Parashat Terumah (Exodus 25:1–27:19)
The First Commandment
This week we are reading Parashat Terumah, and in fact that's what I wanted to talk about this week: the fact that we're reading Parashat Terumah. Parashat Terumah extends from the beginning of Exodus 25 all the way through the middle of Exodus 27, and when I say “we're” reading it what I mean is that on the Jewish calendar this is the week in which those 2½ chapters are read in synagogues.
On Monday and Thursday mornings, even last Saturday afternoon if you were at the afternoon prayers, you heard a little bit of it. On Monday and Thursday mornings and the previous Saturday afternoon you read what's the traditionally the rishon aliyah, the first of the seven readings that the weekly section is divided into for Sabbath morning. On Saturday morning, of course, you read the entire section. During the week, people read the current section of the Torah and attempt to learn something about it; that’s the purpose of this weekly column as well.
It’s true that not every synagogue has a reading of the entire portion. There are lots of synagogues, at least in America, where only one-third of it is read: either the beginning third, the middle third, or the end third. Then you continue each year with the next one-third in sequence. After three years you've read the entire portion, and in the fourth year you go back to the beginning. I see that 5783 puts us in the first year of the triennial calendar right now.
Still other synagogues are going to read even a much smaller section of the Torah, perhaps just nine or ten verses. But whatever they read is going to come from Exod 25:1-27:19. I’ve never been in a synagogue where the Torah reading was not from the portion of the week.
From time to time there’s an apparent discrepancy that actually proves this rule. On the Diaspora Jewish calendar, festival days are doubled. This year, the second day of Shavuot falls on a Saturday, so Diaspora synagogues will use the holiday reading. Meanwhile, synagogues in Israel, and Diaspora synagogues that use the Israeli calendar, will move on with the regular Torah reading. Then the two groups will stay out of sync until July 1st, when the Diaspora synagogues will combine two portions to catch up.
That’s not what I'm talking about this week; that is the asterisk. What I'm talking about is the fact that all of the Jews are reading the same part of the Torah at the same time. That’s a great thing, but it's also a little bit of a not good thing. Here's why.
We have a tendency only to read the things that we're scheduled to read. Lots of Jews don't know anything about the rest of the Bible beyond the end of the book of Deuteronomy except for those portions of it that are read after the Torah reading from what Jews call “the Prophets”: the books from Joshua through Malachi. (Remember that the books of a Jewish Bible are in a different order than those of a Christian Old Testament.)
From the entire rest of the Bible, the Writings, some people know some psalms, and everybody knows the book of Esther. (If you’re a Christian and don’t know Esther, let me recommend the graphic novel version of it by J.T. Waldman.) The bottom line is that, with the exception of the Five Scrolls read on festivals, Jews don’t read any biblical books “from cover to cover.”
We do at least read the Torah from beginning to end; what we don't often do is read any part of it other than the portion of the week. Very few people are going to be dipping into the Torah anywhere other than Parashat Terumah this week, and that's a shame. If you just begin at the beginning of Parashat Terumah you don't have any context for what you are reading.
Here’s the beginning of Exodus 25, the beginning of this week’s portion: “YHWH spoke to Moses, saying.” That of course could be anywhere in the Torah. “Tell the Israelites to get contributions for Me” — gold, silver, and all the other high-end construction materials — “and let them make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.”
Quick question: When did God say this to Moses? If you just begin at Exod 25:1, you don't have any idea. You remember vaguely that this is after they've left Egypt, after they've gotten the Ten Commandments, and before the golden calf episode and Moses not getting to see God's face, the two major plot points that are going to interrupt this recounting of (1) the instructions for building the Tabernacle, and then (2) the description of actually building it.
I ask again: When did God say this to Moses? What's the context? I'm going to go back now not even to last week’s portion, Mishpatim, but all the way back two weeks ago to Parashat Yitro and Exod 19:1, which begins on “the third new moon after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt.”
You may get confused and even a bit dizzy if you try to follow Moses up and down the mountain in that chapter, but it ends this way: “Moses went down to the people and said to them …” (Exod 19:25). Exodus 20 begins, “God spoke all these words.” It sounds, somewhat awkwardly, as if Moses is saying that to the people and then reciting the Ten Commandments by quoting God’s saying them.
Then at the end of the Ten Commandments you have, “YHWH said to Moses: ‘Say this to the Israelites,’” and a few more verses of instructions. Exodus 21 continues without introduction, as if it were more of that same speech, to say, “These are the rules that you shall set before them.” There follow 2½ chapters of various laws — we talked about some of them last week — and then, in the middle of Exodus 23 and still without introduction, God addresses Moses personally once again: “I am sending an angel before you” (Exod 23: 20) and so forth. The rest of Exodus 23 deals with what will happen when the Israelites enter Canaan, eleven days away if Deut 1:2 is to be believed.
Now we’ve reached Exod 24:1. The NJPS translation, widely used among contemporary Jews, writes, “Then He said to Moses.” But a more correct translation of וְאֶל־מֹשֶׁ֨ה אָמַ֜ר v’el Moshe amar would be “He had said to Moses,” taking us back to some unidentified earlier moment. (Follow this link for a deeper dive into the grammar involved.) It would be reasonable to locate that moment before the last time we heard “YHWH said to Moses,” near the end of Exodus 20.
What follows in Exodus 24 sounds a lot like we have returned to Exodus 19 and the moments before the revelation to the Israelites. The 11th-century French commentator Rashi certainly thinks so. He remarks about Exod 24:1 (in my Commentators’ Bible translation), “This was said to Moses before the Ten Commandments. It was on the 4th of Sivan that he was told, ‘Come up.’” The Israelites solemnly agree to do “what YHWH has commanded” (though it’s not clear what this is), and then, commanded a second time to ascend the mountain in v. 12, Moses does so. The confusion in Exodus 19 about where Moses is located has resumed, but Exodus 24 ends this way:
Moses came into the cloud and went up the mountain. Moses was on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights.
And that is where Parashat Terumah begins.
If you follow the reading all the way from the beginning of Exodus 19, starting “on the third new moon” or perhaps “in the third month” after the Israelites went out of Egypt, there's quite a bewildering array of stage directions: Moses goes up the mountain; Moses goes down the mountain; sometimes he goes up and forgets to come down and goes up twice. God speaks to him some number of times; Moses communicates some sort of covenant terms to the Israelites; they are sealed in various covenant ceremonies; and it's all extremely confusing.
My point is not to try to solve all of these conundrums — you can look at the various commentaries to do that, ancient, medieval, or modern — but to remind you that if you're willing to start reading just one verse earlier than the beginning of Parashat Terumah, you find this:
Moses came into the cloud and went up the mountain. Moses was on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights. YHWH spoke to Moses as follows: “Speak to the Israelites and let them bring Me a contribution [terumah] … and let them make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.”
Almost everyone, from those of us who remember somewhat vaguely their Sunday school Jewish education all the way to those who think of these events as ma’amad har Sinai, the unique moment when an entire nation received divine revelation as one, would have assumed that the first thing that God said to Moses after he went up the mountain to stay for 40 days and 40 nights was בראשית ברא אלהים ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. (For a better translation and more careful discussion, click here.)
But Parashat Terumah says that’s not so — or at least the conjunction between Parashat Terumah and Parashat Mishpatim says it's not so. The first thing God told Moses was “Let them make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.”
Almost the entire rest of the book of Exodus is about the building of that special place — the first commandment Moses received after ascending the mountain. I’ll have more to say about that over the next few weeks.