Moses convoked the entire community of the Israelites and said to them, "These are the things that Adonai has commanded you to do: For six days you will do your work, but on the seventh day you will have the holiness of a complete Shabbat day of rest for Adonai. Anyone who does work on it shall be put to death. Do not kindle fire in any of your settlements on the day of Shabbat." (Exodus 35:1-3)

Traditionally, the mention of Shabbat here, before the completion of the Mikshkan, is interpreted as a sign of the precedence of Shabbat over the building of the Mishkan. Based on this, the ancient rabbis derived the thirty-nine categories of work prohibited on Shabbat. Any work that could be connected to a large building project—from planting crops to carrying objects from one place to another—is forbidden on Shabbat because, as we learn from this week's portion, Shabbat takes precedence over the building the Mishkan.

There is another lesson, though, that we might take from the strange and repetitious appearance of the Shabbat restrictions at the beginning of this week's portion. It is not just that the commandment of Shabbat rest overrides the commandment to build, it is also that the very idea of rest should take precedence over the impetus to work.

Sigmund Freud wrote that human beings require two things to remain human: love and work. We need to love and to be loved. We need to have something to do that gives us a feeling that we are useful and have a purpose. Torah, though, suggests one more thing that we need—rest. We need to have time to sit and reflect on our lives. We need a time when our purpose is not to do, but to consider what all of that work means. This is what Shabbat is.

The odd thing, though, is that our tradition teaches that Shabbat rest actually comes before work. Before we even begin to work, we must take the time to reflect on our labors. It may not make logical sense—why take a break before the work is begun?—but it does make spiritual sense. 

Before we lift the hammer, plow the field, or start typing at the keyboard, we need to know what that work means. We need to understand why it matters. We need to reflect on how our struggles in life fit into the larger puzzle of a universe that is a mystery to us.

It can seem like human beings are the only animals that do not understand instinctively the need for rest. Every other creature appears to balance work and rest—like breathing in and out. We are the only animals who are in any danger of intentionally working ourselves to death. And we do it all the time.

When I see the way that people's work takes over their lives in our society, I worry. I see so many people who put work first—their number one priority. If our work life takes such a priority over every other aspect of our humanity, how can we be sure that we will ever rest long enough or deeply enough to ask the question, "What we are working for?"

Shabbat needs to come first—not just in time, and not just in law—but in our hearts. Shabbat, this beautiful gift of deep and spiritual rest, needs to be the touchstone of our lives. Shabbat is not just a break that allows us to catch our breath, it is the first of all of our holy days that allows us to find holiness in every other day.


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Letting Go

Rabbi Nachum Twerski of Chernobyl, the 18th century Chasidic master known as the Me'or Eynayim, compared the Mishkan to a person's soul, another "dwelling place" for God. Like the Mishkan, there is something pure about the human soul that makes it a fitting place for God to dwell. But our souls do not stay pure in this world. Once we are born, our souls become sullied by our imperfections and failings. How then will God dwell within us?

To answer this, the Me'or Eynayim looks to a famous passage from the Talmud that says that we learned the entire Torah in the womb, only to have it slapped out of us in the moment before we were born:

A light burns above the head of an embryo in the womb and it looks and sees from one end of the world to the other… There is no time in which a person enjoys greater happiness than in those days, for it is said, “O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me” (Job 29:2).… The embryo is taught all the Torah from beginning to end… As soon as it sees the light, an angel approaches, slaps it on its mouth and causes it to forget all the Torah completely. (Babylonian Talmud, Niddah 30b)

The Me'or Eynayim observes from this passage that we had the merit to learn the Torah while we were in the womb because, at that time, we were a proper dwelling-place for God, pure and perfect. As we were exposed to the world beyond the womb, though, we had to forget. The angel who slapped us on the lips anticipated the reality of this world. Purity is not so easily achieved in a world of shadows and uncertainty. 

Why did God bother to make the world this way? Why make us with the purity needed to be a vessel for Torah only to take it away from us? Me'or Eynayim answers that it was so we would have the free will to learn Torah painstakingly for ourselves. It was so that we could choose to heed the Torah and earn reward, or ignore the Torah and deserve punishment. Torah cannot work in this world if it is just planted in our brains to direct us like an automaton. We have to choose—and choosing contains the possibility of failing. 

But, in this case, failure is not all bad. Failure offers with it the possibility of repentance, t'shuvah. We do t'shuvah to bring God and Torah back into us, just as it was when we were in the womb. Ironically, we can be even better here than we were in the womb—better in this world of imperfection because here we get to choose Torah. 

We are, like the Mishkan, created to be dwelling places for God. However, being a God-vessel is not easy and it is not automatic for beings that have to contend with the realities of this world. We have to work for it. We have to strive for it. We have to fail and apologize and forgive ourselves over and over again. 

Yet, we do have within ourselves a memory of a time when God and Torah were as easy for us as receiving breath and sustenance through the umbilical cord. We can vaguely recollect the time when God was right there with us, hovering over the Mishkah, a light over our heads, so that we can remember what it is we are striving and struggling to remember.  

When we make our souls into a dwelling place for God, we are actually choosing the choice that was once all we knew.


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You are What You Choose to Be
Pekudei: A Love Letter

Earlier this week, I posted a commentary on the Torah portion, Vayakhel (which, it is worth noticing, means, "He gathered the community"). I wrote about how when people come together creatively, the result can be a miraculous unity in which disparate parts join to form a whole that appears to be the "work of one hand."

Surely, you have experienced this. Most people, I think, have had the experience of a collaboration in which no one person can claim responsibility for a creation that is far greater than any one contribution.

That is the kind of experience that can make Jewish communal life truly joyful. It is the experience of being part of something larger than oneself and of seeing  oneself deeply interconnected with others that can make a Jewish community feel like a holy place.

What are the specific examples of this experience that we can promote in our communities to make contemporary Judaism more joyful? I have three examples below and I'm curious to hear about your own.

1) Group Singing. It is no coincidence that almost every religious tradition in the world has some practice of group singing. There is something hard-wired in the human psyche that makes the experience of hearing ones own voice amid the voices of others feel deeply calming, joyful and fulfilling. It is as if, in the moment of singing together, we lose ourselves in the ocean of sound we make with a community. This has to be part of the reason why volunteer choirs often have such a passionate following. But group singing should not be limited to the people who rehearse and perform together. Anything that promotes more communal singing during services—for example, choosing musical settings that are easy to learn, using repetitive chants, taking time to teach a new melody, handing out rhythm instruments—all enhance the joy that people can experience in worship. Also, it is important to remind the congregation that the quality of their vocal skills is irrelevant; when everyone sings, there is no "audience" and every voice, no matter what it sounds like, adds to the joy.

2) Chavruta Study. Study partners working in pairs is an ancient Jewish practice. The partners share a text and argue its points to each other. The curious thing about studying in chavruta (or chavrusa) is that new insights about the text arise between the partners that, it often seems, would not have occurred if each of the students had studied alone. Traditional chavruta study can be expanded into groups of threes, fours or fives. Also, it need not be limited to the study of traditional texts, but can be expanded to the study of modern commentaries, poetry and other texts. When it works well, people find that part of what makes chavruta study rich and rewarding is learning about another person through a text, and learning a text through learning about another person. It is an experience of lifting yourself out of your own being and learning to see with the eyes of another.

3) Social Action Projects. We don't usually think about how we personally benefit from working on a social action project that is designed to help others. However, when we send relief to disaster victims, collect and distribute food for the hungry, or build homes for the homeless, we are fulfilling a basic need within ourselves, too. Human beings need to feel useful. There have been many studies that show that people prefer to work for nothing on a project that is useful than to receive pay for work that is useless. When we make ourselves useful to others in a project that we do in collaboration with others, the experience of connection and fulfillment is doubly fulfilling. In every social action project, include lots of opportunities for volunteers to get to know each other, to talk about the meaning of what they are doing, and to connect it to Jewish teaching and values.

What have been your best experiences of joyful community building? Please share your ideas about gathering people together to discover that they form a sacred whole that is greater than the sum of their individual contributions.

“Lazybones, go look at the ants. Study their ways and become wise. Without leaders, officers, or rulers, they prepare their stores in the summer, gather their food at harvest time" (Proverbs 6:6).

An ant can spend an entire day, or many days, doing nothing but moving grains of sand from point A to point B. Sometimes, an ant will do this without even noticing that another ant, simultaneously, is moving the same grains from point B back to point A. 

A colony of ants, though, can do remarkable things. Leafcutter ants, for example, plant, feed and harvest a fungus that provides for all their food. They make adjustments in the care of the fungus in response to factors like temperature and their nutritional needs. Other ant species can build tunnels underground starting from two distant points that meet, incredibly, at exactly the right place in the middle.

Taken individually, ants are mindless. Taken as a community, they are miraculous. In a way, this is what this week's Torah portion is about.

Parashat Vayakhel begins with Moses instructing the Israelites about Shabbat: "On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Shabbat of complete rest..." Moses gathers the people to remind them (they've heard this before) about how to observe the sanctity of the seventh day. "...You shall kindle no fire throughout your settlements on Shabbat" (Exodus 35:1-3).

Then, abruptly, the subject changes. In the very next verse, Moses instructs the Israelites about the materials they should donate for the construction of the Mishkan, the tabernacle for God they will carry through the wilderness. Moses tells them to bring metals, yarns, skins, stones, and incense. 

What does Shabbat have to do with building a portable temple?

The Isbitzer Rebbe (whom I quoted in one of last week's post) states that the connection between Shabbat and the building of the Mishkan has to do with bringing people together. In the collection of his teachings, Mei HaShiloach, he says, "The building of the Mishkan brought all of Israel together in their hearts, with none raising his or herself over a fellow worker." This is like Shabbat, he says, because Shabbat is all about connecting ourselves to something greater than our own individuality. 

The Isbitzer explains that when the Israelites would look at the things they themselves had done to build the Mishkan—attaching an animal skin to a frame, beating a golden fastening ring into shape, or carving a tent peg—they would be suitably impressed by the careful and loving work of their own hands. However, it was only when the Israelites saw the Mishkan assembled as a whole—how the frames all fit together and how the skins and tapestries came to form a unity—that they realized how each piece belonged to the others. 

The Israelites had the simultaneous experience of great humility for the smallness of their own individual contribution and great pride in what they had done together. Each saw that this particular sum was composed of more than their individual human parts. In allowing themselves to come together in holiness, holiness itself provided the crowning glory for their labors.

The Isbitzer says, "The Shechinah [God's indwelling presence] would not have been able to dwell within Israel if even one tent peg had been missing. Therefore, none could think him or herself as higher than any fellow worker—not even the one who made the Ark over the one who made the tent pegs for the courtyard."

When we seek a spiritual life, we strive to discover personal meaning. We want to know the purpose for which we were made and we want to know how we can reach toward God. We sometimes forget, though, that living a spiritual life is not, so to speak, an individual sport. We are most able to see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves when we do it as part of a community. We see the path toward our own individual life's meaning when we see it reflected in the eyes of others.

As you go through this week of Vayakhel, take some time to consider how community plays a role in your spiritual development. When you are feeling that you are lost in your life's  journey toward meaning and purpose, when you are lost in seeking God's presence in your life, do you allow connection to community to guide you back? Do you (perhaps privately and quietly within yourself) believe that you have to "go it alone" to find spirituality? Just think about those tent pegs.

Jews are not ants, but we can learn something from them. As human beings, we need to be more self-reflective than an ant is capable of being. Ants don't have egos, but we need to allow our ego to assert itself within us from time to time. Yet, we can follow the ants in learning to let go of the illusion that we are isolated beings, independent from each other. Like the ants, we can see our own smallness in contrast with the miracle of being part of something larger than ourselves.