You shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him.
- Exodus 25:2

Overlay it with pure gold - overlay it inside and out...
- Exodus 25:11


I have been reading lately about the concepts of giving and receiving love. Which is to say that, in a healthy, communicative relationship, one does not only give love, but needs to be able to receive it as well. And often, when we think that the barrier between another person and ourselves is that the other person "doesn't love us," in fact it often is the case that it is we ourselves - because of our own hurts, fears and rejection due to former wounding - that are actively, unconsciously, blocking that love from being received by us. And so we don't "feel" loved, even though we are loved.

The only way to solve this problem is to actively, consciously, focus on receiving gifts. And I think that is an important lesson that is given in our Torah portion this week. Moses is instructed to accept gifts for God "from every person whose heart so moves him." So, for example, not from the people who Moses thinks are better or more able to give gifts than other people. Not from the people who Moses thinks are serious, or authentically giving a gift. But from all of the people who are "so moved" to give a gift. And it is not the gift itself, although instructions are given as to what kind of gifts the people are meant to give in order to build the tabernacle and the ark, but the important thing is that the person has a desire to give the gift. And the second important thing is that the gift is received.

In this parsha, Moses receives the gifts from all the givers, and he receives them on behalf of God, but also on behalf of all of us. In this parsha, I think we can understand, on an intrinsic level, that we are like Moses, and like Moses, we have permission to receive the gifts that all people - and God - wants to give us. Whether or not we think that person is sincere, and whether or not we actually believe ourselves to be worthy.

We already know that Moses does not think he is worthy. He refused to even speak God's words to Pharoah, because he was self-conscious of a speech impediment. So we know that Moses is not perfect. And even though for the most part, he does what God asks him to do, even he has limitations, and they are physical and emotional limitations that are part of his body. They are part of who he is, and part of his relationship with God. But even so, he has permission from God to "accept all the gifts" of the people for the tabernacle.

And so we, too, have permission to "accept all the gifts" that those in our lives wish to give us, for the sake of God. We can accept them "for God," if we don't believe we can accept them for ourselves, and it is with those gifts, that we build the tabernacle and the ark to carry the tablets of the covenant.

The second thing we are told is that, when building the ark, we are to "overlay it with pure gold" both inside and out.

Certainly this was meant literally, but when I read this, I read it as a metaphor for the body. Because the body is a wondrous, marvelous tabernacle. As I study the parts of human anatomy in preparation to work with people and their bodies as a bodywork practitioner, I am constantly amazed and astounded at the beauty and complexity of the architecture of the human form. And it is this architecture that we carry around with us and move with and in every moment of our lives, to the point where we almost always take it for granted. We often mistreat our bodies, we feel embarrassed by them. Sometimes we ignore them completely. But they are part of us, they are us, and they are not "us" at the same time.

But when I say that I see this image as a metaphor for the body, I mean that, like the ark, we are constructed of precious materials "both inside and out." And I mean that, in a body, the muscles are what allow a person or an animal to move. Gold is beautiful to look at, and because of that, it is like the muscle of an economy. It allows people to move, eat, and enjoy life.

When you think of a body, you think of the muscles you can see, on the outside. Perhaps you flex your arm and witness a bulging bicep. Or perhaps you are aware that the muscles of your neck and back are sore from holding your head up, or from stress. Maybe you've gone running and your calf muscles feel sore. These muscles are precious material, and they are overlaid on the acacia wood of our bone structure.

But there are muscles inside you that you cannot see, and they are just as important. Inside your neck, under the round bone of your skull you have suboccipital muscles that hold your head up and allow it to move and rotate. Inside your leg, you have the iliopsoas muscles, which begin in the inner thigh, at the hip joint, and connect all the way up inside the torso, on the inner spine, just under the diaphram, which is the source of our breath. The movement of the diaphram creates the tzimtzum into which air rushes to fill the space that is created in our lungs, and the muscle returns to push air out again.

And then there are my two favorite hidden muscles: The subscapular muscles, between your shoulder blade and your rib cage. And the iliacus, which connects to the iliopsoas, and is a swath of muscle tissue lining the inside of the pelvic girdle, those two great wings that support and carry in them the weight of all that is precious - all of those inner organs that are both delicate and strong, and which function continually to keep us alive for as long as we are here.

Those wings, to me, are reminiscent of the Cherubim (Keruvim) that are to be placed at either end of the lid of the ark.

The keruvim shall have their wings spread out above, shielding the cover with their wings. They shall confront each other, the faces of the keruvim being turned toward the cover... There I will meet with you. And I will impart to you - from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on top of the ark of the pact - all that I will command you...
- Exodus 25:19-22

And so it is from the space between, where we confront each other, where we face each other, that God speaks. And it is also from within.

Because the body is a vessel not only for our internal organs, but for our spirit, and for what we know as "living Torah." We all carry within ourselves the "living pact" that we don't just do with God - it is something that we are.

And sometimes it is from that space, from between the wings, that God speaks. Because your body is a vessel of your pact with God. It is your pact with God. It is a gift and a vessel for God. And it is often through our bodies, from that place, between even the two halves of ourselves that face each other, that God speaks to us.

Shabbat shalom

A burning bush in the Wilderness

This past Shabbat's parsha was Sh'mot, the first book of Exodus. In services this week, we had a guest preacher give the drash. And he really was a preacher, from the Church across the street. He had something very powerful to say about how African Americans can relate readily to the story of the Exodus, because the memory of slavery is still a fresh one in many of their minds.

He had a lot of other interesting things to say, too. One comment had to do with the burning bush. He drew attention to that, and to the wilderness as a place in which to meet God - where God meets us, in fact, and speaks to us. And He uses signs to grab our attention. In this case, it was a bush, consumed by fire, but not being burned.

Here is the text from my copy of the JPS Tanakh:

An Angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, "I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn't the bush burn up?" When HaShem saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am."

And once I read the text more closely, I got a lot more out of it. For one thing, at the beginning of the section, it doesn't say that God is there - it says "An Angel of the LORD appeared." But we know that "Angel" means messenger. So in this case, the "messenger" is the blazing fire. This is like God's handwriting on the world. Or God sending a text message by way of his wireless, languageless device - the Universe. Or maybe, this wasn't the text just yet, but rather the beep, buzz or ring tone that lets you know you have one.

The thing is, with cell phones, pagers, emails or anything, you have the option to answer or not. You can ignore it. Save it for later. Maybe you're just too busy right now. You don't want to be bothered. But Moses says, Hey, what's this?

I love Torah - you have this ancient text, supposedly about people who have little in common with us, in terms of their daily lives, and yet, they're just people. This is basically how any of us would respond. Like rubberneckers on a highway. Whoa, what happened here? Only here is Moses, out in the wilderness, with no one to corroborate what he is seeing. He is the only one who can describe this vision, and who knows what he was really looking at? Was it a bush? Was it really on fire? Was it something else? Or does it even matter? Because, whatever it was, it got the message across.

So first, you have the bush. And presumably, this bush was not right in front of Moses, because he said, "I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight." So Moses shifted his gaze. He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and he went out of his way to look. He didn't know that God was calling to him. In that moment, he was simply aware of his surroundings, and willing to give something a second look that didn't seem to jive with his usual understanding of the world, i.e. that when bushes are filled with fire, they normally burn up.

And then it says, "When God saw that Moses had turned aside, he called to him out of the bush." And that may seem like a throwaway line. It's what you expect. Moses sees the burning bush, and the next thing you know, God is calling to him out of it. Simple right? But that line is loaded. It says God saw. So what that line is really giving us is a glimpse into the Mind of God. And it also gives us a little kernel of doubt. God sees everything, right? So if Moses had NOT turned to look at the bush, He would have seen that, too. So God was sitting on pins and needles for a while there.

Here is this guy, Moses, out in the wilderness with a flock of sheep, and God wants to call to him and make him the liberator of the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt. So God has to figure out a way of getting Moses' attention, and when he does this, by way of the burning bush (you could make an argument for a better way, but maybe that's all God had at the time) He can't even be sure if Moses is going to look at it, never mind respond. God sends the text, and the beep goes off, but what if Moses doesn't hear it? So there is God, watching to see what Moses does. When he sees that Moses has turned to look at the burning bush, then He speaks to him out of it. Not before he gets Moses' attention. He doesn't speak to get his attention. He only does it after the attention is given.

He says, "Moses! Moses!" And he answers, "Here I am!"

Not, What do you want? Not, Who are you? Just, Here I am.

And I'm thinking, what does this say to me? What does this mean in my life, right now? The pastor, who gave the drash, made a good point that when we get a call from God, or from our neighbors, we should pay attention, and think about what it means to answer, and what it means to Act. I really appreciated him saying that, because action is important to me. It's one of the things I love about Judaism - that it's not a religion of passively sitting by and imbibing philosophy, knowledge or belief, but one, ultimately, of action, and preferably action that benefits an entire community, and/or one's own life and of those close to us.

But I also wondered, and thought about later, what are the burning bushes in my life? What are those things, items, phenomena, dancing in the periphery of my vision that I should be turning my gaze toward and saying, Hey, what's this? I'm going to check this out. What are those things that aren't happening the way they are supposed to that are demanding a closer look? And if I don't look, maybe I am going to miss an important message. If Moses hadn't looked at that burning bush, the entire story of Exodus wouldn't have happened. Or at least Moses wouldn't have been a part of it. Maybe Moses wasn't the first one. Maybe God had tried to reach dozens of other men, or even women, and all of them had been too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to the message God was sending.

So if we don't pay attention to the messages in our own lives - to those burning bushes, those outliers of experience that make us say, Hey, hang on a minute, that's not quite right - we're missing a big piece of the action. We're missing the opportunity to not only have a conversation with God, but to liberate ourselves and possibly many others from the negative forces that are enslaving them.

Shavuah tov.