Dear Friends,
“Hear O Israel, ADONAI is our God, ADONAI is ONE!” God is one. Some translate the Shema as God is alone.
Have you ever considered it from God’s point of view? How difficult it is to be God, all alone, the only One?!
After all, who among us likes to be all alone? We are inherently social beings, we humans. We live with one another. We live in family systems. We even pray within groupings of ten – minyans.
But God is all alone.
That may explain the unusual verse in this week’s Torah portion. We read, “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,”(Exodus 25:8)
Yes, what follows are a couple hundred verses describing the architectural instructions for Moses to build the desert tabernacle, which eventuated into the Temples in Jerusalem. Minutiae of every type detail how to construct the poles for the walls, the sockets for carrying the Ark, the cloths and the hinges. But, most vitally, the instructions indicate how to build a place wherein God might dwell among us.
God must have been lonely, for God sought a resting place with us, the chosen people. Of course, God assumed that we would be good neighbors – that we would observe the commandments and treat one another and our neighbors with sacred respect.
Earlier in Genesis we read that it is not good for “man to be alone.” Hence, Genesis mythology describes how God fabricated a woman from the rib of the male, that there would be a human partner for living and for procreating. Being alone is not the ideal for humans, any more than it is for God.
However, we no longer live together around that single abode which God commanded to be built. Rather, we live in disparate places. But, can we still fulfill the command to establish a place where “I may dwell among them?” Surely, we all can no longer fit under one roof. But perhaps if we extrapolate that roof to entail the heavens, then maybe we could be in that conjoint sanctuary. Then God could dwell among us.
To do so, however, would require a radical re-understanding of “let them make…” It would require us to see everyone – those who look like us and those who look differently, those who sound like us and those who speak otherwise, those who act like us and those who behave with other norms, and so on, to be included in the biggest tent of them all: them!
God saw us all as them. Shouldn’t we do so, as well?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Doug Kohn
“Hear O Israel, ADONAI is our God, ADONAI is ONE!” God is one. Some translate the Shema as God is alone.
Have you ever considered it from God’s point of view? How difficult it is to be God, all alone, the only One?!
After all, who among us likes to be all alone? We are inherently social beings, we humans. We live with one another. We live in family systems. We even pray within groupings of ten – minyans.
But God is all alone.
That may explain the unusual verse in this week’s Torah portion. We read, “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,”(Exodus 25:8)
Yes, what follows are a couple hundred verses describing the architectural instructions for Moses to build the desert tabernacle, which eventuated into the Temples in Jerusalem. Minutiae of every type detail how to construct the poles for the walls, the sockets for carrying the Ark, the cloths and the hinges. But, most vitally, the instructions indicate how to build a place wherein God might dwell among us.
God must have been lonely, for God sought a resting place with us, the chosen people. Of course, God assumed that we would be good neighbors – that we would observe the commandments and treat one another and our neighbors with sacred respect.
Earlier in Genesis we read that it is not good for “man to be alone.” Hence, Genesis mythology describes how God fabricated a woman from the rib of the male, that there would be a human partner for living and for procreating. Being alone is not the ideal for humans, any more than it is for God.
However, we no longer live together around that single abode which God commanded to be built. Rather, we live in disparate places. But, can we still fulfill the command to establish a place where “I may dwell among them?” Surely, we all can no longer fit under one roof. But perhaps if we extrapolate that roof to entail the heavens, then maybe we could be in that conjoint sanctuary. Then God could dwell among us.
To do so, however, would require a radical re-understanding of “let them make…” It would require us to see everyone – those who look like us and those who look differently, those who sound like us and those who speak otherwise, those who act like us and those who behave with other norms, and so on, to be included in the biggest tent of them all: them!
God saw us all as them. Shouldn’t we do so, as well?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Doug Kohn
