Photo: A billboard showing Israeli hostages including Aviva Siegel’s husband Keith Siegel, second from the left and second from the bottom. January 14, 2024. Photo by Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student
With Parashat T’rumah, the high drama of the Book of Sh’mot, Exodus, comes to a screeching halt. We’ve had the Burning Bush, the Ten Plagues, the exodus itself, the parting of the Sea of Reeds, the arrivial at Sinai and the giving of the Decalogue, God’s Ten Words… and this week, and for the next couple of weeks, we have a lot about cubits and and copper and, improbably, dolphin skins.
These are the chapters about building the Tabernacle, or the Tent of Meeting, and all its accoutrements.
Searching for meaning in these lists of building materials and measurements, we could start with the name of the parasha itself: T’rumah, Gifts.
Our ancestors who are building the Tabernacle are now free people, not slaves to Pharaoh. And so God does not COMMAND the Children of Israel to bring building materials; God INVITES gifts “from every person whose heart is so moved.”
We could look at how this project will help forge our ancestors into a people, as Denise L Eger writes in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary: “The people’s participation in the making of the Tabernacle will unify the nation… It will elevate the seemingly mundane work of construction into a sacred vocation.”
Or we could zero in on the verse which gives the reason for these gifts and this construction project, Exodus 25:8: “And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”
One short verse that slides by in an instant between lapis lazuli and acacia wood, but which contains so much meaning – it tells us why God wants this Tabernacle built, wants it built to such detailed instructions that we will spend three Shabbats in a row hearing about it.
Let’s look a little deeper at two interesting word choices in this short sentence.
The first is DWELL – God says God will DWELL among the people. The Hebrew verb here is shachan, rather than yeshev – the word the Torah uses, for example, when Abraham settles in Beer Sheva after the Binding of Isaac.
Shachan, by contrast, is related to two other words – MISHKAN, the Tabernacle itself, and SHEKHINA, a feminine name for God, the Divine Presence, who is often depicted as dwelling within us.
And indeed the 19th century rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel, known as Malbim, picks up on the wording in this verse which says exactly that: “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them” – not “that I may dwell IN IT” – God is not saying that God will dwell in the Tabernacle itself, but that building the Tabernacle will allow God to dwell within the Children of Israel – within us.
What does that mean? What can it mean for God, the Shekhina, the feminine Divine Presence, to dwell within us?
If we keep our eyes and our ears and our hearts open, we can see what it means.
And I saw it recently in Aviva Siegel.
Aviva Siegel, a grandmother of five, was 62 years old when she and her husband Keith were taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7.
Thankfully, Siegel – the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor – was held for only – only – 51 days, and was set free in the first round of hostage releases and ceasefire at the end of 2023.
Since then she has spoken frequently about what it was like to be held by Hamas in Gaza.
“Hostages were chained, tortured, starved, beaten up into pieces. I saw that in front of my eyes. That’s what they did to us,” she has said.
She was among the first to confirm in public what many feared, that young female hostages were being sexually humiliated and abused by their captors.
She has described being held with three other women, younger women, and being told by their captors that she could not touch them, hold them, hug them, even speak to them when they were brought back after being abused. But, she said, their captors could not stop her from looking them in the faces and “hugging them with my eyes.”
She had been separated from Keith in captivity but demanded to see him before she was released – and there is clearly something very powerful about Aviva Siegel, because her captors bowed to the will of this starved, unwashed, psychologically tortured 62 year old woman, and they let her see her husband.
“I bent down to him and I said that I’m going to Israel and he must be strong for me and I will be strong for him,” she told him. She thought – she had been told – he would be released the next day. He was held for another 14 months, but he is home in Israel now, reunited with Aviva and the son they assumed had been killed on October 7.
In an interview with Israeli news anchor Yonit Levy for Unholy: Two Jews on the News, Levy’s podcast with Jonathan Freedland, released the day Keith was released, Aviva Siegel talked about how she feels about the people of Gaza now.
“When I used to think about the children that I saw walking around there in the streets by themselves, or carrying water or thinking about mothers in Gaza having babies in tents, it broke my heart. And everybody around me used to say, but how come you are feeling sorry for them? And I used to tell them, they are not going to take ME away from me. I am a person that feels, and I feel for other people, and I want good for the good people. And even though I was treated by Hamas like I was, they are not going to take that away from me.
“There’s people that are bad and mean but there are lots and lots and lots of good people.
And most people are good. And most people want good for everybody. I know that there are lots of people in the world that don’t think like me. But I can only be myself and I want good for everybody.”
This, I believe, is what it sounds like for the Shekhina to dwell inside a person. And Aviva Siegel’s words – her message – her voice – they are T’rumah. They are a gift.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.