Here we are at the last reading in Sh’mot, the book of Exodus. And the storyteller in me wants to think about this book, just the second of the five books of Torah, as one complete story to be read in and of itself. Except that it ends right in the middle of the journey. Or does it? Now I realize that the story calls for wandering for 40 years. That the generation that lived in slavery had to pass away before entering the land. But…
Remember, at the end of Devarim, the last of the five books, the people still have not crossed over into the land. This seems significant to me when looking back at the story in Sh’mot.
The book begins with our ancestors living in Egypt as slaves to a temporal power, the Pharaoh. They are unwilling builders of the Egyptian temples and cities, making bricks from mud and straw. Building structures that cannot move. And when Exodus ends, they have freely entered into a relationship with the Divine, building a portable tabernacle made of the finest precious metals, jewels, woods and hides they have been able to muster.
I suspect there is a teaching here about where holiness is truly found, and it isn’t connected to place.
When the people completed the building of the tabernacle, Moses blessed them. The Midrash tells us that his blessing was: “May it be God’s will that the Divine Presence rests upon the work of your hands.”
Similarly at the end of Devarim Moses says to the people: “The thing is very close to you, in your mouth and your heart, to observe it”
In the Torah, both at the end of Sh’mot and at the end of Devarim, the people do not enter the land. They are told that the Divine Presence is within, and can be expressed in one’s actions and in one’s work in the world. This simple and radical teaching is often overlooked in our desire to connect myth with history (please do not make any assumptions about my political leanings about Israel from this statement — I am speaking entirely about our relationship with the Divine as it is revealed through the story).
On Shabbat, we look back on the week before. We rest. But it does not mean we do not reflect on our work in the world. The question to ask when we stop running (which means we catch up to the Holy One, who wasn’t going anywhere) is whether the work we have done expressed our relationship with the Divine, so that the Presence will rest upon it, and among us.
When we can answer that question clearly on an ongoing basis the tabernacle will follow us wherever we go. And the Promised Land will always be beneath our feet wherever we are. This is the experience of the unification of keter and malchut (and all the sefirot in between). This is the experience of the non-dual nature of peshat and sod. The recognition that Samsara and Nirvana are one: wherever you go, there god are!
Comments