Parashat Terumah 5768

This week I am very excited to share an exceptional Torah resource with you. Each week, the wise folks at American Jewish World Service (AJWS) send out a commentary on the parashah, the weekly Torah portion, called dvar tzedek, which focuses on issues of social justice. If you are interested, you can sign up for it on their website www.ajws.org or by clicking here.

This week's Torah portion, Terumah, describes God's detailed instructions to the people as to how they should build a mishkan, a dwelling place, for God. The mishkan is to be a portable sanctuary, which will carry the Law that was given to Moses at Mount Sinai and provide a place of meeting for the Israelites and the Divine. The Torah portion explains:

Adonai spoke to Moses, saying: Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him. ...And let them make Me a mishkan, a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. ...And deposit in the Ark the tablets of the Pact which I will give you. (Ex 25:1-2, 8, 16)

In this week's AJWS dvar tzedek, Evan Wolkenstein, writes:

Taking a closer look at who or what resides in the mishkan, we find that God is not, in fact, the tent's primary resident. Rather, at the center of this sacred structure is the Law - the two stone tablets chiseled during Revelation at Sinai, when the human and heavenly worlds met.

Wolkenstein suggests that the mishkan was not only intended to be an abstract dwelling place for God, but also a physical home for the tablets. He suggests that this placement has profound meaning. He writes:

God dwells among us when we build relationships that are founded on morality and focused on the encounter.

Our Torah teaches us a fundamental lesson this week: We encounter God when we honor our tradition's central messages of justice and morality. We have a lot to learn from this ancient model. And I wonder:

What is our modern day mishkan? What do we place inside it?

What are ways that we can couple our commitments to spirituality with our commitments to justice?