpatim means laws.  One of my friends’ sons has never wanted to learn about his Jewishness because he doesn’t want anyone to tell him how he should relate to his spiritual beliefs.  How he should believe in his god.  He doesn’t want religious rules.  At least that is the way that she has explained it to me.

I’ve always wanted to be an independent thinker.  A trailblazer.  The leader rather than the follower.  But really I might not be.  I do like rules.  I do feel more comfortable with boundaries.  Sometimes I want to know the rules just so that I can break them.  Judiciously.  But the rules make me feel safe.  And the rules are like the lines on the freeway.  They keep us all organized and moving in the same direction without too much chaos.  So long as people use thier blinkers, things move along pretty smoothly.  Occasionally I don’t use my turn signal when I change lanes.  Rarely, but when it happens, I feel like such a rebel!  That is my free thinker stepping up.

I’m glad that there are rules to follow and rules to break.  It shapes us as a community…as a people.

1. Exodus: Yitro

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Do not take God’s name in vain.  That’s one of the ten commandments that God gave to the Israelites this week.  When I was growing up people said that this means you can’t say “oh my god” because it means “oh my God” and that is taking God’s name in vain.  So for a long time I taught my kids that it was not okay to say “oh my g/God”.  It might offend people.  Of course, when I’m pleasantly surprised, or suddenly frightened, I always say “oh my god” and for years felt just a twinge of guilt.  Because of course I would not want to take God’s name in vain.

Then I was listening to someone speak.  It was a woman that I have very little respect for, so I was not expecting to hear anything of great value.  But she surprised me.  Pleasantly.  She said that a rabbi explained what it means to take God’s name in vain.  It has nothing to do with an innocent “oh my god”.  Taking God’s name in vain means doing something with intention and doing it with the understanding that it is being done for God.  Doing it with the belief and understanding that God would want it done.  Like flying airplanes into buildings because it’s what God wants.  That is taking God’s name in vain.  That is clearly not what my God wants.

So now I say “oh my god” and barely feel any guilt at all.  And I don’t stop my kids when they say it (most of the time).  I do cringe just a bit and worry about offending someone.  But then I try to remind myself that “oh my god” can sometimes be “oh my God”….since maybe the cool and surprising things in my life are not a complete coincidence.  Maybe God had a little something to do with it and I’m just noticing and celebrating the attention.

So totally off topic, and so totally exactly right…the unknowable

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I know.  I didn’t write anything about last week’s parsha.  I am breaking all of my rules.  Isn’t that ever to irreverently Jewish though?  I did of course read last week’s parsha.  And a bunch of commentary.  And I have tons to say on the subject.  But I have something else stuck inside me that needs air more than my thoughts on last week’s reading do.

I spent last weekend with a group of women, most of whom I barely knew or didn’t know at all.  They were all very nice and we had a really lovely time, thank you.  I learned to play a game called “truth truth lie” where you tell 3 facts about yourself, one of which is entirely made up.  It’s very revealing and gave us much to talk about.  And there was wine involved, so that loosened a lot of lips too.

A couple of us were discussing beliefs (this was after one of the women went outside to dance a very rapturous and jiggly prayer for a friend of hers who is in the hospital).  The dancer calls herself a pagan, the other woman I was talking with calls herself an atheist who was raised a Jew, and then there was me.  I know you’re never supposed to talk religion in polite company, but this wasn’t exactly polite company.  By this time in the evening there were very few secrets left in the house.  We were no longer “company”.  Of course we were still very polite.

So the atheist Jew is bothered by the whole god thing.  Her mother has not been well and is apparently feeling her own mortality and dealing with it as many do…with help from her god.  She has been pushing her version of god on my new atheist friend.  Her version is very similar to Santa Claus with a different outfit and address.  My atheist friend doesn’t buy that god.  She asked me about my belief, knowing that I do deeply and enthusiastically embrace my Jewishness.  I answered the way I usually do:

“What is at the end of the universe?  At the very edge, beyond everything we know?  Beyond the dark and the stars and the planets and the solar systems? “  That is my understanding of God.  If I could answer one question, then I would be able to answer the other.  It is the unknowable that holds us all together.

Her answer though, was that there is nothing at the end of the universe.  Honest as this is, it baffles me.  I don’t understand nothingness.  I’m reading a book by Lawrence Kushner, “Kabbalah, A Love Story”.  I haven’t gotten very far yet, but this is how Kushner describes the end of the universe.

Einstein, in describing the “big bang”, describes that everything comes from a single point of light.  “Everything” includes matter and energy and space and time!  So, if you were to go out to the edge and look back at everything we know, you would have gone back in time and be looking at a single point of light that contains everything yet to come.  The light would be so dense as to contain “galaxies and planets, civilizations and centuries, people, everything”.

It kinda feels like God to me.  Unknowable.  So immensely huge.  And for me, deeply comforting.  Aaaaah….all that air feels good.