Tetzaveh: Elevating the Self

“You may begin, Rav Benizri.” “I’ll begin. Very well. Thank you. Good evening, dear friend.” “Good evening.” We are reaching the culmination of the creation of the world. The culmination of creation is this small sanctuary that man offers to G-d in exchange for the creation of his universe. In other words, everything hinges on man coming to feel the need to live with G-d in this spiritual intimacy, to the point where G-d’s wish can be fulfilled in this dwelling here below — the dwelling the Creator of the world desired from the very origin of creation. For without this descent into the world here below, into the world of reality, into the world of the tangible, the notion of G-d would have remained a pure idea, without any hold on the reality of the world; and it is not even certain that the notion of a Creator of the world would have been perceived by any creature whatsoever.

Now we ourselves have a deep desire to have a home of our own, to fulfill ourselves in our small universe, in our world, in our intimacy. And this spiritual intimacy to which everyone aspires — within the circle of family life as much as in the personal, private intimacy of each of us — is precisely what we raise to a far, far higher level, to a sublime level, when we achieve this intimacy with the Infinite, always busy refining the way we will furnish our inner life. You know that in the sanctuary man offers to the Eternal there is the table, the candelabrum, and also the library: the aron, the cabinet, the ark. Above this aron there is the image of a couple, a couple that remains attentive to the word of the Absolute as they gaze constantly at each other face to face, each one within the other. That is what could truly bring about the fulfillment of man and give G-d this serenity: that G-d be satisfied with His dwelling, satisfied with His creation, because it answers His deepest aspirations.

You know very well that we often nurture projects and then remain far on the margins of the projects we nurtured; we try to correct our aim, to correct mistakes, lapses and so on. But the goal is to raise oneself. So, just as there is a holiness in time, given to us through Shabbat, to which we respond by sanctifying the festivals — it is G-d who sanctified Shabbat, and it is we who sanctify the festivals — there is likewise a duty of holiness for man, of sanctifying the life of man. G-d has offered us the elements of this sanctification; it is up to us to bring it about.

But there is also this holiness in space. And this holiness in space is the dwelling of our life. Of course, everyone imagines this dwelling according to his own demands. One can be content with very little, or one can take pains over every detail so that this dwelling reflects our personality, our deepest intimacy. And at that level there are indeed several degrees, several stages. One can be content with a basic dwelling, or one can demand — at fixed intervals or by choice — to adapt the dwelling to our requirements, sometimes even to move house. But there is a spirit that drives us to build this sanctuary where the whole intimacy of our life will find expression.

That is the Mishkan (the Tabernacle); that is the ohel, the tent, that G-d chose within man and that man carries with him. So the Sanctuary is not, first and foremost, a place of sacrifice; it is not a place for shedding the sins we commit, the mistakes we have made, the lapses to make good. It is above all a makom — a makom, that is, a place of self-elevation. Indeed, when the Holy One, blessed be He, asks us to show a giving of ourselves, He speaks of terumah. Terumah is hitromemut, elevation. And in this elevation, what we give is not truly given away: it is what we keep for ourselves, what we have invested for ourselves.

That is our only real acquisition, because everything else is lost. And that is why the building of the Sanctuary speaks first of a gift of the heart, as the verse says: “from every man whose heart moves him, you shall take My offering” (Exodus 25:2). It does not say “you shall give your terumah,” but “you shall take” your gift. You will take your investment, you will benefit from your investment. But this intimacy — even though we would like it to be exclusive — we must know that we build it with the money we earn outside, and it comes from every direction: it may come from the Egyptian world, from Egyptian silver and gold, just as it may come from Persian culture or from Greek culture. All these elements in their proper place, all these peoples, can indeed contribute to the building of this sanctuary and of this intimacy with G-d.

We reject no one. Yes, there is one single exclusion. The only thing excluded is iron. You know that in Daniel’s dream there are four powers, which he sees in the form of a statue with a head of gold, a chest of silver, hips of bronze and feet of clay. What one could bring to the Temple, then, was the gold of Babylon, the silver of Persia, the copper of Greece — all that glitters is not gold — but steel, none at all. One could not even pass a sword or an axe over the stones to dress the materials of the Temple, because weapons were made of that material, whereas the Temple represented precisely everything that could embody serenity and the joy of living.

So iron, steel, had to be kept away from this construction. The feet of clay — the feet of clay are, as our Sages say, Rome: when a stone falls on them, the whole statue falls, and in Daniel’s dream the stone turns into a small mountain. And this small mountain is the answer to Mount Sinai. That is to say, it is the answer that man brings to the Torah — the Torah that was given through ten commandments which, of course, are shiv’im lashon, seventy languages — they can break apart into seventy languages, into seventy flames, including those of the nations. And after all the scraps, all the debris, all the scrap metal have been removed, and things have been presented in their purity, a meeting takes place between the contribution of humanity as a whole and that of the Jewish people in particular. And it is the meeting of all these elements together that makes up the answer of the Jewish people — and therefore of humanity — to G-d’s revelation to the world on Mount Sinai.

So there is always a movement of exchange between the Creator and the created. And that is why, when King Shlomo built the Sanctuary, he brought one hundred and fifty thousand workers from Lebanon. These were people who were strangers to the whole of Jewish tradition, to the whole of Jewish spirituality, yet they could take part in building this sanctuary without any problem. And the materials can be imported from anywhere, because there is no exclusivity. Just as creation is offered to the whole of humanity, the sanctuary that the Jewish people builds is not the exclusive place of divine service for the Jewish people: it belongs to all of humanity.

That is why a non-Jew could offer a burnt offering inside the Temple. The only sacrifice they could not offer was the shelamim (peace offering). The shelamim is a sacrifice that is shared. One portion goes on the altar, one portion is given to the kohen (priest), and one portion the owners of the offering eat within the precinct of the sacred. Imagine being able to eat before G-d, to share a meal in His presence! That is an idea the pagan world did not reach. As long as it has not integrated the will to sanctify matter and space, it will not be able to bring the shelamim, the sacrifice of peace with the Divine, this shared intimacy. So here is an important idea: belonging to the Jewish faith is not something that tears us away from the rest of the world, or from the world of matter as such, and projects us into the sphere of celestial ideas, into the world of ideas. We have no use for that. Jewish life is a life that loves to see the house one lives in, the home one inhabits, as a small sanctuary, where the table too is an object of sanctification, where the light, the menorah, burns constantly, where there is this aron in the intimacy of the Kodesh HaKodashim, the Holy of Holies. And of course this must be an impulse of the heart. One does not impose a faith.

One does not impose a divine service. […] Each as he feels it, each as he lives it. That is the ideal. Only there is a risk. What is the risk? That we fall back into certain fantasies that go beyond fiction and that sometimes even undermine the moral order. So there is a second parashah. After Terumah comes Tetzaveh. Tetzaveh is a command; it is an education. We cannot live, we cannot rely solely on the impulse of the heart; we must truly submit to clauses, to a discipline of law, to rigor. And of course, a person who is not capable of doing so by himself must be given the possibility of receiving an education, of having the means to do it and to get there.

So the Mishkan has two parashiyot. There is Parashat Terumah, which we read last week, and there is Parashat Tetzaveh, which we will read this week. In Parashat Terumah, the building of the Sanctuary is left in Moshe’s care. It is Moshe’s name that recurs constantly. Very well. But Moshe’s absence led the people to make the golden calf. That is to say, after G-d’s revelation to the world at Sinai, the people were at such a lofty level that they no longer wanted to hear of this world, and their attachment to G-d found expression in aspirations to the celestial spheres — as one can still see today.

Now one must beware of this spirituality that tears you away from the world here below and lets you be seduced by the world of the unknown. That is what leads to the golden calf, because when one wants to return to reality, what does one do? Instead of serving G-d, we serve recipes of spirituality, like cooking recipes. They become closed, finished circuits that turn back on themselves, in which there is no novelty, no elevation, no renewal — and that is not Judaism. Judaism is this: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, “in His goodness renews each day, continually, the work of creation,” renewing His creation every day, so it is up to us to review our spirituality every day, to enrich it with our experience, and to give it fresh momentum as we pass through the trials of life.

So what happens is this: Parashat Terumah, the parashah of the impulse of the heart, where there is indeed no separation between the word of G-d and the man who cleaves to it — that is Moshe. For him everything is spirit; everything is contained in the spiritual world he has absorbed. And indeed, his inclination is to remain forty days and forty nights on the mountain without eating or drinking. He is nourished simply by the law, by the joys of his discoveries, by the joys of this intimacy with the sublime. But at the end of these forty days, which are the limit of the viability of such a way of life, there comes the golden calf, and Moshe is forced to come down to save the people. And at that point, the one who takes command is no longer Moshe; the instructor of the people will become Aharon. In Parashat Tetzaveh, Moshe’s name does not appear. That is to say, in the passage from the conception of the Sanctuary to the stages of its construction, it is no longer Moshe. Moshe is the one who oversees, if you like, everything that is done, but the central figure is Aharon, the kohen.

Aharon is the one moved by love of the people, who seeks to bring them closer to Moshe’s path, to instruct this people that remained at the foot of Mount Sinai and could not absorb the whole teaching. And this time Aharon will become its guide, and the sons of Aharon will afterward inherit his priesthood, his teaching, the task of education, the duty to educate the people. So at that point one no longer lives by the impulse of the heart. No: what counts are the commandments concerning the building of the Sanctuary. The commandments concerning the Sanctuary are contained in the word Tetzaveh. Tetzaveh means to bind. Tetzaveh means to educate. We find it with Avraham: “that he may command his children and his household after him” (Genesis 18:19) — so that he may instruct his children after him.

And Parashat Tetzaveh opens another aspect of the Sanctuary. We said that at the beginning the Sanctuary was a desire to live this intimacy with the Absolute at every stage of our life, to be able to draw out of the everyday the elements of an ordinary, commonplace life, so to speak, and give it the seal of the sacred. So originally the idea of sacrifice was not part of the conception of the Sanctuary at all — the idea of an expiatory sacrifice. Indeed, we see the very first element of the Sanctuary in Parashat Yitro, immediately after the revelation, immediately after G-d’s revelation: He asks Moshe: You shall make Me an altar of stone, but you shall not pass iron over its stones to dress them. Yes — and you will avoid investing gold and silver; and you will avoid, when you go up to the altar, when you climb the steps of the altar, uncovering your nakedness.

That is to say, the Sanctuary must not truly become a way of exposing yourself before the whole public, of showing in some way how you assert yourself in relation to others and how you will lead your life. It was simply an altar, and it was not an altar meant for the atonement of sins. Indeed, in Parashat Terumah, which deals with all the elements needed for building the Sanctuary, there is only one element missing. Which one? The altar on which incense was offered: the mizbach haketoret, the altar of incense. Now the altar of incense was precisely the altar where one had, at all costs, to include an element that was impure, that had a foul smell, and that symbolized the sinner, embodied the sinner, embodied evil — yet which had at all costs to be integrated with the other elements of the whole. There were eleven ingredients, and if this element, the chelbenah (galbanum), was missing, the whole was invalid. It is there that the text speaks of atoning for the children of Israel, of atoning for the sins of the people. So that is the new dimension in Parashat Tetzaveh, and it is better suited to man as conditioned by laws, by clauses that come from outside, to which he must submit. And this man will not always measure up to the diligent observance of these laws; there will be lapses, there will be negligence. So there are ways of making up for this, of not sinking into despair and not abandoning what one has undertaken. For what is important in the spiritual life is not what one does, not the task one has finished — one never finishes it, sometimes for lack of time, sometimes for lack of means. What is important is the oseh, the doing, and not the ma’aseh, the finished deed. It is not the act one has finished, performed, accomplished. It is the determination with which one has done things. One has done a third, a quarter, a fifth — it does not matter.

The essential thing is that one has committed oneself, invested oneself in this spiritual undertaking. One has carried it out; it will bear fruit. The children will continue it, the disciples will continue it, the friends too. In short, that is what matters in the Sanctuary, and that is why in the Sanctuary there were three gifts. The first was “from every man whose heart moves him” — each man according to the impulses of his heart. Very well. But the second, which concerned the foundations of the Sanctuary, what are called the adanim, the sockets, required bringing the half-shekel. The rich could not give more and the poor could not give less. The half-shekel expressed this complementarity of man, this openness of man toward his neighbor — and toward G-d as well, because the neighbor par excellence is G-d. The re’a, the one closest to oneself, is the one who leads me to reach out toward the other, who is different from me.

Because if he is me, nothing changes. If I get along with a person with whom I share exactly all my tastes, everything I want, all my feelings, then I have merely sought another self to reinforce my own, to reinforce my ego. We are never two; we are always one. The re’a is the one who is different. He is the one with whom I must get along, the one who will complete me. And the one who is different from me in essence is my Creator; it is G-d. “Ve-ahavta le-re’acha kamocha” — “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18): this means loving your neighbor, loving G-d as you love yourself, loving what is different from you. That is where there is an identity of interpretation between love of one’s neighbor, strictly speaking, love of G-d, and love of one’s spouse.

Because the re’a, the one who is different from you, is the wife — by definition, is it not? In short: for the sockets, each person indeed had to give the half-shekel. But there was a third gift. The third gift is that of the soul; it is the gift for the sacrifices, that is, for the functioning of the Sanctuary. And this functioning of the sacrifices was likewise shared by the whole community. Here too there was a half-shekel. No one could say he had given more than another. In this building of the Sanctuary everyone stood on a footing of complete equality. So where was the inequality? It was in the menorah. The menorah had its branches representing the seven days of creation, representing the seven sciences that made up the sum of the knowledge of the world. But there were the six branches, three on one side and three on the other, whose lights were directed toward the central light, the light of Shabbat. That is to say, everything is oriented toward this axis of knowledge — the one that is constantly lit from the altar, and it is this one that lights the others; it is this science of Shabbat that kindles all the other sciences. That was the menorah. And in this week’s parashah, Tetzaveh, before we come to the garments of the Kohen Gadol (High Priest), “for glory and for splendor” (Exodus 28:2) — because a uniform is needed: a uniform for the rabbi, a uniform for the kohen.

Glory and splendor — it is not merely a uniform: each garment has a meaning. You know there were eight garments. The ordinary kohen, the kohen hedyot, had four garments; the Kohen Gadol had eight. But the service of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement for sins, was performed in four garments. We will come back to this in detail. What matters for the moment is to see that bringing the oil that was to keep the menorah burning is what opens the phase in which the Sanctuary functions. In the conception of the Sanctuary, it was “each shall give according to the impulse of his heart”; in the bringing of the oil, likewise: “ve-yikchu elecha shemen zayit zach” — “that they bring you pure olive oil” (Exodus 27:20). They will bring oil. Who will bring the oil?

It is said that the heads of the tribes brought the oil. These leaders had at first shown a certain arrogance toward the people when it came to collecting gifts for building the Sanctuary. They said: “We will let the people give; surely they will not manage to gather a sufficient sum for building the Sanctuary, and then we will make up the difference.” But it turned out that within two days of that appeal the people had shown that they had given more than was needed, and when the nesi’im, these princes, wanted to bring their contributions, there was nothing left for them; nothing remained, nothing more was needed. So the text removed a yod from their name. At that point they could bring only the precious stones that the kohen wore on his breastplate, through which he was to include the whole people of Israel in the atonement for their sins.

The Choshen HaMishpat was the breastplate of judgment. And there they learned their lesson: in the spiritual life there is no room for displaying contempt toward the people. Everyone could accomplish according to his measure — and even more than what a prince could bring. Still, a favor was left to them. These princes were chachamim; these princes were people steeped in great learning. They were not ordinary mortals; they were not people who had asserted themselves through their wealth, but through their knowledge. And so it was they who brought the shemen ha-mishchah, they who brought the anointing oil, they who brought the oil of the menorah for the inauguration of the Sanctuary — because what was important in the Sanctuary was the knowledge that emerged through the service that was performed.

The intention, the recognition of the service performed — the basis, the essence of knowledge — lay in the Tablets of the Law that were inside the Sanctuary, in the ark. But that was not the essential thing. What was essential was the interpretation of the Oral Law carried out by the people, by the men who had deepened this knowledge of the law and who were entrusted with it. Those entrusted with the protection and preservation of the Oral Law were the kohanim. And that is why it is the kohen who, with a sense of humility, so to speak, lights this menorah — which was nevertheless of human dimensions. He had only to stretch out his hand; but no, he had to climb a stepladder, three steps, in order to lean over and light the menorah.

It is in a state of humility that one could truly innovate within the law without stepping outside its limits. That is why the menorah was indeed the doorway: it stood at the entrance to the Holy of Holies. It was the menorah that embodied the people’s doorway into the Sanctuary, through the service performed in that Sanctuary.