As I was assembling the Dvar-Torah volunteer schedule a few weeks ago with a little introduction for each parsha, the one for parashat Terumah came from Liel Leibovitz's 5772 (2011) commentary at Dvar Tzedek. Wikipedia just says this parsha relates "...God's instructions to [the Israelites to] make the Tabernacle (Mishkan)and its furnishings." My initial reaction was, here's a people who went from semi-nomadic herding and farming to being construction workers and standard ancient urban/agrarian trades in Misr/Mitzra'im, then back to living in tents and succot for a couple of generations, yet now they're spoze to become architects?? Leibovitch began to make it make sense to me:
...[the instructions for building the Mishkan embody] a valuable lesson, [that insisting on a particular] structure as holy sends a powerful message: housing—whether Divine or human—should never be taken lightly. Home is imbued with holiness. A home is a basic human right... [while] many of us moderns have come to think of a home as the ultimate ...biggest and shiniest... commodity, ...people in many other parts of the world are [utterly] deprived of shelter...
THEN Navy Vet Terp's
Shabat Shekalim diary and discussion last week explained what the taxes collected at the Mishkan were for and
that gave
Terumah a sharp focus
:...
In organized communities, home means more than shelter from the elements. For one thing, it also means the community's social, material, political and economic resources are obligated to provide basic infrastructure and security for all its members (the infrastructure mentioned was eye-opening about ancient tech). In today's terms, it means clean water, sanitation, healthful food-prep facilities, safe place to sleep, protection from weather, conservation of household resources, power for lighting and communication by which to study, participate in exchange of ideas, participate in economy. (A while ago I read of villages in the Third World powering night-time educational computers from daytime solar collectors they themselves build ...and sell to others nearby to use as well! I wish I could find the link again..) These two parshas combined say the literal provision of shelter and infrastructure and survival resources is a community's obligation to create, a concrete recognition of and ministering to the needs of people living side by side by side. People create community when they build together: families, civic relationship, social safety net, instilling in youngsters that this is what we do, whether we're nomadic or stay-put: We Build.
Now Terumah looks less like a conspicuous consumption plan-cum-commandment to emulate architectural masters (double-entendre intended) in Misr/Mitzraim, among others: it starts to look more like a theoretical example teaching how very complex, detailed, demanding, intricate and diverse in materials, talents, skills, auxiliary industries, people, etc, is genuinely effective construction of the human and material community/village that it takes to raise all us children (no matter how old we get, each of us is child of those who came before) and keep raising us up.
Most fundamentally, it teaches that We Build. We build relationships, traditions, ideas, tools, remedies. It teaches that it takes practiced skills to build. It teaches How To Build What We Hadn't Imagined Before ...and How To Imagine What We Didn't Before. And it teaches to Build Strong & Beautiful With/From Diverse 'Materials' Together. We learn that we have built and always will build, by many names, what we humanly need most basically: families, households, neighborhoods, clans, tribes, towns, nations, countries, religions, cultures, ideologies, congregations, organizations, associations, fellowships, blogs... every form of community our species has come up with.
Being human —To Engineer is Human ( BBC documentary on youtube )— sometimes we build not so well. Sometimes the most fundamental need about "home" that humans share with many other species is not included: protection from developing over-aggressive drives, protection from aggressive drives of our own species.
How do we make the building mistakes to fail at that? Well, sometimes, to meet a need, we build one thing to substitute for another better thing we can't build because we don't have the material or human resources or maybe we can't build it because it really hasn't been invented/imagined yet. Maybe we don't have the necessary perspective, or the necessary involvement, or the necessary distance, or the necessary skill to recognize there's some building needs to be done that hasn't been done yet or maybe even ever. By habit, or training, or bias, or limited vision, we don't see needs that exist now that perhaps didn't before — illnesses of individual or community that books of history and philosophy don't explain how to heal, that traditions are obscure about and myths complicate further. Maybe we can't build because the necessary resources are concentrated and controlled by and for just a few alone. Maybe material resources become exhausted to a trickle and a crumb and a shard, too little to go around for all who are in need. We hope (and pray) then that substitutes will do.
Even substitutes for relationship. So, sometimes congregations substitute for communities, friendships substitute for broken neighborhoods, religions substitute for unreachable self-actual meaningfulness, armies substitute for heritage and culture, ideologies substitute for independent thought, competition substitutes for fellowship, authority substitutes for cooperation and morality and law, violence and devastation substitute for passion and commitment and love, possession and control substitute for that most basic building-block of human civilization - family.
Sometimes the substitutes are as good or better, because we are a very innovative and creative species. But sometimes substitutes do not suffice far less excel, badly don't, especially if we mistake the need that actually exists for something else it seems to resemble, so when we do something to meet the needs we think we see, it doesn't work, and desperate chaos spins outlaw. ...as if badly designed substitutes are so "chemically" alien than what evolution has shaped us to be capable of that they function as toxic addictions that warp innocents and opportunists alike beyond capacity for any homeostasis at all far less recovery. The vicious cycle of degeneration becomes a constant, self-fueled all-engulfing tornado flailing in every direction, rabid for the family and community and future that it has destroyed ability and materials to build.
We live in an era in which any attempt to discern the heart of even a modest philosophical concept is implicitly faced with the question, "why does this matter at all"? I've tried to graph out the idea of home/family from a sort of medical perspective of mechanism (compassionate, I hope) that I don't find being used anywhere within my own range of asking and listening, trusting that the intent to be useful is relevant and meaningful without inciting controversy.
Shabat shalom.