Summary

Terumah (Exodus 25.1 – 27.19) talks about the building of the first sanctuary known in Hebrew as the Mishkan. The Mishkan is to be a mobile place for God in which the ark containing the tablets will be located and where, in the outer court yard, the priest will carry out the sacrifices.

Commentary by Rabbi Danny Rich, Chief Executive, Liberal Judaism

Historians consider it unlikely that a wandering group of recently freed slaves (of Hebrews and others) would have so quickly established such a sophisticated cultic system. This school suggests that the account of the construction of the Mishkan was written much later (in the Temple period) by priests and their supporters who wished to anchor their Temple institution in ancient Jewish history.

Although outside of the Bible we have little direct evidence of the first Temple, it is fair to assume that there were two Temples in Jerusalem. Following the occupation of Jerusalem (a former Jebusite city) by King David in c.1000 BCE, his successor and son, Solomon, appears to have built an impressive “house of God”. (See, for example, accounts in the Hebrew Biblical books of Kings and Chronicles. Little archaeological evidence of the First Temple has been found, but there are impressive remnants of its successor, the Second Temple, the construction of which was probably begun when the Jews returned from Babylonian exile to the Land of Israel under the leadership of Ezra the Scribe in the middle of the fifth century BCE.

Much of the archaeological remains are of the expanded Second Temple created by Herod, the Idumean, Roman appointed governor of the region in the first century CE. Herod was responsible for raising the level of what is now known as the Temple Mount, and the famous Western or Wailing Wall is, in fact, the outer curtain wall of the Mount rather than a Temple wall itself.

The religious institution which we, of course, know best is the synagogue. It used to be assumed that the synagogue must have been founded during the Babylonian exile (586-536 CE) on the ahistorical ground that once the Babylonians had sacked the First Temple in Jerusalem and brought the Jews to exile in Babylon in 586 BCE, they must have found an alternative place to meet for religious purposes. An article by Ellis Rivkin, the late professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew Union College in America, titled Ecclesiasticus and Non Appearance of the Synagogue, demonstrates in my view that the synagogue was not established until after the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. Modern scholarship suggests that the synagogue may well have been established after the Maccabean Wars (circa. 167-164 BC) when a growing urban, Jewish middle class, influenced by Greek ideas of democracy, began to question why they should fight and die for a faith which seemed to suffer from rigid central control by an hereditary class of priests, centred in one admittedly glorious building.

Concerning the Second Temple, rabbinic literature, including in particular the Mishnah, gives us quite a deal of detail about Temple practices including sacrifice, prayer, music, and who was doing what. This Second Temple came to an end when the Romans, under Vespasian and then Titus, razed to the ground the Temple and much of Jerusalem, and thereafter the Roman authorities forbade its rebuilding. It was eventually replaced, first with Roman buildings, and later by the two mosques which still stand on the Temple Mount today.

It would appear therefore that temple and synagogue co-existed for at least some 250 years (circa. 170 BCE – 70 CE). The Temple was a central body in which an hereditary class of priests had interpretive authority to decide what God wanted and what the Jewish people should do, and, in a technical sense, carried out sacrifices on behalf of the Jews who would watch but perhaps barely understood what was happening. The synagogue offered an alternative: a participative, democratic style of worship in both the traditional Hebrew and the local vernacular, the absence of animal sacrifices, and a system of leadership based on education and merit.

The traditional liturgy still prays for the restoration of the Temple as a precursor to the arrival of the Messiah. In its earliest years Liberal Judaism rejected the concept of a personal Messiah and the desirability of the restoration of the Temple. Liberal Judaism argues that the Temple is a glorious but past phase of Judaism and that the institution which supplanted it, the synagogue, is a finer institution for the purposes of meeting the religious, educational and social needs of the modern Jewish community and is a more effective means of affirming, in a metaphorical sense, the presence of God.

In a literal sense of course of the idea of God having a house in which S(He) dwells is an absurd one. It was a point well made by the Psalmist, other Jewish commentators and the Midrashist (in Mechilta to Exodus 17:6) who declared “Wherever you find a human footprint, there God is before you”.

The presence of God was a common theme for Hassidic story tellers: “Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk surprised a number of learned people who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of God’s glory?” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever we let God in.” (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters, Schocken Books, New York, 1961, p. 277).

May this week and this Shabbat give you plenty of opportunities to let God in.

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