Terumah : Exodus 25:1–27:19

I’m thinking about workmanship.

We hired some painters this fall to finish painting our apartment, 8 years after we moved in. There were still rooms that were painted a yellowish-white flat paint, what I called “developer white”. Our kitchen was one of them, and after 8 years of cooking the walls there were all sticky with grease.

The painters were a team led by a friendly Brazilian guy, and they had painted our second-floor neighbor’s apartment. She is an exacting woman, bless her heart, and we figured if it was good enough for her, it was probably way too good for us. But we had no other painters in mind, and we were feeling more flush with money -- and less flush with time -- than usual. Also, some people we knew were just winding up a gazillion dollar renovation on their house, and we had just seen a perfect house ourselves, around the corner from us, that was far too expensive to actually buy. So compared to a giant renovation or a new house, getting a few rooms painted seemed very sane and modest. Well, because it is.

Most of the other rooms we’d painted ourselves. (“We?” asks the husband in my head. ) They were perfectly acceptably painted rooms. Maybe not all the trim got done, or the ceiling, and maybe the walls were not perfectly smooth, and maybe the edges were wonky in a few places. No biggie. We didn’t care. It was not like in my husband’s parents’ dining room where, once upon a time, when painting, he’d painted the word ‘party’ in giant letters, before immediately painting over it, except that in certain light, 25 years later, you could still see it there.

Anyway, so the Brazilian guy and his team were in our apartment for a week and a half. They sanded and painted. They cleaned up at the end of each day, they left everything spotless, and they did extra work just to meet their own standards. It’s a beautiful, beautiful paint job.

There’s a book I keep meaning to read and not getting around to, written by someone who might have been a banker or a professor (I really can’t remember) and became a motorcycle repairman instead, Shop Class as Soul Craft.Only of course now he’s a writer, not a banker or a professor or a motorcycle repairman. It’s about craftsmanship, and about what we lose when the work we do is not a craft, when it is all in our heads, when it’s pushing papers and sitting at computers and clackety clacking on our clackety keyboards.

Me, I love my clackety keyboard. Clackety clack, it goes, and keeps the silence at bay. I am reminded of A Wrinkle in Time, of the shriek of anguish as evil destroyed a little piece of creation. And I am reminded of The NeverEnding Story, of the Nothing that came to devour the universe of the imagination. There’s the power of mind, and the power of body. We’re all up in the clouds with our heads, or we have our feet solid on the ground. Oh, the manichean divide between the material world and that other one, the one in our heads. But it’s not a real divide, because in truth our heads are full of squishy brain stuff and the material world is built with abstractions, like money. There are our neurons, and at the same time, money, art, music. God.

I haven’t even talked about the parsha, have I? Typical. The parsha is all about how to build the tent of meeting, the mishkan, within which God, or the Shekhinah, the emanation of God, the Spirit of God, will dwell. It’s a long and tedious parsha, especially coming as it does without illustrative pictures. I’ve read the fundamentalists are fond of their recreations of the tent of meeting, recreations of the ark of the convenant, with the cloud above it by day and the glowing pillar of fire by night. A mobile home for God -- who ever heard of such a thing? The gods lived in high places; they did not traipse around with ragged bands of worshippers. Gods were for going on pilgrimage to, they were not a traveling hit Broadway musical, advertised on taxicabs. What sort of God consents to be schlepped all over the desert, in what, however nicely made, was a box inside a tent?

Anyhow the instructions for the tent take a very long time to get through. God is quite exacting. And strictly speaking it’s not just one tent, but four, with lots of fancy curtains and gold clasps and threads dyed with rare shellfish and all kinds of special things. It’s a whole tent city, magnificent and gaudy, a traveling gypsy circus. Come one, come all, come see the God within. Well, pay for a sacrifice at least; don’t get too close, the unholy may be incinerated.

So that’s the parsha.

Back to human craftsmanship. Why all the fuss about the stuff, exactly? We’re all about stuff, aren’t we, these days, and at the same time, we want desperately not to be about the stuff. We are drowning in stuff. Cheap stuff, nice stuff, pretty stuff, ugly stuff. Sometimes you look around and the human race just seems a blight upon the world, spreading our shitty stuff everywhere you look. Building ugly buildings, and leaving ugly vacant lots. Paving over everything in sight and shopping all the time and buying our new mobile phones each year and donating our old ones to women suffering from domestic violence, as if that makes it okay, as though there could possibly these days be not enough mobile phones to go around. Like the clothes donation bins in parking lots, always too full, full of our lightly worn and badly made clothes, as though somewhere someone does not have enough old navy t-shirts.

So there it is: disgust at all our stuff. Disgust at what we humans make, what we have wrought upon the face of the earth and upon the sky and upon the waters and everywhere on this great and gorgeous, magnificent world. It’s miserable, really. If you’re so inclined to believe there’s something more out there, something else beyond this world, it’s awfully tempting to think what happens here, what we do to this place, is quite irrelevant. If our world is just a testing ground, a waystation, an illusion, what’s it matter, what happens here? Given, say, the toxic electronics dumps of Lagos, and, say, the Mall of America, that would be a relief, really.

Well, most of my readers, I bet, are not inclined that way in any case. There’s nothing here but here. It’s awful what we’ve done to it, we’re hardly likely to recover. The global warming and the pollution; the overpopulation, the slums, the strip malls. All those ugly houses in the suburbs. We’re stuck with it, until it kills us, pick your version of materialist apocalypse: the weather goes all wrong, or the soybean blight, or the new and awful plague, the collapse of society driven by the end of cheap oil. What a miserable future we have to look forward to. This, we say, looking at each other, this right here is as ridiculously good and insanely profligate as it is ever going to get. When we are old, if we are lucky enough to grow old, we’ll tell stories about the glowing screens in our pockets, about the heavy metal tubes that somehow flew, very fast, all over the world, about listening to a radio station broadcasting in Paris via a tiny computer the size of my hand, in Boston. That’s the very best we have to hope for. The very worst involves guns, and starvation, and fiefdoms, and death. We’ve fucked this world up, and we’re not likely to fix it, humans being what we are. Our heads are not in the clouds, but there’s not really any ground there either, is there? Just a choice of terrifying materialist apocalypses, none of them less awful than the traditional kind with the hellfires and the horsemen.

So this is us, right? These are our choices: we can take the shiny things and the mountains of junk, or we can leave it all, the beautiful and the damned of it all, the gorgeous paint job and the faux leaded-glass. Either the stuff is important, or else it is irrelevant or worse, a hindrance (spiritual or psychological, as you wish). Augustine of Hippo vs. the Stoics. What else is there?

Oh, but.

Step right up, come one and all, let’s see what’s behind these curtains here. What’s this shining tent in the desert, glittering in the sandstorm? An extravagant confection, this tent, a Turducken of a tent, tents inside tents inside tents, a beautiful fairyland of a tent. Like Tivoli, this tent. Traveling in the desert with a whole people, the rich and the poor, the craftsmen and the weaverwomen and the moneychangers too. All the people having made this tent, with the very best work they could do, some with their hands and some with the mushy stuff inside their skulls. The people have made the tent and they honor their God who dwells in it, and their God honors them right back, by dwelling in their midst, in the place that they have made. Not a high mountain, not a sacred spring, not a grove of trees or a volcano or a valley or a sea -- not for this God. This God will take up residence in a hand-made tent, with all its hand-made imperfections, an entirely human place.

This God has truck with humans, pitiful as we are. This God consents -- no, commands -- to be dragged all over the desert in a circus tent, like a dancing bear. But why? What can this possibly mean?


It means this world is not a terrible mistake. It is not a hardship to be struggled through, and it is not an illusion, and it is not a sort of school to get through on our way to some other, better, less-cluttered-up Reality. This world is not purgatory, and it is not hell, and it is not nothing, either This world is real, and what we do here matters. The future looks like eight different kinds of disaster to me, most of them all our fault. If not for that ridiculous tent I’d be despairing. That tent means that God trusts our work. The tent means that God doesn’t plan to burn up this world and start all over again, and that even given all the crap we make and the shit we throw out and the awful way we treat this world, sometimes we can make things so beautiful and special that God Godself will dwell in them. Whether there are other worlds after or beyond or interleaved with this one, I don’t know. But I do know that God does not consider this world to be disposable, that God has faith in us, that God hopes and trusts and yearns for us to be up to this task of making this world (and that is what we are doing, for better or for worse -- we are covering the face of the world and we are making it over, a new creation, of a sort, not always to my taste, but still -- you can’t deny the enormity of it all).

God hopes in us as much as we must hope in God. And how could I have hope if God did not have hope in us? Who can believe we humans will muddle it all okay in the end, without something else than us? We cannot get away from things. Can you imagine us not building, making, doing, painting, singing, sculpting? We build our cities and our gardens and our violins and bookstores. We build our world financial markets and our currencies and our philosophies and our websites. Let us hope there is some way to turn all our doing toward the good. It seems impossible to me. I cannot imagine how we can make all this come out all right. What a nasty broken mess we’ve made.

Fix it, says God, from the ridiculous tent in the desert. Follow me and fix this world, brick by brick, nail by nail, day by day. I’m right here with you. Many hands make light work, remember? You don’t have to complete it, but neither can you refuse to do it.

Somewhere in the distance I hear the blast of the shofar, calling us to the tent of meeting. A Terumah is a gift, an offering. But who is offering what to whom? There are so many layers to this tent, rooms within rooms, like a dream, like a mystery inside an enigma inside a secret, like diving into a deep pool, like a funhouse, only very serious and very strange at the same time as it is very glad. A cold high kind of glad mixed up with a warm furry kind of glad, smoke and incense and animal skins and everything utterly strange and yet familiar... I feel as though I’m falling through a mirror, I try to focus on the clickety clacking of my fingers on the keys, a siren outside, the rain in the trees, my own burning skin. Everything is hyperreal. I feel quite strange. (I wonder if I’m losing my mind again?) Sometimes life is like this -- numinous. The world itself is a tent of meeting. Let us sanctify it.

mishpatim - Exodus 21:1–24:18

Shelby N. is standing next to her car, a luxury behemoth of a car, the kind that is advertised, inexplicably, in the pages of The New Yorker, with the Charles Schwab and the Pratek Philippe and the Mandarin Oriental ads. ( I have read The New Yorker for years and yet I still marvel at how little its advertisers seems to know about me. ) I think it’s a Jaguar. She’s got that chemically straightened hair and she’s wearing those sheepskin boots and a big down coat and the sky is slate gray and spitting at us with contempt. It’s not a day and its certainly not a good time to stand next to your car in the middle of the rotary at Memorial Drive and the BU bridge. She’s getting splashed by other cars, five-thirty in the evening, merging and weaving in an endless circle. It’s nearly dark and she forgot to put her hazards on, and she’s talking on her phone (I see her nails, immaculate orange, clutching her phone, they’re almost the only part of her I can see in the wintry dark) and I can’t see what’s wrong with her car but obviously something, because why else would she be standing there, gesturing madly, in the sleet, next to an enormous puddle.

Who knows how I recognize her at all? I haven’t seen her for thirteen years. I’ve thought of her sometimes, since college. I have thought of her with bile and malice and bitterness and regret. She was awful to me -- who knows why? -- one year in school. The people who assigned roommates had been mistaken. We could not live together, she and I. By the end of the year I shrank from her, I skulked so as to avoid her, I found a boyfriend I could spend the nights with so I did not have to hear her, see her, be tormented by her.

Of course I recognize her. The mind remembers danger, right? She looms out of the darkness at me, and I know her at once, and I knot up in fear and catch my breath and remember I am safe and warm in my own car, and I can drive right on by and leave that bogey in my past.

I can’t, though. I mean, I can, of course, but I may not. I am commanded not to. Stop, says my God and the God of my people. Stop and help your enemy raise her ox, which has fallen under the weight of its burden.

That’s what mishpatim says.

*****

It doesn’t say I have to be gracious about it. It was Jesus who is best known for saying we must love not merely our neighbors -- which is difficult enough, God knows -- not just our neighbors, but our enemies too. Not that Christians have a monopoly on loving their enemies. I remember a story about a Jewish man who befriended, somehow, I forget how, a grand poobah of the KKK after said person tried to pipe-bomb his house or something equally terrible. I think the poobah got reformed and when he became fatally ill was cared for by the Jewish man and his wife, in their home, until he died. It sounds like I read that in one of those Chicken Soup books, but I didn’t -- the book I read it in had a much more tasteful cover, and was much more scholarly in tone. Chicken Soup for the Cultural Snob’s Soul. But there wasn’t any talk of chicken. Chicken is not scholarly and it is not advertised in The New Yorker.

Anyway, God commands me to stop, in the sleet, in the dark, with my dandruffy hair and my Target boots and my cheap dye job ( Natural Instincts, if you must know) and my ragged nails ( did you know you can superglue a nail together so it doesn’t tear entirely off after you have chopped it up while making dinner? ) and my station wagon with a piece of the front bumper missing and the plastic in one of the rear lights broken, to pause my own life and to bring my 18-year-old self, shrinking or no, right along with me stopping up behind the Jag and putting my own hazard lights on and getting out of my own safe cocoon and stepping into reach and asking “Can I help you?” with what I hope is a sympathetic smile.

God doesn’t tell me what has to happen after that. That depends on Shelby, right? Maybe Shelby needs my help, and she has her son in the backseat, and some groceries, including ice cream, and maybe he’s autistic, her son, and perhaps I loan her my car to take him home in and I stand there myself, waiting for the tow truck, so her autistic son can be safe at home eating ice cream.

Maybe Shelby does not need my help, and moreover does not recognize me, and she is bewildered that I have stopped and a little irritated at my odd solicitude, some people are so weird, and she waves me on without a word, with just her eyebrows.

Maybe instead the tow truck comes as I am asking if she needs any help and she could get a ride with the tow truck guy or I could drive her home instead, and she’s alone, no son with special needs, and she does remember me, of course, come in for tea, why don’t you, I’ve always felt I was not quite fair to you that year, that I made your life more difficult than it ought to have been. I’m so glad to see you again and tell you so.

God and Mishpatim are silent on what happens next. Never mind. What would be the fun of living if we knew how it all would turn out, the raising of our enemy’s ox? God breathes it all in motion and builds a web of rules, like the best damn game theorist you ever saw, and waits to see if we can listen, if we can hear and can obey. If I stop my car that day, God wins. I was commanded, and I obeyed. Do I win too? Can that ever turn out bad for me, that question, “Can I help you?” I could spin some horror story endings, something snopes would warn about. If it all goes south from there on out, should I have listened and obeyed?

I think so, yes. That’s Bitachon, or trust in God. The moment I stop, the moment I ask, God and I have won together, whatever happens next. A piece of the world has been repaired.

****
To be honest, I don’t get much else from mishpatim. Such a faraway land, such a strange people, a trembling mountain, Moses dashing blood upon the men of Israel, gathered together at the base of the thundering mount. Such alien laws. I am embarrassed to confront the rules on slaves and how to free them properly. You can take your proper bride price and the penalties for raping a virgin and you can shove them up your neighbor’s ox’s butt. I have no fields to let lie fallow in the seventh year, and I know of no one, Jew or otherwise, who does not believe in making loans with interest. Clearly that’s one the Rabbis have driven several trucks of loopholes through.

Still. Here is an ancient scroll, from an alien people. It purports to tell me of my god and what God wants of me. Maybe it tells me other stuff too, stuff that isn’t really about God at all. That happens. I don’t know for sure.

But I do know what I must do if I see Shelby N. and her broke-down Jag in the sleet on a February afternoon. And perhaps that’s quite a lot indeed, from mishpatim.

Fear and Trembling ( Yitro: Exodus 18-20)

So one of my new year's resolutions was to make time again for my d'vrei torah. All fall I've been avoiding my poor abandoned torah blog. Things are like that, though, aren't they? The longer you ignore them the harder it is to pay attention to them again, because then when you turn and face the thing you've ignored, at the same time you are facing the fact that you ignored it. Oh, I feel like I should jump right into an ad for Facing History, Facing Ourselves, which was not my point. I am just trying to psych myself up for re-starting something that I meant to make a habit and then abandoned, frustrated and embarrassed by my failure to do so.

Of course I can provide a long list of extenuating circumstances: the meds debacle, the new job, the grapefruit interaction, the confusion and turmoil and busy-ness of the life of a working mother of two children under 8. And it is not that those circumstances are not extenuating, because they are. Nobody but me expected me to be able to maintain any kind of regular writing this fall, but then, who besides ourselves ever expects us to do the things WE want to do. Self-imposed goals are always dispensable, according to everyone else.

Happily there is repentance. Yes, yes, I know that repentance is not really meant to refer to my turning again to the writing of a blog that no one in particular reads. The failure of the blog is not a moral failure. And yet it feels as though it is, because it is a betrayal of something I want and that I think I need in my life, and a betrayal of what had always felt for me like a calling without a caller. 

You would think, having found the caller, that the calling would be easier to practice. It is not. It is no easier to write regularly about God than it is to write regularly about politics, or computer programming, or fashion, or history. In fact, it is harder. All those other things are the things of this world and they have secular value, and you can both write about them and not write about them without having to examine yourself.

Anyway, I'm on vacation right now. Along with the piña coladas and french cheese and the pool and the beaches there is still a feeling of unease. That is because I would like to write this blog post, about this week's parsha, and it is much easier and less unsettling to read a trashy novel or have a nap. Why should I have to be uneasy on my vacation? What in the world leads me to make myself sit here, feeling anxious and inadequate and undisciplined and incoherent, thinking of something to say about Yitro? You can lead a horse to life-giving water, but can you make her drink? 

I want to drink that water, and unless I must write about it, I will not. In the end I'm hoping this blog can serve as spiritual practice for me. I want to hear God better. I want to listen more. But the things of this world make it hard to hear God. There is hustle and bustle, and I'd rather think of myself as a basically good, perhaps even better than average person. I'd rather not face my failures. 

Perhaps in the Torah there's not a lot of facing my failures to be done anyway. Maybe there's nothing much there to be scared of. Just a bunch of strange, cobbled-together stories, the mythology of a long-dead people, made sacred by the fact of its survival down all the long years.

**** 

That's a very long introduction to the first d'var torah i'm writing in months.  The Hebrews have just left Egypt. They travel through the land of the Midianites, and Jethro, who was not a Hebrew, came out to meet Moses, with Moses' wife and his two sons. Jethro is Moses' father-in-law. One of his sons is named Gershom, which means "I have been a stranger in a strange land,"  and if that's not a phrase pregnant with meaning through all our ages of exile, right down to Robert Heinlein, I don't know what is. 

Jethro notices that Moses is wearing himself out serving as the judge for all the people, and advises Moses to delegate, delegate, delegate, which Moses does. If you are looking for "Easy Life Lessons In The Torah", this is one of them. "What you are doing is not right; you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you, you cannot do it alone." (Ex 18.17). Moses takes his father-in-law's advice ("Easy Life Lessons from the Torah, #283: Sometimes your in-laws actually have something useful to say.") and delegates some of his power to judge to some other elders. All is well. Off go the hebrews, with, one presumes, Moses' family in tow. They go to Sinai, and there's a big mountain, and they camp there, and God gives Moses one of two versions of the not-really-ten commandments that are received in the Torah. This particular version gives the fact that God rested on the seventh day the reason for the commandment to observe and to guard the shabbat, whereas other places we are told it is because we were slaves in Egypt and now are free that we must be shomer shabbos.

The whole scene looks an awful lot like a grumbling active volcano, what with the mountain "all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder." (Ex 19.18 -19). Charlton Heston didn't make all that up, there really is all that drama.

"All the people witnessed the thunder and lightening, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance." (ex. 20.15) They were afraid, and they said to Moses that he should speak to God for them, because they did not want to get too close, and they did not want to hear God's voice.

The commandments themselves are sandwiched in there, not clearly ten, and a motley bunch. I'm your God, and don't forget I liberated you from slavery in Egypt. Don't worship anyone else. Don't make a sculptured image of me or anything else and worship it (the 'sculptured' here would turn out to be very important to the Eastern Church as it developed its complex tradition of iconography, because it doesn't say 'painted', does it?).  Don't swear falsely by my name.  A long paragraph about the importance of Shabbat. "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy." Honor your father and your mother. Don't murder. Don't commit adultery. Don't steal. Don't bear false witness. Don't covet anything your neighbor has, wife, slave or ass. (Here we can at least be grateful that wife comes before slave and ass.)

I'm struck by this odd thing about purity, and about fear. It says that God tells Moses to tell the Israelites to make themselves pure, and then to stay away from the boundaries of the mountain. Whoever touches the mountain will die, says God, and it won't be safe to go up on the mountain until the ram's horn sounds a long blast. So there we have God telling everyone to stay away from the mountain. (oh, and be pure, don't touch a woman, so we're using everyone rather loosely..) 

On the third day the people (or, at least, the men-people) stand at the foot of the mountain, as instructed, and the smoke and thunder and everything come, and the ram's horn blows, but they don't go up the mountain, even though the instructions were "go onto the mountain when the ram's horn sounds a long blast." Only Moses goes up the mountain, and God says "Tell everyone not to come up here, if they look at me up here they'll die." Moses says "you told us to set bounds around the mountain, to sanctify it, so why would anyone come up here when I already said to them don't?" And God says "okay, never mind, go down and get Aaron and you can bring him up here with you, but everyone else must stay below or else I'll kill everyone." So Moses goes down, but actually he never does seem to bring Aaron back up with him, at least not in this version of the story. He tells the people the not-10 commandments, and they say "don't make us all go up there with you, and Moses goes up again to be instructed that God prefers monuments of natural stone, like Andy Goldworthy, rather than of hewn stone, like Rodin. And there's Yitro, as strange and alien as the Torah always seems, excepting those little nuggets of Easy Life Lessons.

I'm torn between writing posts that focus on these Easy Life Lessons, of which you can almost always find at least one per parsha, and writing posts that are much less coherent and much more difficult but that are actually attempting to look at the whole of the parsha. Or, if I were actually someone with any experience in torah study, I'd probably go deep into the meanings of two or three words, relate them to Lurianic Kabbalah and the Baal Shem Tov, and wind up with a seven-heavens theory of spiritual growth with some insight meditation thrown in for good measure.

What I'm doing is messy and confused. It's probably not very easy to read, and you could argue that if I'm going to do it this way I shouldn't do it. But I feel as though I have to get through the torah this way before I can or should get through it any other way. I don't want it pre-masticated for me, even though I know that naively reading the Torah without the benefits of scholarship and tradition is as likely to lead you astray into polygamy and stoning as it is to lead you to fresh insight and profound understanding.

Back to Yitro, where I try to find a less-easy but still manageable life lesson to wind everything up with, to make it worth the while of you and me. Something about sanctity and boundaries. Something about Yirah: the fear and awe of God. Or of the Universe itself, of Reality, if the word God makes you all squeamish, like endometriosis or placentas. So does God tell Moses to keep the people away, or do the people tell Moses to keep God away? We are scared of God, we are scared of reality, and if we're not careful, our faces will melt off like those of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

You wouldn't think I could relate to the storm und drang of Mt. Sinai, to the feelings of fear and awe the Hebrews had, with that long blast of the ram's horn sounding but all of them too paralyzed to move, and God, seeing that, changing his mind and letting them stay put. Ordering them, in fact, to stay put, so that they are not overcome by their fear, so that their faces don't melt off. We're so broken, down here, in this world, that we can't face God. We can hardly face ourselves, and our own small failures, and our own grand triumphs. To the extent that we are made in God's image, we hide from ourselves as we hide from God, fearful and overwhelmed by our own inexplicable existence. God would like us to come up the mountain when the ram's horn sounds, but when we don't, he grants dignity to our fear. Oh, says God, that's what I meant all along: so that you will be afraid and you will do as I say, because of your fear. I meant stay away, so you will not be destroyed. God says that, God is polite that way, but God still wishes we would seek God's face, still hopes we will all someday climb that mountain, and look upon him, and that our own faces will shine with all that glory, and that everything will turn out all right in the end. God believes in God's own fairy tale, God keeps faith with us, all of us, terrified and tortured down here. God is looking forward to the big party up on the mountain, and hopes we all come, even late, even without the right clothes, even bearing no gifts at all but our own strange and curious selves.