This week's Torah reading - Va-Yakheil

Exodus Chapter 37 begins:
“Then Betzalel made the coffer, of acacia wood, two cubits and a half its length, a cubit and a half its width, and a cubit and a half its height.”

This is the famous Ark of the Covenant, and it, like all the other parts of the Mishkan, our portable Tabernacle, or Temple in a Tent, described in this week’s Torah reading, Va-Yakheil, received incredibly thorough attention to detail.

In the Torah, we are given detailed instructions on buildings, even as we receive far vaguer directions in other areas. We are told about circumcision and its importance, and the details are left to us to work out.

Perhaps we see these differences because our ancestors understood that some things can be controlled, and others cannot. We can describe exactly how to build something, or how to make an offering, and yet the ritual for bringing a child into the world must always be relevant to the baby’s parents and their community. Relevance tends to change over time.

What a piece of wisdom!

When it comes to something that requires details that make a difference - we lay out all the details with exacting precision.

When it comes to the best ways to create family and community, we understand that people are infinitely varied, and our applications of important principles will change over times and circumstances.

Have a great week!

Source of image: http://www.mnartists.org/work.do?rid=303034

This Week's Torah Reading - Parashat Va-eira

Stubborn Pharaoh, stiff-necked Israelites - our time as slaves in Egypt ended over the objections of our oppressor and even the Israelites resisted liberation by Moses. Moses was a stranger who emerged from the desert speaking the words of our God who had abandoned us to oppression for centuries.

This week’s Torah reading, Parashat Va-eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35), describes all of this drama. The Israelites ignore Moses:
“But they did not listen to Moses, out of shortness of spirit and out of hard servitude.” (Exodus 6:9)
Between God hardening Pharaoh’s heart and Pharaoh being stubborn on his own, the story of the Exodus from Egypt seems focused on basic failures to communicate.

No one escapes these difficulties - to work together is to often face difficulties in understanding and persuading.

I believe that often we lack sympathy because we hesitate to share each other’s stories. When we speak from the heart, we can hear more profoundly. When our hearts are hardened, just as Pharaoh’s was, no amount of persuasion and well-reasoned argument can sway us.

As we approach this new calendar year of 2014, let us aim to share from the stories which form our true fabric, and pause to listen for those stories from each other.

A little bit of silence and a long walk

A piece of commentary from last week…

This week we read the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, I know, again.

Still, it may contain the most important long walk in the entire Torah, if not in our entire tradition.

God sends Abraham on a long walk to bind and, in Abraham’s mind, sacrifice Isaac. Here’s the text from Genesis, Chapter 22, just to refresh our memories:

Gen. 22:2 He said: Pray take your son, your only-one, whom you love, Yitzhak, and go-you-forth to the land of Moriyya/Seeing, and offer him up there as an offering-up upon one of the mountains that I will tell you of.

Gen. 22:3 Avraham started-early in the morning, he saddled his donkey, he took his two serving-lads with him and Yitzhak his son, he split wood for the offering-up and arose and went to the place that God had told him of.

Gen. 22:4 On the third day Avraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.

Rabbi David Kimchi remarked on this, nearly 700 years ago, that God could have asked Abraham to do this immediately. God doesn’t. God says go on a walk. Think about it, in Rabbi Kimchi’s words, so that he would have three days’ time to build insight for himself on the matter.

That seems pretty reasonable. Most of us take at least that long to make a decision of importance. From relationships, to large purchases, from job changes, to college applications – we spend a lot of time reflecting on what to do in those moments of our lives. The wisdom from the Torah here reminds us that we do well when we do this, especially if we give ourselves the time to take a walk.

On that walk we may find the moments to reflect and to listen. We have to listen to the quieter voices around us and within us. In the words of Hannah Senesh, “the rush of the waters, the crash of the heavens,” – we are often too caught up in the noise of the everyday to even notice the thundering of the world beyond our walls.

Our prayers on Shabbat offer us moments to take an inner walk, to find our ways within. These moments of silence that we enter together every week, every time we offer t’fillah, can be that walk. They can be the time to travel deeper, to build upon our insights, to construct new frames of wisdom.

May the silence we find together allow us to walk towards a meaningful Shabbat.

Let us take a few longer moments of silence to deepen the walk into our selves.