Parashat Terumah

Parashat Terumah
Exo 25:1 – 27:19; 1 Kings 5:12-6:13; 2 Cor 9:1-15

This week's Torah reading is an architect's or interior designer's dream portion. It begins with the Almighty commanding Moses to tell the Jewish people to donate the materials necessary for the construction of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary. In the plainest sense, on the pshat or surface level, this is a Torah portion about craftsmanship, construction, and cloth.

What is worthwhile noting is that no fewer than thirteen weeks' worth of Torah portions in the book of Exodus are devoted to the details of how the Mishkan was meant to be built. In contrast, Torah devotes one chapter to its account of the creation of the universe and three chapters to the revelation at Mount Sinai.  It's easy for the modern Torah scholars to glaze over during these weeks in the Torah reading cycle. Types of wood, colours of thread, bells and breastplates …  what relevance can we find in these long instructions for creating ritual items we outgrew so many centuries ago?

Plenty, if we read these verses like poetry. Just look at the start of chapter 26, about the fabrication of the Mishkan's tent. Standard interpretation tells us that blue, crimson, and purple were the costliest shades of dye, but these ways of beautifying also have an imagistic resonance with the colours of the sunrise and sunset sky. The gold and copper clasps, fifty apiece, are embodied metaphors: they bind disparate pieces into a unitary whole. In a poem, a tent made from the two kinds of skins the Torah specifies might represent the synthesis of land and sea, the coming-together of opposites. What brings these images together is the metaphor of weaving, connecting threads into a something seamless to form a single piece.

For Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the whole point of creation was the construction of the Mishkan, a place where God could dwell in the "lower realms" of creation and human consciousness. In fact, we notice a cadence of six of work to one of rest in the construction process which clearly links the Mishkan to the creation account in the book of Genesis! Creating that space for God is still our purpose; and though we no longer do it by following this pattern, we can extrapolate some new instructions for the work of building God's home in the world.

Firstly, the home we build for God's presence should be beautiful. Torah instructs us to place the words of God - the stone tablets, crystallization of revelation - in an Ark of wood surrounded by gold. That ark, in turn, is covered by a golden kapporet (Mercy Seat) with cherubim, angelic figures like the ones guarding Eden, hammered on it. And atop that assembly comes the tri-layer tent, beginning with a spectacular linen layer emblazoned with colour.

The most spectacular coverings won't be visible on the outside, of course, which leads to the second big theme of these instructions: the home we build for God's presence should have layers within layers. Cover the tablets, Torah tells us, with layers of wood and gold. Cover those with layers of weaving: first brilliant linen, then goat's-hair blankets, then a tent of ram's hide and dolphin-skin. Make protective coverings to guard the teachings beneath. If weaving represents unity, then the section about the layers of the Mishkan teaches us to create unity within unity, because coming together in unity is how we honour Torah and honour God.

All three layers of the Mishkan's tent carry the symbolism of weaving, but the innermost one bears some special thread work: keruvim ma'aseh choshev, "a design of cherubs" (or, more literally, "cherubs, the work of a designer.")
Opinions differ on what exactly this meant: double-faced weaving? Linen fabric, inked with design? One way or another, this innermost weaving is unlike the other layers, because -- like the kapporet -- this resplendent weave of colour and sparkle features two cherubim looking at one another.

Cherubim will appear a third time in this week's Torah portion, in the description of the parochet, the inner curtain which screens the Holiest of Holies from view. In each of these three places, the cherubim appear in a pair. They are in constant relationship, facing each other.

Perhaps that is what they're meant to remind us: that beneath our many layers and levels of self-protective defence mechanisms, relationship is the final doorway through which we can find God, for we are created as relational beings!

In the warp and weft of our relationships, we can create the tapestry of community -- and the more richly and attentively we can weave ourselves together, the more honour we do to the God Whose words are at the centre of our lives.

1 Cor 12:13
13  For by one Spirit we were all immersed into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free — and have all been made to drink into one Spirit .