Terumah 5768: The Eco-Temple

When we last left Moses, he was ascending Mount Sinai at the request of the people that he would be the exclusive representative of the people, and he would then teach the laws to them. Moses thus begins the Forty-day period of receiving the Torah. God starts with the design plan of the Mishkan, the portable temple that will be the center of Israelite practices until the time of Solomon. This week Moses receives the plans in rather interesting detail of the items found in the Mishkan, such as the ark and the altar, and ending with the Mishkan itself. The text starts:

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, that they bring me an offering; from every man that gives it willingly with his heart you shall take my offering. 3. And this is the offering which you shall take from them; gold, and silver, and bronze, 4. And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats’ hair, 5. And rams’ skins dyed red, and goats’ skins, and shittim wood, 6. Oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil, and for sweet incense, 7. Onyx stones, and stones to be set on the ephod, and on the breastplate. 8. And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. [Exodus 25:1-8]

Looking at that inventory of supplies, the list seems large. The questions arise immediately: How would people who were slaves mere months before find such stuff? The answer of course comes from an earlier passage:

35. And the people of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed from the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and garments; 36. And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent them such things as they required. And they carried away the wealth of the Egyptians. [Exodus 12:35]

The borrowed items from the Egyptians became the materials for the Mishkan. They did not acquire new stuff, but re-cycled old. This was so different than Solomon’s temple which stripped the cedars of Lebanon. The Mishkan was commanded by God. The idea for the temple was King David’s, who wanted a permanent location for the ark. God merely gave him permission.

What made me think of this was one rather minor candidate in the primary this week. For the last few weeks leading up to Super Tuesday I’ve been getting mail from candidates clogging my mailbox. One person running for a commissioner for the water reclamation district was particularly interesting. This is the public service which takes sewage and makes it safe to discharge into water supplies. In a media blitz for a minor job, she puts up billboards, ran radio ads and clogged the mail box with large postcards. She claimed to be an environmental candidate, and the Sierra Club photos of her helped play up that image. But going to my mail box day after day I decided I couldn’t vote for her.

Every day, I kept find the same thing in my mailbox from her. A big coated four color postcard claiming she was the candidate for the environment. As a guy who has made his own paper from consumer waste, I know very well four color heavy - stock coated postcards are the absolutely worst type of paper to recycle, and never starts off recycled. In her zeal to get elected she proved to me she didn’t care about the environment - -she didn’t use post consumer waste for the card stock. When I found out one of her big contributors was the big oil company BP, I was not surprised in the slightest.

It made me think about recycling, and of course the issue of using the gold of the Egyptians and turning it into the Gold of the Mishkan. Recycling is transformative. My own paper recycling actually turns old office documents into paper sculptures. In the biblical case, all the idolatrous amulets of the Egyptians were transformed into the gold layering of the Ark. This is not just a miracle of God, but a miracle of man, taking one thing and turning it into another.

Such transformations are part of life of course. Watching a snowstorm out my window, I think abut the frozen water crystals that probably evaporated from the Gulf of Mexico, froze in mid air over Chicago, and fell as snow. Eventually they will melt, run down the Illinois River, then the Mississippi to return to the Gulf.

Outside of nature is human thought. The concept that the Mishkan is a metaphor for human thought is certainly not my own, I’ve heard it used often. But how often in such a metaphor do we realize how much of our own Mishkan of the soul is also recycled. There is the stuff we learned from our parents, both facts and attitudes. There is the stuff we learned from our friend’s and from the world around us, in social interactions, social pressure, advertising, the media and the rest of everyday life. And the there is the stuff we intentionally learned in school. Like the gold, acacia wood, gems, white, blue and purple cloth, we recycle ideas into our own Mishkan.

Moses was told by God to take stuff collected from the Egyptians and turn it into a mobile place for God to interface with Israel. It was David’s dream and Solomon’s task to recycle the Mishkan into the Temple. After the destruction of the first temple, it was Ezra’s and Nehemiah and their generation’s task to recycle what was left of the first temple into a second one. After the destruction of the second Temple, it was Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples’ task to recycle the idea of the temple into prayer and home practices. Each had a task to transform what came before into something new, yet that retained a core idea of the original wood, cloth and gold in the wilderness of Sinai so long ago. The core, the covenant of God and Israel always remains.

So it is with a scholar who departs from the study of the Torah and engages in other pursuits, yet even after many years have elapsed when he wishes to return [to its study] he is not abashed, because he says: ‘I am returning to the heritage of my ancestors.’ [Exodus Rabbah XXXIII:7]

There are times in our lives where we have to be away from our core, and pursue other things; we recycle what we know to fit that occasion. Deep within us however there is some core that we can return to. It is the Holy of Holies within us. It is the place where the Shechinah dwells in each of us. I would call that my Nefesh, the life force, the soul. Often we need to bury it for social convention or economic need. In those cases, transmute its outside wall and layers into something that may not reflect what it really is. But it is there.

Paradoxically one of the most and at the same time least instructive pieces of advice anyone can give another is these two words: Be yourself. One needs to ask the question: which self? Our core Nefesh or the recycled stuff that others expect us to be? Depending on the situation we may choose one or the other. Yet even when we change to fit the situation, we remember who we are. From Mishkan to Temple to Talmud, that outside can change, but that core will always be the same.

May you find your Nefesh, may you be your Nefesh.