How many of you here this evening remember your first calculator? When you got it, didn’t you think that it was the world just couldn’t get any better?
I remember my family’s first calculator. It was a five function Texas Instruments machine with red numbers, nothing quite as sophisticated as liquid crystal displays, but rather little light emitting diodes. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide and, miracle of miracles, could also find the square root. It was marvelous. And it only took about 3 seconds to multiply two 5 digit numbers together. I remember my father paying $119 for this technological marvel the sophistication of which, I was convinced, could never be exceeded. For those of us who remember those early days of digital electronics, we thought that technology had reached its epitome.
Of course, that was not the case. In fact, for a lot less than $119 you can walk into any K-mart and buy a 350 function calculator with buttons and functions on it that hardly any of us will ever use, let alone understand! There seems to be no stopping what technology can accomplish. Our children will never understand what it was like. I think that that is the phrase that our parents uttered when they got their first black and white TV set and what we said when we got our first computers. And God only knows what our kids will remember. For they are living in a world where computers were always around, where the Cold War never existed, where Vietnam means nothing to them, and for the younger children, where the Gulf War is a non-event. It means that we are living in a time when preschoolers today can wire a television, VCR and Sony PlayStation, but may not know who to tie their shoelaces. When Middle-schoolers can help their parents navigate Windows, when their parents were only asked by their parents to was the windows!
Now, I share this little discourse with you not to remind ourselves how old we are getting or how dated some of the things that were news to us mean nothing to our children. Technology has made them so savvy that, unless you are in the know, the vocabulary is foreign. Rather I share this technology insight with you to show you how much our children have lapped us. Like a runner who has run so fast that we are seeing the back of his shirt for the second time in the race, so too, our children have lapped us, or will do so very shortly, in knowledge, information, and technological savvy. While we may have a generation gap, I think what we see more today is a “generation lap.”
But being lapped by the next generation is not a bad thing. In fact, as Jews, we have been lapping the previous generations and we see the beginnings of that in tonight’s parasha.
What we read describes the beginnings of the Tabernacle which was the entire set-up of the tents and the Ark of the Covenant and the copper bowls and the altars for the sacrifices. It was new invention for the nascent Jewish people and this new thing would accompany them from this moment forward to the time they entered into the Land of Israel forty years from then.
But the question is “why bother to build a Tabernacle?” This is where the Jews began lapping the previous generation. You see, the Tabernacle was built immediately after the Revelation at Sinai where, tradition says, the Ten Commandments were given and where some of the subsequent commandments dealing with property and people were recorded. At Sinai there was an awe and a fear of God and an awareness of the sanctity of the place. The typical Jew hardly needed to be reminded of the holiness of the place.
It is just like today when people climb up the traditional mountain called Jebel Musa, the Mountain of Moses, purported to be the actual Mt. Sinai. They get there at sunrise and blow a shofar on top of the mountain and try to recreate the sense of awe that those early Jews felt.
But what happened when it was time to move on from Sinai? Sure after the appearance of God at Sinai, it’s like Yom Kippur every day. But when they begin their travels through the desert, holding on to that feeling is much more difficult. So, in order to capture that feeling of God’s Presence it made sense to build a Tabernacle. Since, according to tradition, the Tabernacle was build by Moses and Aaron with stuff donated by the people all following the very literal blueprint provided for by God, then this was not just the thing around which the camp was built. It was a little bit of Sinai that came along for the trip. All the same characters were there and all the same symbolism. Even God’s own fingerprints, in the form of the Ten Commandments inscribed on the living rock cut from Sinai itself would infuse awe and holiness no matter how far from Sinai they traveled.
And in later centuries, when Ark and the Tabernacle disappeared or were destroyed by Israel’s enemies, once more, the previous generation of Jews was lapped by the new generation with a new form of worship. The Holy Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon, repaired by Cyrus and enlarged by Herod was a brand new idea in Israel. It was something that Abraham and his children never imagine and something Moses could never envision. But it served exactly the same purpose as Sinai and as the first Tabernacle. It helped make the people aware that God was near.
But today we don’t have the Mishkon in the desert and the we don’t have the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. So what are we supposed to do?
There are those Jews who think that we should try to reconstruct the Ark (or finding the original one would be even better.) Such an thing would be a religious coup! Or so they think. Actually, finding the Ark would be more of an interesting archeological event than a religious event. In fact, trying to reestablish the Tabernacle as the expression of Jewish spirituality would be an utter waste of time. It’s meaning to the 21st Century Jew is very different than the Jew of the 10th Century BCE. Judaism has evolved prayer and worship and the service of the Tabernacle was a lapping of what happened at Sinai but would be several major steps backward if we somehow tried to make that the only expression of Jewish worship.
So much for the Tabernacle. .But what about the Temple? There are, as you know some groups of Jews who want to rebuild the Temple. That, they say, would be a sure sign of the Messianic age and that, they believe, would recapture the sense of awe and wonder and spiritual fulfillment that the Jewish people felt at Sinai.
But, once again, building the Temple would be a colossal waste of time. First of all, it would mean destroying the Al-Aksa mosque and the Dome of the Rock which are the second and third holiest mosques in the Islamic world. I don’t know about you, but the thought of angering 750 million Moslems is not my idea of good Public Relations!
And then there is the more practical matter. Who among us wants to sacrifice animals as an expression of our spirituality? Again, rebuilding the Temple, even if you could assuage the 750 million Moslems, would hardly speak to the 21st Century Jew, with perhaps a few exception just like the Temple lapped the Tabernacle, the Rabbis and their invention of the synagogue lapped the Temple.
The rabbis taught a lesson that we still subscribe to to this day. They taught that the important thing was not so much the building or some other external place which could focus our mind on the holy. Rather it was heart and the mind that needed to be filled with the Holy. And that was the sole reason for the Tabernacle and the Temple–filling the person with a sense of the holy. Everything else was meant to add beauty to that task.
Apparently even Jews need occasional reminding that holiness comes not from without but from within. I learned this the other day when I went to work out at the JCC. There I was, minding my own business, when one of the employees was being friendly and greeted me by saying, “Good morning rabbi.”
I returned the “Good morning” greeting.
A woman who was standing there, who was neither part of the conversation nor was someone I had even seen her before, looked at me and said, “Rabbi? You’re a rabbi?”
And before I could even tell her “Yes,” she said very accusingly, “Where is your kippah?”
I suppose I should have been ready for that since she sounded pretty angry. But, nu? That’s one of the requirements to be a rabbi? Someone who is supposed to wear a kippah all the time? Well, I thought of an answer that I would have loved to give but was really not in the mood to debate or explain the foundations of Jewish reform nor to even suggest that the idea for the kippah was neither a Jewish law nor even a Jewish invention, and so on. But, still, I really, really wanted to say, “I think God cares more about what’s in my head, than what’s on my head!”
Being Jewish has always been an exercise about knowing that God is present. In the Torah portion we read it says, “Bring gifts so that I may dwell among them.” The purpose of the Tabernacle was to symbolize the presence of the Holy. That was the purpose of the Temple. The development of Jewish law was the next stage. And many Jews still find law and custom and tradition to bring them a sense of the holy.
But we must continue the search. We must lap and pass what no longer works for us, whether it be a custom that has lost its meaning or a law that seemed to prevent God’s presence rather than invite it. It means that we must move beyond the structures of the past if we find them to be ineffective so that we may honestly feel the words of the Torah that “God dwells among us.” It means creating new liturgy, new prayers, new songs, making up new traditions and creating new services all intended to do what Jews have always done: write the invitation for God to dwell among us. To stay trapped in the 18th Century or worse, the 1st Century is to be living with things that may be dead and not even knowing it.
There is a true story of a 78-year-old man who took two months to notice that his roommate was dead. He told the investigating detective that the man was very stubborn. He though his roommate was mad at him so he simply wouldn’t answer him.
We simply can not hope to sense the holy if are too stubborn to accept that only way to sense the Presence of God is by doing what our parents or grandparents did. Sometimes we just keep insisting that the past is the only way to go and we just fail to see that we are getting nowhere.
In South Carolina, some time ago, the county Department of Social Services sent this letter to a certain Philip Fleming:
Dear Sir:
Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992, because we received notice that you passed away.
May God bless you.
You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.
Indeed, some younger Jews feel that Judaism has nothing to offer because that is the myth they learn and the letters of invitation they get from the Jewish community are addressed to people that, in the minds of these young people, are long dead. But there is hope.
Our young people are beginning to lap us Jewishly and we should be thrilled about it. More and more young Jewish families are joining synagogues that are a far cry from the distant-rabbi-on-the-bima speaking as if he was Moses on Mt. Sinai. More young Jews are rediscovering and making meaning out of tradition with a 21st Century mind that combines the ancient with the new. Jewish Day Schools are more popular now than at any other time in American history. And new types of religious services are popping up all over the place. All this because the next generation wants to sense God among them and, instead of drinking the same water from the same wells as their parents, they are drinking the same water out of wells that they dug themselves.
To paraphrase the verse we read this Shabbat, being Jewish has a lot to do about building sanctuaries in the desert so that God may dwell among us. But the desert of today is the desert of the soul that wants God to dwell within but finds the old ways do not speak to her.
As a Jewish community, it is up to us to build new sanctuaries and new tabernacles and to encourage other members of our community to do the same. Let us be sure that new ideas that build community are never thwarted just because they seem alien. And let us be sure that new ways of worship—even if they are firmly grounded in tradition and ancient Jewish custom — are encouraged with love and are given our support.
In this way, we will be fulfilling the Torah’s command to “build a sanctuary so that I, God, may dwell within.” Sure, in time, we may be lapped, but how wonderful it will be to know that it was because of what we did that others are able to sense God in their generation as we have sought to in ours. May God bless their, and our, endeavors.
From <https://americanrabbi.com/so-that-i-may-dwell-among-you-by-cy-stanway/>
