(Delivered March 1, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

As I mentioned last night, I am newly the mother of a twenty-one-year old. This milestone has got me reflecting back to those early days, weeks, and months of parenthood: the utter bliss of falling in love with each of my children in his turn, the abject sleeplessness, the chaos of a household with a new person in it. And of course the recordkeeping. Especially with Akiva, our first-born, Bill and I were pretty compulsive about noting: everything he ate, his convoluted sleep patterns, how often he needed a new diaper, not to mention the gifts and cards and the thank-you notes they required of us. And of course, as a first child, Akiva was extremely well-photographed! Everything he did—from eating to laughing to yawning to sleeping—was adorable enough that we thought it needed to be preserved forever… from multiple angles. 

I tried to capture everything in the world’s most comprehensive baby book. Every time he sampled a new food. The first time he sat up on his own. His first steps. His first words. His favorite books and songs and funny things he said. Every single moment was precious to us, and we wanted to hold onto it all, even as we were sure we’d remember everything with exquisite precision. Truth was, in our memories, we would constantly be overwriting one cute unforgettable thing with the next one, with the result that the whole thing was fuzzy by lunchtime. The number of details we were suddenly tracking—or attempting to track—was staggering, and all this, while we were exhausted and disoriented to begin with.

You’ve heard me say it before: the Torah is always on time. And so it is this week, as we study Parshat Terumah, one of a fistful of parshiot known for their repetitive, not to say slightly boring, detail. Terumah spells out the what and the how of building the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites will keep with them through their years in the wilderness. This parsha is full of the kinds of details that can cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over, the kinds of details that drove the Hassidic masters to go full mystical metaphor, the kinds of details that can make rabbis and B Mitzvah students alike wish for an easier parsha.

It’s tempting to skip over all this detail—the what and the how—but as people who take Torah seriously, we have to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of all this detail? Why do we need to know what color threads were used for the curtains, and what the planks were made of, and how the hooks were joined to the planks, and so on? What’s the deeper teaching here?

In a way, this building project is the holiest thing the Israelites have done thus far. This is the moment where they move from receiving wisdom to actually doing something. God provides instruction in painstaking detail because nobody has ever done anything like this. God is asking the Israelites to take a leap of faith and imagination, to contribute from their own belongings toward something larger than themselves. 

Here, God says. You don’t know what this will be, but I do. You’re going to have to trust Me to show you what’s next. 

Receiving the mitzvot and the manna were both mind-alteringly new experiences, but both of those developments were passive. In Terumah we turn the corner from observance to action. Receiving the rules and regulations is one thing, but if we are to build a society of our own, it’s not just about the rules and regs. There is the doing, and Terumah begins to show us how.

It’s not lost on me that this, too, is reminiscent of starting life with a new baby. Before the baby comes, there is anticipation and learning, and maybe in some way you think you have a vague sense of it. But all that learning is theoretical until you’re up all night with this small, needy creature whom you love with more love than you imagined could exist and he won’t stop squalling. These are the moments when we need instruction, and I can imagine that the Israelites would have floundered and failed, had they not had the clarity of divine expectation and instruction, just as Bill and I needed to be able to call our parents and ask, what do we do now? 

And part of the value of having all this detail in the parsha today as modern readers is in connecting us to our tradition. This endless detail, boring as it may seem, enables us to remember, at least in imagination, something deeply consequential to our people, something that now feels as remote to us as Mars. It helps us to think what it might have been like to be in the wilderness—in every imaginable way—and not know what to do next, and then to get the instruction—commandment really—that says, get going. The next part is up to you.

I think ultimately the lesson is, if you want a community you have to build it. And indeed, the one pasuk in Terumah that deeply transcends the what and the how comes from the first triennial, chapter 25, verse 8: 

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם
Let them build Me a holy space, and I will settle among them.

With this pasuk, we learn the why of the Mishkan. We learn that God commands us to give freely of what we have in the service of something mysterious and unrevealed, commands us to assemble specific materials and do all of this detailed work, so that, once completed, this Mishkan—the word Mishkan rooted in the meaning “to settle or to dwell”—will be a space for God to enter. If we want a community—or a family, or a society—we have to be willing to build it ourselves. We have to bring what we have, surrender to the guidance offered to us, and gradually, make it our own. And when it’s our own, it’s much more than just ours, for the divine presence dwells in places we are willing to work on together. 

Shabbat shalom!