“Lifted Up”
Trying to understand a word by examining its origins can be risky; guided by wishful thinking, the procedure often results in misinterpretation. So I hope I am not falling into this trap in thinking about the Hebrew word that serves as the name of this week’s reading, terumah. The reading starts off with God telling Moses to “take a terumah for Me… gold, silver, and bronze, blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine linen”—and so on and so forth through the whole inventory of materials. All these items—presumably among the things that the Israelites got from their Egyptian neighbors on the eve of the exodus—are to be offered for the construction of the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites are to build for their time in the wilderness on their way to Canaan. This is what God goes on to say to Moses: “And let them make a sanctuary for Me, so that I may dwell in their midst.”
The root of this word, r-u-m, means “to be high, rise up,” and a terumah is thus something that is lifted up. It is regularly used for agricultural products that are “lifted up,” set apart as sacred offerings that God awards to the kohanim (Num 18:28). These offerings are said to be taken from the rest of the produce, and the same act of taking seems to be reflected in God’s commandment here that the Israelites “take a terumah for Me.” One might wonder: shouldn’t God have told the Israelites to “give Me a terumah”? But since terumah in general is taken, separated off from a greater quantity, so too with these things that the Israelites are to give for the construction of the mishkan. They too are to be taken, “lifted up” from whatever is available, and offered to God. This lifting up results in a change of status, from the ordinary to the sacred.
Which seems to be the whole point here. The very sanctuary that the Israelites constructed in the wilderness was itself one big offering, its materials “lifted up” and made sacred to God. Once that initial act was completed, then the regular, daily offerings could take place.
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Of course, there was no real necessity for a mishkan. At this stage of things (before the sin of the spies in Numbers 13), the Israelites were presumably going to be in the wilderness for only a short while before their entry into Canaan. During that time, God could have continued to dwell on Mount Sinai and then moved to Mount Zion without any need of a mishkan along the way. Or else He could have followed the wandering Israelites from within a cloud or some other feature of the natural (or supernatural) world, accepting their offerings from within such a dwelling. There is thus some significance in the fact that the mishkan was to be built by human hands, “Let them make a sanctuary for Me so that I may dwell in their midst.”
In considering the matter, the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud depicted the building of the mishkan as the last step in a kind of great circle. They pointed out that when God created the first human beings, He put them in the Garden of Eden, where He Himself dwelled. (As the rabbis pointed out, Adam and Eve are said to have heard “the sound of the Lord God walking about in the midst of the Garden” in Gen. 3:8, so He must have been right there.)
But after the pair ate from the forbidden tree, God put some distance between Himself and the human beings and hovered at some distance from the garden floor. Then came Cain, Adam and Eve’s son; after he murdered his brother Abel, God further distanced himself from humanity and went up still higher. The generations that followed were hardly better, until finally, after ten generations, God had to bring the Great Flood in the time of Noah in order to cleanse the earth of its sinful inhabitants. By then, He was far, far away, watching from a great distance above the earth.
Just at that point, however, a new sort of human being appeared: Abraham, “the one who loved God” (Isa. 41:8) and who was prepared to follow Him at all costs. Abraham was followed by his son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob, both likewise devoted to God. Jacob’s son Joseph was a model of virtue, “Joseph the righteous.” As these figures appeared one after another, according a famous midrash, God began to descend little by little, until He was once again just above the earth’s surface. It was then that He said, “Let them make Me a mishkan so that I may dwell in their midst.”
The rabbis associated this great return with a particular verse in the Song of Songs: “I have come into My garden, My sister, My bride.” The bride, of course, represents the people of Israel, and the “garden” in question is no other than the mishkan. But why call it a garden? The mishkan was a tent, fashioned by human hands. In view of the foregoing, however, it was indeed like the Garden of Eden; it was a place where God might again dwell in the midst of humanity, just as He had done in the time of Adam and Eve. In this sense, the building of the mishkan was indeed a kind of return to what had once been—but different, since this garden was made by humans. In fact, one might pronounce the words of that verse, “I have come into My garden, My sister, My bride,” slightly differently, not aḥoti kallah (“My sister, My bride”) but aḥoti killah (“which My sister—the people of Israel—has completed”). If so, this reading would stress (albeit with some grammatical leniency) that the second garden, unlike the first, was made possible through human agency, “lifted up” by human hands and offered to God.