|
|
February 11, 2000/5 Adar 1 5760, Vol. 52, No.23
Do sanctuaries honor God or our success?
Torah Study
RABBI MARC J. ROSENSTEIN
T'rumah/Exodus 25:1-27:19
Just when we though that we have been liberated from building campaigns in our own synagogues, Parashat T'rumah reminds us that Moses came down from Sinai with a sheaf of blueprints for a portable sanctuary, lists of costly materials, and a powerful campaign slogan: "And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them" (Exodus 25:8).
Wasn't Abraham's revolution against idolatry the basis of believing in a God who cannot be confined to a particular place, who cannot be described by a physical image but who may be found wherever we seek God? Didn't we flee to the wilderness in order to clarify our vision of a God who is seen in all of creation but ultimately is not seen at all?
Now we are being instructed to collect gold and silver and precious stones and fine fabrics in order to build the Mishkan (dwelling) for God. Maimonides argues that the Mishkan and its sacrifices (and later the Temple in Jerusalem) were necessary stages in the spiritual maturation of the Jewish people. If all the other gods were worshiped with sacrifices in fine temples, then until we were fully educated about the uniqueness of our God, we, too, needed a similar set of rituals.
Today we must ask if anything has changed. Prayer has replaced sacrifice, and a central shrine has been supplanted, at least temporarily, by thousands of synagogues throughout the world. But the key, problematic idea remains the same: "And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them." The tension between the God who is everywhere and unseen and the God who dwells in the sanctuaries we build remains part of our consciousness. We spurn idolatry and reject the deification of leaders, objects and places, but we are concrete creatures living in a concrete world.
We may believe that the divine presence is everywhere, but we'd still like to know where God lives, and we'd like to be able to visit God there. And so we build beautiful sanctuaries, places that many of us suspect are actually monuments to our own success, fictions that make us feel good.
We are caught in our relationship with our synagogues between two understandings of God's covenant with Israel.
One is unconditional: As long as there is an appropriate edifice in the neighborhood, God will dwell among us. The building and its rituals are sacred. By contributing to the building and the maintenance of the edifice and its service, we ensure God's presence and protection. The other is conditional: God's providence depends on our behavior and on our keeping the commandments. We cannot "buy" protection by contributing to the building fund. Beautiful edifices and impressive ritual give us a false sense of security (see Isaiah, chapter 1).
Therefore, as we study the divinely inspired blueprints in T'rumah, we must ask some difficult questions: What do we mean when we say that we desire God to dwell among us? Will God dwell among us if we don't build buildings or "tents of meeting"? If God doesn't need such "tents," then why do we build them? And if God does need such "tents," then what kind of God do we believe in?
A possible answer is that God dwells among us when our community life reflects the values of justice and mercy that animate God's commandments. Community life requires institutions, and institutions require buildings. When our hearts move us to build buildings that manifest these commanded values, buildings in which we devote ourselves to justice, then the Shechinah (divine presence) is found in them and God dwells among us.
Maybe our synagogues are not concessions to our need for the physical accoutrements of religion but rather the proving grounds where we demonstrate the value content of our religion by how we behave in them, by what they stand for and by what they do. They can be temples to vulgarity and materialism or sacred spaces in which we gather to pursue social justice and treat one another with fairness and mercy. They provide us not with guarantees but with opportunities.
Rabbi Marc Rosenstein directs the Makomba-Galil Seminar Center at Moshav Shorashim, Israel. Torat Hayim, sponsored by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, is available on the Internet at www.uahc.org/torah.
|
