Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts. . . And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair; tanned ram skins, dolphin skins, and acacia wood. Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. . . They shall make an ark of acacia wood, two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high.
This week’s Torah
portion, Terumah, opens with God’s request that the Israelites offer as
gifts the fine materials that will be required to construct the mishkan—the
elaborate portable sanctuary that they will carry with them through the desert
over the next forty years. This turns
out to be the most successful building campaign in Jewish history: the people
respond with such generosity that Moses actually has to tell them to stop
bringing more donations!
But how does a nation of
newly liberated slaves, wandering in the midst of the desert, come to possess
such fine materials? Our commentators
note that most of these resources are reparations gifted to the Israelites by
their former Egyptian taskmasters as a kind of guilt offering.
This makes sense for the
precious metals and fine fabrics. But
what about the wood? The design for the mishkan
will require large beams. Where do the
Israelites find such materials in the middle of the desert?
Midrash Tanchuma
offers a fascinating answer to this question:
Where did the wood
beams come from? Jacob planted them at
the time he descended to Egypt. He told
his children: “You will ultimately be redeemed from this place, and the Holy
One of Blessing will say to you: ‘Make Me a sanctuary.’ Therefore, go plant
trees now, so that when God commands you to build this sanctuary, beams will be
available.” They arose and planted as he
had commanded them to do.
The historicity of this
story is dubious at best, but it teaches an important lesson for our time. The midrash presents Jacob as a kind of
prophet of sustainability. The wood that
the Israelites use to construct a home for the Divine Presence was planted by
their ancestors centuries earlier.
The Talmud echoes this
wisdom. It recounts that Alexander the Great asked the Jewish sages of his
time: “Who is truly worthy of being called wise?” They replied: Those who see and anticipate the
consequences of their behavior (Tamid 32a).
Our challenge is to
follow this example. Our world is dearly
in need of the wisdom that Jacob embodies: the ability to recognize the impact
of our actions on coming generations, and plan accordingly. Like our patriarch, and our sages, we must
learn to constantly ask ourselves: Are we building a culture of
sustainability? Do our choices secure a
positive future for children, grandchildren and beyond? These questions
should animate how we eat, how we travel, how we power our homes and
habitations and so much more. To fail to
ask them—and act accordingly—is to derogate our responsibility.
We are all building a
house for the Holy One, every day and every hour. Let us build conscientiously.
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