Building from the heart

D’var Torah

Feb 28, 2025

Parshat Terumah

Part 1: Gifts for the Mishkan

In this week's torah portion, God instructs the people on how to make the mishkan. The mishkan will serve as a portable sanctuary for God that the Israelites can carry with them as they wander in the desert.

In order to construct the mishkan, God directs Moses the following “Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you will accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.”

In a book otherwise filled with commandments, the mishkan is notably created with gifts from the heart. They are not obligatory or performative. They come from a feeling of being moved to give, “you will accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved”.

Part 2: The Purpose

The purpose of the gifts and the mishkan is made very clear in our text: 

God says  “let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”

The mishkan is what allows God to dwell with the people. The mishkan further allows us to conceive of the shekinah, a feminine name for God connoting God’s presence. Both words, mishkan and shekinah, hold the same Hebrew root of to dwell. Thus, with the mishkan, God shifts from being a power on high to being a presence, traveling with, alongside, and within us. A big theological and emotional change. 

Or HaChaim, a Moroccan 18th century Kabbalist, offers us a layer of compilation in his commentary. He writes that the shekinah was with us all along. Proof of this is apparent from the way we build the mishkan - with the gifts from our hearts. For Or HaChaim, these gifts are an indication of the divinity within each of us. 

So why, if we already have shekinah with us, if we already have God within us, do we need to create a mishkan, a place for God to dwell? Why do we need to give God a place to visit us if we already have God in our hearts? The whole thing seems circular. 

Part 3: We need to build things

Perhaps we do not need a mishkan. 

What we need is to build things. Build things from the heart, from the divine within us. In doing so, we are not only reminded that we are guided by holy hearts, but also that God will come be with us in these creations.

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I can’t help but feel that these are directions for us now

“Create from your heart. From your intuition and from the piece of God inside of you. That will remind you of your sacredness and that will bring God to us.”

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Today was my last day at the synagogue I have worked at for 4 years.

In the past year and a half, I would literally find a room to wait out services, so absent was God for me. 

My heart had nothing to give in a space where I felt so disappointed by zionism, the echo-chamber of Jewish pain, and moral cowardice in the moment we need integrity the most.

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I cannot hold myself any longer from listening to my heart, from the divine within me that knows what is right and wrong. 

We cannot stop from listening to our hearts. We cannot help ourselves from something that reflects our hearts. 

And in doing so, we cannot stop God from dwelling with us.