TRUMAH: The Nitty Gritty

A turn for the worse


The creation of the world was fascinating.  The flood was epic.  The stories of the forefathers, Yosef and the brothers, slavery in Egypt, the 10 plagues, the splitting of the sea -- this was all very exciting.  Even parshat Mishpatim, last week -- o.k. it was a bit technical with the damage and monetary law and what-not...the Rashi's a little longer than we would have wished... but at least there was action!  An ox on a rampage, a gouged eye, some theft, some intrigue at least!  This week, though, all of a sudden we're charging taxes, and before we know it we find ourselves in the middle of a metalworks, textiles and architecture textbook.  Coat this with gold, this many cubits by that many cubits, hammers this, weave this...  What happened here?!?  If the Jews in the desert had to build some sort of Temple for X or Y reasons, let them, but leave us out of the blueprints!


To make matters worse, Hashem preludes this long list of technical instructions with the loftiest of promises:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם   

"Make for Me a miKdash (Sanctuary) and I will dwell amongst you" (Shemot 25:8).

If only we could make it through all the nitty-gritty details of this parsha we would love to!  Who wouldn't want the Shechina, the indwelling of G!d's presence, here with us?  Peace and love between people, clarity, enlightenment, wisdom available to all, jealousy and hatred banished...it really does sound tempting, but what a pain in the neck to sift through all these details! 

~~~~~

Feminism Lost

We do speak about it, but we rarely actually think about it: the Beit haMikdash is destroyed.  It's been destroyed for almost 2,000 years.  When we walk down the steps towards the Kotel plaza and the view opens up as we round the corner, very few of us will even flinch at its lack.  We may even enjoy the beauty of the interplay between the blue and aquamarine tiling with the golden dome, and perhaps its contrast to the time-battered wall below, and "how interesting" how the different religions "share" this holy place.  This is just with regards to the physical structure.  In terms of what went on in there, it is barely a blip on our radar.  Even if you have a good Jewish education, and intellectually know what the Beit haMikdash service was like, how real is it for you?  How much can you actually relate to it?  Odds are... not much.  It is, at very best, a blurry, distant memory.

You see, I am a kohen, and there's a mitzvah from the Torah to give honor to kohanim (Vayikra 21:8, Rambam Hilchot Klei HaMikdash 4:2).  This means I get the first aliyah to the Torah, I lead Birtkat haMazon, I get served the first piece of cake at a birthday party, and everyday here in Israel, I go up to the Ark with the other kohanim and give a bracha to the congregation.  Intrigued by what kohanim used to do to deserve such honor, I looked into it a little bit.    

I'm going to tell you right now, in layman's terms, what they used to do in the Beit haMikdash.  It's something you probably already know, you just never thought about it like this: they would cook, fry, grill, bake, make sure people got fed, burn incense, light candles, clean the floors and all the while make sure that they remained impeccably dressed.  The following detail may have been lost in translation, but the Temple was not called "the Temple;" we call it the "Beit haMidash," "the House-of-Making-Holy."  It was first and foremost a house, our model of what a Jewish home should look like.  Every Jew turns to pray towards the spot where the Beit haMikdash stood -- it was the center of national Jewish life, and what was going on there?  Everyday household chores.

Again, we are so removed from this at this point, that we can't help but think that this is a bit "wierd."  We have grown accustomed to hearing answers to the question, "what does your mother do for a living?" with something to the effect of "she's just a stay-home-mom."  A "successful" woman is, generally speaking, defined by her success in the professional world, independent of any children she's raised and cared for, or the house she's maintained to be a well-oiled machine for two decades.  Hold this in the light of the destruction of the Temple.  What was once the source of radiance of G!d's Glory, raised on the pedestal of the Temple Mount as essentially meaningful, has been reduced since the Temple's destruction to "mundane," "trivial" and "technical."

One's masterpiece

The opposite of קדוש "holy" is חול "mundane."  חול, in Hebrew also means "sand," small, disparate particles without connection to one another.  קדוש, on the other hand, always refers to absolute unity.  When a bride and groom stand under the chuppa, the man says to his bride, הרי את מקודשת לי "Behold you are ultimately unified with me."    

Again, the Temple is called the "Beit haMikdash."  We now can understand that this means: the House in which the mundane everyday details are made holy -- unified. 

Every med student knows that it is much easier to remember pieces of information if they are connected as systems.  Every history student knows that history must be learned as a narrative.  Lugging around details is cumbersome and frustrating.  Understandably, then, when we get to these parshiot recording the construction of the Mishkan, the moveable Temple in the desert, we get a bit antsy.  The reason is because we're just seeing unrelated pixels.  A curtain here.  A table there.  A candelabra there.  We don't understand or appreciate how these technical details are connected, but every component of the 613 parts of the Mishkan was critical to the whole like the 613 mitzvot and the 613 parts of the body and the 613 parts of the soul (R Yehoshua Heller, Ohel Yehoshua -- in this treatise on the Mishkan, Rav Heller maps how the Mishkan was a larger-than-life model of the inner world of the human soul).

Building a life has many many moving parts.  Any solution that is unitary in its approach -- a hammer with every problem a nail -- will never work.  The human mind and the world we live in are too complex for simple solutions.  To be able to bring G!d's Presence in requires unifying all the details that were previously חול mundane-disconnected towards that goal.  Exercise, work, love in marriage, study, eating well, prayer, giving to the community, friendship, teaching, mentoring, going to the dentist, getting enough sleep -- none of these are mundane when they are unified towards the goal of bringing in G!d's Presence -- none of them are just technical.  They are all necessary parts of your בית (home) and can therefore all be made קודש.

The challenge, of course, is defining one's overarching goal, ensuring that it is קודש, and planning how all the pieces move him towards it.  Then, there still remains the day-to-day challenge of reminding oneself that the nitty-gritty is part of the process towards that destination.  


The secret to Simcha-Joy in the face of these challenges is to realize that every detail is a piece of your Mishkan for Hashem.  Nothing is "too small."  It will take a lifetime to finish, but if one knows that he is building the space for the Almighty to come into his life, not just shlepping bricks for Pharoah, every piece can be placed with simcha -- the big difference between working as slaves in Egypt and working for G!d.