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March 29, 2025 - 29 Adar 5785 Parashat Pekudei - Inner Space
Dear Friends, This weekend marks the end of the March Mega Food Drive and I would like to thank everyone who participated. We collected more non-perishable food and toiletries items than in previous years, so please take pride in knowing that we are helping more people this year than ever before. Yasher Koach (more power to you)! Next Shabbat morning, we will have a very special celebration. Harry Speiser, our senior-most member, who has not been able to join us for services since before Covid, is turning another milestone birthday. I won’t say which one, but it is several more than 100. To celebrate Harry’s birthday, in place of my traditional sermon, I will sit down with Harry for a Torah-side chat that we are calling “100+ Years of Wisdom.” After the service, there will be a special Kiddush in Harry’s honor. It will be a unique opportunity to hear the thoughts and perspectives of someone who has lived through so much history, so please be sure to join us. Passover is just two weeks away, but the deadline to RSVP for the community Seder on the second night is Thursday. The Seder should be fun, festive, and traditional, but we need to tell the caterer how many people will be attending, so please send in your reservation form and payment as soon as possible. If you have any questions about preparing your home for Passover, please ask me. Essentially, one could say that the quest of religion is to establish sacred time and sacred space. Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh, and all of our holidays and commemorations are all about designating a holy time within the mundanity. Our sanctuaries, our houses of worship, and, hopefully, our homes are spaces we've designated as holy. As we are about to close out the book of Sh'mot, in Parashat Pekudei, the Israelites are putting the finishing touches on the Mishkan, the most sacred of spaces our people had ever constructed. Back in Ki Tissa, in chapter 30, God commands Moses to take a census of the people - not by counting their heads, but by collecting a half-Shekel silver coin from each person. Eight chapters later, we finally discover what happened to all that silver. "The silver of those of the community who were recorded came to 100 talents and 1,775 Shekels." For what purpose was the silver used in the construction of the Mishkan? For the altar? For some part of the Ark? Surely, it must be for a ritual object that singlehandedly connotes holiness, right? Wrong. (Leslie Nielsen in "Airplane" might have added, "And don't call me Shirley.") "The 100 talents of silver were for casting the sockets of the sanctuary and the sockets for the curtain, 100 sockets to the 100 talents, a talent a socket. And of the 1,775 Shekels he made hooks for the posts, overlay for their tops, and bands around them." Rabbi Tali Adler of Hadar brought this to my attention in one of a series of her wonderful Divrei Torah. Her take is that this is God's response to the Israelites' fashioning of the golden calf in order to represent and memorialize a human being, specifically Moses, assuming he was gone forever. For me, though, there is an even more simple brilliance in what is done with the silver. Rather than be melted down and forged into an instrument of the Mishkan, the gifts of all the people become the actual structure of the Mishkan itself. Their contributions become the pieces that, quite literally, hold the Mishkan up and together. They are the skeleton and foundation, the space itself rather than any object within it. In a world where we hear so much about safe spaces and their importance, we learn from the silver gifts of the Israelites to be creators of sacred places, fashioners of physical and figurative space - for each of us, all of us, to be our best and most authentic selves. When that happens, when each of us feels a sense of belonging, it is then that the Mishkan serves its best and highest purpose, and when God truly dwells within it. Chazak Chazak, V'nitchazeik! By making space for each other, may we be strong for and strengthen one another. Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Joshua Strom
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