Weekly Torah Reading, Terumah, March 1, 2025

Exodus 25:1 – 27:19

A New Garden

 

At first glance, there might have seemed no reason for God to instruct the Israelites about building the mishkan, Israel’s sanctuary-in-the-desert, as recounted in this week’s reading.

 

At this stage of things (that is, well before the episode of the spies in Numbers 13), the Israelites must have intended to stay in the wilderness for only a short while—a few weeks at most—before their entry into Canaan. What then, was the point of transmitting all the details of building the mishkan here, long before they were necessary?

 

In considering the matter, rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud apparently concluded that the building of the mishkan was actually 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 Genesis 3:8, so He must have been present right there.)

 

But after the pair ate from the forbidden tree, God put some distance between Himself and the two humans, staying slightly above ground level in the Garden of Eden. Then came Cain, Adam and Eve’s son. Cain murdered his brother Abel, thereby causing God to distance Himself still further from God.

 

The generations that followed were hardly better, until finally, after ten generations, God brought the Great Flood in the time of Noah in order to cleanse the earth of its sinful inhabitants. By then, God was far, far away, watching things 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” (Isaiah 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 to 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 of the Israelites, “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 none other than the mishkan. But why call that structure a garden? The mishkan was really just a tent, fashioned from ordinary materials and shaped by human hands.

 

In view of the foregoing, however, the mishkan 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 to be made by humans.

 

In fact, one might pronounce the words of that verse in the Song of Songs, “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, a “lifting up” (terumah, in this week’s reading) by human hands.

 

Shabbat shalom!