Shabbos Parashas Terumah - 5779

Shabbos Parashas Terumah - 5779

Rabbi Hal Miller

They shall make a Sanctuary for Me so that I may dwell among them. [Shemos 25:8]

Why does God direct the Israelites to build Him a Sanctuary? Is He out in the cold that He needs

us to build a shelter for Him?

Abarbanel asks why God commanded us to build a sanctuary. He notes that God is not physical

and has no relationship to any given place. King Solomon asks [I Kings 8:27], "the heaven and

heaven of heavens cannot contain You, how much less this house that I built?" Abarbanel's

response is, "The Divine intention was to combat the idea that God had forsaken the earth, and

that His throne was in heavens and remote from mankind." Therefore, "He commanded them to

make a Sanctuary, as if to imply that He dwelt in their midst, that they should believe that God

lived in their midst and His Providence was with them."

Sefer HaChinnuch, in one of the longest essays he writes on any single mitzvah, holds the view

that this commandment has nothing to do with any physicality of God, rather that we must

prepare ourselves when we go to pray, to purify our thoughts and come clean before God.

Instead of "so that I may dwell among them", Onkelos translates it as, "Cause My Shechina to

dwell, rather than I will dwell." This gets away from the potential anthropomorphism.

But still we ask, why a Sanctuary?

Both Rav Hirsch and Onkelos explain "dwell among them" that God's intent is not the physical

house, rather refers to people's daily lives, that Israel will live in God's ways. His mitzvos are

what is actually dwelling among them.

Rav Chaim of Volozhin says that the real Temple referred to here is the personality of each

individual. The Divine Presence resides within us. The original creation of man involved a close

tie between man and the Divine, but it was lost when Adam and Chava made their mistake. Our

verse, commanding that we build the Sanctuary, was to restore that close relationship, in which

God will dwell.

In the story about the blind men and the elephant, each described the animal from a separate

vantage point, yet each was correct in his description. All of our commentators here are really

saying the same thing. In our day, we are still bound by this mitzvah, and the way to achieve it

is to improve ourselves as individuals.