Still Standing
Foundations and Children
Yesterday, a man drove a car into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Armed to the teeth, he came hell bent on destruction.
The security team stopped him. All 140 students in the early childhood center, the staff, and the teachers were safe.
As is always the case, with every act of violence brought to Jewish houses of worship. I have been sitting for hours now, trying to find the words.
This week’s Torah portion is Vayakhel-Pekudei, the concluding chapters of the book of Exodus. After all the drama of the golden calf, after the tablets broken and remade, after the long detour through human failure, the Israelites build the Mishkan. The portion opens with a single word: vayakhel, and he assembled. Moses gathers the entire community and says: here is what we are going to build together.
What follows is almost obsessive in its detail. Every beam, every curtain, every hook, and clasp and socket is listed. Every type of person brings something unique to theier life. Nobody is exempt from the project.
And at the very end of the book, when everything is assembled and in its place, the cloud descends. The Divine presence fills what the people built. The Torah’s message is almost unbearably plain: when we build together, something holy can happen.
A text I first learned decades ago often pops into my head across myriad moments of life. Eikhah Rabbah, a midrash on the book of Lamentations, begins with a commentary on Psalm 79. The psalm begins, jarringly, with the word mizmor, a song.
A psalm of Asaf: God, peoples have invaded Your inheritance.
The rabbis can’t let that go. The Temple is burning, the people are in exile, and Asaf is singing?
The midrash offers an answer through a parable.
A king builds a wedding canopy for his child. He decorates it, plasters it, and fills it with beauty. The child though goes astray. In his grief and fury, the king tears the canopy apart. And the child’s teacher picks up a flute and begins to play. Everyone is horrified. The king destroyed his child’s wedding house and you’re playing music?
The teacher answers: I am playing because the king directed his rage at the wood and the stones, not at his child.
The rabbis apply this to the Temple’s destruction.
The Holy One burned the building and not the people.
The Sanctuary was consumed so that Israel could survive. And that, the midrash says, is why Asaf sang.
Today a man tried to burn a building that was full of children but he did not succeed.
I don’t want to romanticize what happened. A security guard was hurt and hundreds of families were terrorized. The children who were in that building today will carry this. The teachers who hid them under desks will carry this.
And I also can’t stop thinking about vayakhel, that assembly by means of absorption. Every person brought something for the betterment of the collective.
The building absorbed the truck; the security team absorbed the danger; the first responders absorbed the chaos so the children didn’t have to. A security guard who, as Rabbi Jennifer Kaluzny put it, is “not Jewish” but who “absolutely celebrates his relationship with the Jewish community” was hit by the vehicle trying to protect it. That man is the flute player. He absorbed what was meant for the community.
And tonight, communities across the country are doing what Jewish communities have always done after something like this. They are assembling.
Vayakhel-Pekudei ends with the cloud filling the Mishkan, in spite of all the terrible events that occurred, the golden calf, the tablets shattering, and the death of community members. Nonetheless, the cloud came. And it rested in the very structure the people built with their hands.
The Eikhah Rabbah’s deepest teaching is not that destruction doesn’t hurt. It is that the destruction of a building is not the destruction of a people. Wood and stones can burn. The community that builds is harder to consume.
Today the building burned but the community is still here.
In all of our understandable angst, I wonder if one possible response we can muster is to assemble even in the face of uncertainty. Rav Itiel Gold, in his commentary on this portion from Yeshivat Har Etzion, notes something striking about what is missing from the text. When God originally commands the Mishkan in the book of Terumah, the verse reads: “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.” When Moses relays those same instructions to the people in Vayakhel, that phrase is gone. The guarantee has been quietly removed.
As Rav Gold writes:
The Mishkan is built in our parasha in a state of uncertainty whether or not God will in fact dwell in it. Moshe hopes that through the building of the Mishkan, the people will demonstrate to God that they have repaired the sin of the Golden Calf, and God will then agree to rest the Shekhina among them. But at the moment, unfortunately, this cannot be guaranteed.”
And then he draws the deeper lesson:
It is easy to put in effort when the result is clear and guaranteed. However, it is much harder to bother and invest when there is no promise of what will happen in the end.”
The people build anyway, without the promise, without knowing whether it will work. And at the very end of the book of Exodus, the cloud descends. The Shekhinah fills what they built. The guarantee they never received arrives anyway, on the other side of the work. May our work while living with that same uncertainty bring similar rewards.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend