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March 16, 2001/Adar 21, 5761, Vol. 53, No.24
Personal sanctuaries replace false idols
Torah Study
RABBI DAVID S. LIEB
Ki Tisa/ Exodus 30:11-34:35
A case can be made that the second half of the Book of Exodus is out of order, especially the incident of the golden calf in this week's parashah, Ki Tisa.
In Exodus 24:18 we read: "Moses went inside the cloud and ascended the mountain; and Moses remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights."
At the beginning of the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32:1, we read: "When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain..."
Almost everything between these two verses (Exodus chapters 25-31 of Parashat Ki Tisa) is about the building of the sanctuary and the priestly garments and, with some editorial creativity, can be understood as a response to the Torah's most infamous idolatrous incident; therefore, it should follow that story.
In his book on the Torah meditations of Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev titled "God at the Center," David Blumenthal writes about this reordering of Exodus: "The Sanctuary was thus understood as a concession by God to the people's need to have a focus for their worship, and, perhaps, as an act of reconciliation between God and our people following the incident of the sin of the golden calf."
In fact, almost everything in the entire second half of Exodus after Chapter 24 is about the sanctuary, the priests, the liturgical calendar, and the sacrificial system. For all practical purposes, the story of the golden calf does seem oddly out of place.
Although we should be cautious about placing too much spiritual value on editorial oddities, I am, nonetheless, intrigued by the relationship between sanctuary and idolatry, between "sacred space" and the things we find ourselves doing in the world outside of that space.
Is sacred space or sanctuary an appropriate antidotal response to idolatry, as Blumenthal and Levi Yitzhak suggest, and if it is, what happens when the sanctuary itself becomes a semi-idolatrous endeavor?
The simple answer is that sacred space can, of course, protect us from the seductions of a world that worships visible, material gods. That's why we call it sanctuary. That's why the Torah refers to it as ohel mo'ed, the "tent of meeting."
Architecturally speaking, sanctuaries should enhance that possible meeting, pointing beyond themselves to a God whose glory far exceeds that of a building constructed only to make manifest God's Presence.
But the more complex answer is that the golden calf, like so many other stories in the Torah, is a paradigm for eternal human conditions.
If sacred space is indeed a response to our "need to have a focus for our worship," we may need to have that place much closer at hand than the top of Mount Sinai or Friday night services at Temple Sinai. We may need to have sanctuary at home, at the office, in the car, at the mall, or wherever it is that idolatrous impulses threaten to separate us from the holy.
That sanctuary need not be a physical space: It may simply be our ability to quietly withdraw into our own inner center of perspective and peace.
Notice, finally, that after the events that occur in Ki Tisa, Moses no longer meets God at the top of Sinai but in the tent of meeting, and the people can see that such an encounter is happening when the cloud of God's glory descends over the tent. Because a tent is a portable thing, perhaps we, too, need portable sacred spaces as we move through the wilderness in which we live.
David S. Lieb has been the rabbi at Temple Beth-El in San Pedro, Calif., for the past 30 years.Torat Hayim, produced by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, is on the Internet at www.uagc.org/growth.
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