A Hidden Treasure: Terumah

A Hidden Treasure

D’var Torah for Parashat Terumah

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

In this week’s parasha, Terumah, the book of Exodus begins a new chapter, almost a new story.  Except that it’s the same story, only now moved on to its next level. 

In the first part of the book, God makes a personal appearance in history.  God, in person as it were, comes calling upon individuals and nations, asserting God’s authority and demanding reciprocal responsibility.

To Moses, God appears first as a voice from within a dry desert bush that doesn’t seem to be consumed by a fire that engulfs it.

To Pharaoh and all Egypt, God appears as a set of massive disasters, one worse than another, all proving that opposition to God leads to the utter collapse of even the proudest and grandest civilizations.

To the Israelites, God appears in a series of spectacular events that are as cosmic as they are precise.  The imagery is cemented in our imagination and tradition:  the Sparing of the First-born; the Parting of the Red Sea; the giving of the Ten Commandments.  

The imagery of the pillar of smoke which accompanied the Israelites by day, turning into a pillar of fire at night, is mighty enough.  So is the great wind that whirled in from the east, forcing the sea to part, causing an uproar that must have been heard around the globe.

Yet even greater than all these was the scene we call Ma’amad Sinai, our presence at Mount Sinai.  Crashing through the thunder, tearing the sky open with lightning, borne on the wings of a shofar blast that got louder by the minute, came God’s voice, proclaiming God’s presence, responding to Moses’s words—human to God and God to human. 

All these, however, were unique events, one-time happenings that would never repeat—at least not in the exact same way. 

The question that rises is, now what?  What do we do now that these events are behind us?  How do we see God in our day, today?  How do we perceive, in the midst of all the chaos around us, that there IS a God out there—or better yet—one that dwells among us?   It was easy enough to see God’s hand in those events, thousands of years ago. How do we know that God is here, with us, at this moment?  What we need now is something to represent God’s continued presence within us.

It’s easy to see God in miracles.  What we really want is to see God’s presence in the ordinary, real and gritty world that we are part of.

At this point in the story, the Torah is about to offer us two alternative versions of God’s presence.  In two weeks’ time, we will read about the wrong one.  This week, however, we are given the right formula. Terumah gives us exactly what we need when it says, “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). 

We are to build a House for God.  It’s a logical and simple answer, yet it’s also perplexing at the same time.

How could any physical dwelling be God’s house?  Could any structure, no matter how enormous and glorious, ever contain all God’s presence? 

The Torah’s intent, of course, is not that that this Tabernacle contain ALL of God’s presence, only those qualities which we expect—or pray for—in our God.  It isn’t the building that’s going to be valuable, but rather what’s inside it.  Yes, the Tabernacle is going to be constructed from the most expensive materials:  gold, silver and copper; expensive gems, furs and tanned leather; woven and embroidered silk, soft combed linen; spices and oils that would make it all shine and fragrant.   Yet the real value of this palace would not be in its form, but in its content.

To be sure, it wouldn’t be the physical contents, all tools and furnishings of the Temple.  Not the seven-branch menorah, made of one huge boulder of pure gold; nor the table, the altar, laver and even Holy Ark itself—all sculpted in wood and overlaid with gold; not even what the Ark held— hewn tablets of stone with words and laws inscribed upon them in ancient script.  None of these would even begin to contain the indomitable spirit of God.  They are only to give form to it.

So where would God’s holiness ultimately be found?  Where would be the safest, most sheltered and secure place for God’s presence to be nestled?

In our free will.

The key to this huge and magnificent Tabernacle, with its thousands of details of magnificence and splendor, is secreted within the word terumah.  This whole Tabernacle, along with everything that it is, both material and genius, is to be a donation.  Not a gift, not even a commandment, terumah implies uplift, a volunteering that must come from within, not from some outside source.  “From everyone who gives it willingly with his heart you shall take My offering”  (Ex. 25:2). 

You have to want to offer it.

Freedom is the key; freedom to give, freedom to receive.  It’s the willingness, the open heart, that is God’s dwelling within us.

And in return, what do we get?

“My offering.”  God’s freely given uplift, God’s gift returned to us. 

By voluntarily offering the gifts of our hands, hearts and minds we allow God’s bounty to become part of our existence.  Each one of us can become part of the whole; each one of us can become part of the One that is God.

That, teaches the Torah, is the right choice to make.  Freely, not by coercion, we offer the best and most valuable of our resources.   We offer them not because of the inherent value of the material goods, but rather because of the true worth hidden within the structure we create, the most valuable treasure we human beings possess.

A gift given to no other creature other than us, a gift that flows from the most powerful source of life down to the smallest and meekest of us, it is the gift of free will.  The understanding that we can choose and are free to do so at any moment:  To oppress or to bring freedom; to destroy or to create; to be closer to the animal we are, or rather to the aspiring angel our soul yearns to be.

This is the first alternative, the Torah’s preferred one, as we begin to transform the one-time events of the Exodus into an eternal experience of God’s revelation, an ongoing process in which we, too, can play a part.  There is another—but that is for another discussion, in another portion.

©2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Setting Off On The Path of Holiness: Mishpatim

Setting Off On The Path of Holiness

D’var Torah for Parashat Mishpatim

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim (“Ordinances”, Ex. 21:1—24:18), picks up where the Ten Commandments left off last week.  Mishpatim gives us not ten, but 53 commandments.  With 23 positive commandments and 30 prohibitions, this list is the second longest in the whole Torah.

This list of commandments is also crucial to a fuller understanding of the Torah as a system of progress and change.

There are some pretty harsh laws in this parasha.  A lot of people would be put to death if we still followed these, including (but not restricted to): anyone accused of desecrating the Sabbath; anyone dabbling in witchcraft; or any boy who so much as raises his hand to hit his parents.  Whether he actually hits them or not doesn’t matter; the punishment is still the same—death.  And if you thought that was harsh, two verses down we learn that even if he only mocks or curses his parents, the punishment is still death!  Ouch!

This is the portion where we find the often-quoted law, “A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb” (Ex. 21:23-25).

It’s enough to turn anyone away from religion—or at least from any religion that espouses such strict laws.

Yet to view or quote these laws out of context is to do oneself—and the Torah—a disservice.  For this is just the starting point of a long legal discussion, one which still continues to this day.  The fact is that these were the laws of the land in the Middle East around 3000 years ago.  They are found in ancient Mesopotamian legal codes, some of which predate Moses by anywhere from 500 to 2000 years, yet which form the basis for the laws we find in the Torah.

Of course there’s no denying the written letter.  Disobeying authority in ancient time meant destabilizing the most basic tenets and pillars of society.  That simply couldn’t be allowed if society was to survive.  And truth be told, we modern people aren’t much different from our ancient predecessors who lived 3000 years ago.  We still try to get away with as much as we can.  Often enough only the threat of severe and costly punishment deters us from breaking rules.  And sometimes, even that doesn’t stop us.

Yet the obvious absurdity of lex talionis (the laws of retribution—e.g. an eye for an eye) does not escape the wise scrutiny of the Torah.  Nor does the law commanding death for a boy who disses his parents or threatens to hit them.

Almost immediately, we see change and evolution set in. Lex talionis may have been fine for Hammurabi and his society; but for Moses, a much more ethical and practical alternative is financial restitution.  And as for the rebellious teenager, after lengthy discussion, the rabbis conclude that such a case never did and never could come up.  They start off their argument with the verses from Mishpatim (Ex. 21: 15, 17), continue with Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and finish off with lengthy passages in the Midrash and Talmud, adding so many criteria, restrictions and exceptions that the whole dispute becomes ridiculous and, ultimately, moot.

The Torah is indeed the foundation of all Jewish law—but its laws reflect the time and society for which they were written.  To dismiss the entire body of Jewish Law based only on its fundamentals, without looking at later revisions and emendations, is as silly as the original “eye for an eye” law.  Because when we throw the system out, we also throw away the entire structure of discussion and revision that followed Moses and which continues to this day.

Conditions of life, greater understanding of human nature, situations that ancient societies had no inkling of—change necessitates change.  A busy intersection may need a traffic light; but if the town is deserted, there is no need to keep the light flashing.  It is no longer a dangerous intersection.

What Judaism tries to do is to keep the spirit of the law even as its details evolve.

In some other cases, the Torah tries to control a practice it knows cannot be stopped; yet, because this practice can—and often does—lead to all kinds of abuse, it needs to be regulated.  Take slavery, a human condition that is as ancient as humanity itself, one that stubbornly persists to this day.  The evils of slavery are too innumerable to list.  Think cruelty and greed; think human trafficking, particularly of women and children; think child abuse.  There is no doubt that slavery is an evil in itself.  Yet it persists. 

The Torah cannot put a total stop to slavery, but what it can do—and does in the very first verses of Mishpatim—is to limit the power a master has over his slaves.  A Hebrew slave must be freed at the end of six years of servitude.  A freed slave must be set free along with his family.  A slave cannot be sent out penniless; he must be helped in starting out his new life, lest he fall into debt and slavery once again, an inescapable trap for so many people in impoverished, benighted countries.

What cannot be stopped outright, the Torah attempts to limit and control, leaving it up to future generations to prohibit.

The Torah’s truths may be divine and eternal—its words, however, are ours to change and interpret.  The legal process of progress and evolution is ongoing.  It began as soon as the law was first proposed, and still continues today.  Courts of Jewish law, headed by knowledgeable—and, hopefully, compassionate—rabbis, make Halakhah (Jewish law) a living and dynamic system.  That is why the Torah didn’t simply become obsolete in time, disappearing and making Judaism disappear with it.  The Torah’s laws evolve as society does.  Progress cannot be stopped.

The trick is to keep the thread alive, a constant lifeline to the day when, 3200 years ago, these ordinances were first proposed as the foundation for a new way of life, one based on justice, fairness and compassion.  Since then, we have learned to build a culture based not only on limits and controls, but also on the possibility of change and evolution.

Mishpatim, “Ordinances,” thus sets the parameters for human behavior, all the way from what must not be, to what might be.  Ever since the day we first accepted these laws, we, students and followers of the Torah, have been engaged in exploring and finding our place on this spectrum, some veering toward a more strict interpretation, others to a more liberal one. 

The important thing is to stay on the path.  It is, after all, as we see it, the path of justice, righteousness and, ultimately, of holiness.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Climbing Mount Sinai: Yitro

Climbing Mount Sinai

D’var Torah for Parashat Yitro

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

How we interact with the world around us depends on how we are raised.

As any new parent knows, an infant’s needs have to be satisfied as soon as possible.  I remember many a midnight feeding when my daughter was just a few months old.  I would put the formula bottle in the microwave (don’t judge me!) and warm it up for just a few seconds.  The crying never ceased, but as the seconds ticked down on the glowing timer, I would count along:  “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” To this day I think my daughter likes math because of this early exposure to numbers.

Later, as they begin to realize that there’s a larger world around them, we teach our children to share.  It goes along with learning to be part of a group, all sharing whatever limited supplies are available at any moment.

Human beings, more than other animals, need to be taught the mechanics of group interaction.  Not because we don’t have the genes for it—we do.  Rather, it’s because we also have an exaggerated notion of self.  All too often we are prone to think we deserve something, not necessarily because we earned it, but because we are unique, and therefore special. 

I saw a seagull snatch a piece of food in its beak and rapidly fly away with it.  Not rapidly enough, it seems, as within seconds it found itself chased and surrounded by four or five other gulls, all trying to get a piece of whatever it was the first bird had.  A similar mechanism works within us human beings, only magnified several times over due to our inflated sense of self-worth. 

Taking for ourselves what does not belong to us is not acceptable behavior; this rule is drummed into us from the earliest age.  We have to be taught this law over and over, and if we are caught in the act, we can be sure to be punished for it.

Such is the nature of human beings and of the laws we create in order to protect the group of which we are part.

In this week’s Torah portion, Yitro (Ex. 18:1—20:23), the Israelites receive the Ten Commandments.  It’s a powerful scene, told in a way that engages all our senses:  an enormous blast of a shofar gets louder by the minute; fire and smoke surround Mount Sinai, scene of the revelation of God to the entire People of Israel (past, present and future); the mountain itself starts shaking and quaking; and above it all, the voice of God thunders from heaven, declaring God’s presence so powerfully that the people beg Moses to lower the volume and speak for God.

Clearly this is important.

Yet when we read these laws, they seem so simple and self evident, we wonder why all the drama.  These commandments are not very different from prior law codes, such as the one of Eshnunna, a Mesopotamian center that thrived around the year 3000 BCE, a full 18 centuries before Moses; or the later (500 years before Moses), more famous code of Hammurabi.  It seems clear from all these law codes that human nature hasn’t changed much from the earliest times.  People have always tried getting away with murder.

What the Torah tries to do at this point is to simplify everything.  At least for now, leaving to a minimum the reward and punishment aspect of the individual laws, the Torah wants us to look at ourselves and then to examine our interaction with the world around us. 

The first and most obvious difference between the Ten Commandments and the other, previous law codes is that this set stems not from the current ruler, but from God.  No human being is above the law; no temporary ruler cannot deify himself and thus be exempt from God’s laws.  God is the ultimate and eternal source of these laws; God alone is the judge.

The first four commandments thus deal with our relationship with God.  God is the only God, the only one we may worship, in tandem with with no other gods.  We may form no physical image of God.  The Sabbath is set aside as the day sanctifying our relationship with God.

The fifth commandment has us beginning to understand our relationships with other people, starting with our parents.  They are the ones who have given us our physical form, who passed on the spark of life to us, who sheltered us, provided us with food and security until we could do so for ourselves and.  As such, parents are partners with God and deserve to be taken seriously and respectfully.

The next four commandments regulate our relationships with others around us.  We are not to murder, commit adultery, steal or give false witness.  These four revolve around the issue of trust.  Can others trust us as much as we would like to trust them?  Can we do something in stealth, imagining that there would be no repercussions, no consequences?  With God as judge, jury and witness, the answer is obviously, no, we may not.  There will be consequences, there must be no doubt of that.  Nothing is hidden from God.

Finally comes the most difficult commandment of all:  We must not covet.  Desiring something so much that we might be led astray in getting it is a danger, a pitfall many of us fall into time and time again.  Call it addiction, call it lust, it’s a hunger that can never be satisfied.  The tenth commandment is actually the most powerful of them all, for it would have us control ourselves.  It gives us power over our own behavior.  With this commandment, we become judge, witness and jury.

We can be masters of our fate, as long as we obey this most difficult of all commandments.  It’s hard, because we want.  We are born wanting, we live our whole life in expectation of having our needs satisfied.  We throw tantrums, quarrel and fight wars when we feel that our needs are not gratified.  We lapse into our basic, animal state of being when we give in to our desires.

An interesting exercise would be reading the Ten Commandments in reverse.  Start with the tenth, the one that deals with our most basic instincts as human beings, then climb upwards.  As though climbing a tall mountain, with each new level, we rise above the common, above the lowest denominator, and reach for the highest level of all.  Finally we achieve the kind of partnership Moses would have us attain:  a sacred yet personal partnership with the Kaddosh Baruch Hu, The Holy One, Blessed Be God.

Sinai is a mountain that exists not only in a specific geographical region.  There is a Sinai within each of us, waiting to be explored, waiting to be climbed.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Fury And Determination: Bo (An Appreciation of Ariel Sharon)

Fury And Determination:  D'var Torah for Parashat Bo

In Memory of Ariel Sharon

Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This message was first intended as my d’var for Parashat Bo (Exodus 10:1—13:16), dated January 4, 2014. I was thinking about God’s command to Moses, Bo ‘el Par’oh, “Come unto Pharaoh,” so different from previous commands to merely “go” to Pharaoh.  The rabbis teach that the difference is that, with the last three plagues, Moses is told to strike at the hardened inner core of the ruthless tyrant, to destroy him utterly from the inside out.

Coincidentally, January 4 was exactly the day that, eight years ago, Ariel Sharon had suffered a massive stroke.  Now, eight years later, as I set out to write this d’var, the news in Israel was all about Sharon’s quickly deteriorating health situation.  Reflecting on Sharon’s lifelong accomplishments, I couldn’t help but think of the warrior who stood up to Egypt in modern times.  In the Torah, Moses expresses fury as he stands up to Pharaoh and denounces him for his heartless cruelty.  In 1973, it was a similar fury, a similar fierce determination to survive, that saved Israel from catastrophe.  And it was Sharon who made it happen.

It was almost exactly eight years ago, on my way to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv for a flight back to the States when the news bulletin came on.  It wasn’t good.  Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had suffered a massive stroke.

For the next eight years, Sharon would exist in a coma, breathing on his own but connected to machines that did just about everything else.  Through those years, there were ups and downs, times when it seemed that he was breathing his last, and times when his open eyes seemed to communicate that something deep inside him was still alive, still kicking, still making a heroic stand.

Ariel—the lion of God—was his name, but everyone knew him as Arik, a nickname that intimated familiarity, friendship, trust.  From his earliest days, through the War of Independence of 1948 and then almost all other wars Israel had fought, you knew you could trust Arik Sharon.  His soldiers trusted and followed him; and later, when his role in the army was over, the State of Israel trusted him as its leader.  They all had good reason to.  Arik Sharon may have been heavy handed; he may have been well deserving of his other nickname, “The Bulldozer.”  Sharon always got his way, sometimes by ruthlessly rolling right over his enemies and detractors, and just as often going over the heads of his superiors.  But whether you agreed with his tactics or not, almost all Israelis today would agree that few politicians before or after Sharon have been as single-mindedly dedicated to Israel and Israel’s safety and security as he was.  

Over the next few days, and certainly into the weeks ahead, much will be written and said about Sharon, who died early this past Shabbat morning.  Among Arabs, there will be few tears shed.  A dark spot on Sharon’s record will always be Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where Christian Lebanese Phalnagists—militias armed and sanctioned by Israel—massacred hundreds of Moslem refugees.  Regardless of the reasons and circumstances of this massacre, Israel was held responsible.  In the US and elsewhere, country leaders and international bodies condemned Israel in the harshest terms.  The massacre occurred shortly before the High Holy Days in 1982, and on Yom Kippur Day, in many Jewish communities, countless rabbis gave sermons that centered on the theme of “sins of commission and sins of omission,” implying that even though Israel may not have actually participated in the killings, by turning a blind eye to the vengeful intentions of the Phalangists, the Jewish nation was still guilty by omission.  

It is a tragic fact of all wars that terrible things happen, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.  Historian Jonathan D. Sarna, in his book When General Grant Expelled the Jews, writes, “As generals so often do, [General Ulysses S. Grant] had submerged individuals, focusing instead on armies and military objectives and categories of people.”  Sharon led the invasion of Lebanon in 1982—an invasion that was originally intended to last only a couple of weeks, but which extended to eight years.  The massacre at Sabra and Shatila cost him not only his job as Defense Minister; it also lost him the friendship and trust of his long-time ally, then-Prime Minister Menahem Begin.  (Israel’s Chief of Staff, Raphael “Raful” Eitan, also resigned in the wake of the Israeli investigation committee’s findings).  

Later, as a result of rising Arab violence against Israel, Sharon was elected to the office of Prime Minister, an office he shared with Shimon Peres (now the President of the State of Israel).  Sharon was bold and brazen in his reaction to the terrorists, first subduing the violence (using tactics that were often censured by critics, but which were nevertheless successful).  Later, however, he turned his attention to the future.  Starting work on a separation barrier between Arabs and Jews in the West Bank, Sharon was aiming for two goals:  First, to stop infiltration of Arab terrorists into Israel; and secondly, to lay the foundation for a two-state solution, with the separation barrier serving as the de-facto border.

Then, in 2005, in a move that alienated some of his staunchest supporters, many of whom had followed him with unwavering loyalty into five wars, Sharon ordered the withdrawal of all Israelis from the Gaza Strip.  The move was seen as a sign that Sharon would be willing to disengage from other Palestinian areas, as long as peace would be the ultimate result.

The Gaza Disengagement was an experiment, a balloon meant to explore whether peace in return for withdrawal was even a remote possibility.  Ariel Sharon didn’t see the calamitous results of the Disengagement.  Half a year later he suffered two massive strokes that left him comatose.  All he knew to the very end was that he had given peace the best chance he could.

For me, Arik Sharon will always be a hero.  He championed a strong Israel that would be willing and capable of standing up and defending itself against its enemies.  In 1973, three weeks into the Yom Kippur War, he saved Israel by crossing the Suez Canal with his armored division, driving deep onto Egyptian territory and encircling the entire Egyptian army.  The brilliant move ended the Egyptian aggression (and effected an almost immediate order of cease fire from the United Nations, which failed to do so for the first three weeks of the war, when the Arabs had the upper hand).  If it were not for this tactic, the result of the Yom Kippur War might have been much, much worse, possibly spelling disaster for Israel.  Sharon certainly understood the implication of the command given to Moses by God:  Bo ‘el Par’oh, “Come unto Pharaoh,”

At the same time, this fierce warrior was capable of seeing a future where Arabs and Jews would co-exist side by side and who took the first steps toward realizing this vision.  The tragedy is that his health did not allow him to carry through the dream of a strong, secure and peaceful Israel.  Sadly, the self-serving politicians who have followed Sharon—both on the Israeli and on the Arab sides—have done little to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East.

In his 1989 autobiography, Warrior, Sharon wrote, “The great question of our day is whether we, the Jewish people of Israel, can find within us the will to survive as a nation.”

That will always remain the most important question Jews should ask themselves, now no less than ever.

May Arik Sharon’s memory become a blessing and an inspiration for all future generations of Jewish Maccabees.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman