Habitats for Holiness – Parshat Terumah |
Imagine yourself in an unknown desert—sand stretching in every direction, no trees, no shade, no clear path forward. The wind shifts and erases your footprints almost as soon as you make them. And in that place—where survival feels urgent, where clarity feels scarce—you are instructed to find crimson dye, delicate spices, wool for weaving cloth, and given the task of carving cherubim into wood. It feels almost absurd. And yet, this is precisely where the Torah takes.
In this week’s parsha, Terumah, our forebears have recently left slavery. They are wandering, anxious and unsure who they are or where they’re going, remembering only what they have left behind. And at this exact moment, the Torah does something surprising: it slows way down. Not to give us more laws, festivals, and practices, as previous parshiyot have done. Not to resolve uncertainty about what lies ahead. But to describe—at extraordinary length—the details of a space that has never before existed. It lists in exquisite, excruciating, extravagant detail the measurements and materials and metals for building the Mishkan: blue, purple, and crimson threads; fine linen, coverings and curtains; oil, spices, petals, blossoms, branches; wood and silver and hammered gold.
Here, in the wilderness, God does not rush to calm our fears. Instead, Torah slows way down, lingering over every detail of the Mishkan’s construction. We expect guidance—a map, a promise, protection—something to hold onto. Instead, God asks something of us: “Make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among you.”
On one hand, there is something outrageous about this ask. Lacking food, water, clarity, protection, direction, we are asked to do something for God. In the midst of such lack, such fear and trepidation—at times even resentment that we are in this place at all—God instructs us to create. And to create what? Not a functional shelter or defensive fortress, but an elaborate, intricate work of art.
On the other hand, it seems this is precisely what our worried, weary souls needed. Hands that once pressed mud into molds for bricks now measure wood and stitch fabric; bodies shaped by taskmasters’ forced labor slowly relearn touch as craft and care. The Mishkan is shaped by attention, skill, generosity, and imagination—built by people whose memories are still mired in mortar. The work of the Mishkan transforms what it means to labor communally, what it means to collaborate and build and create. Instead of constructing monuments to Pharaoh’s power, we are asked to fashion a place for God’s Presence to dwell in our midst.
Yet, this radiant, resplendent sanctuary itself is not the central story. What is unfolding here is not merely the building of a palace for God, but the building of ourselves as a people. God instructs: here is the pattern of the Mishkan and the pattern of its vessels—now go and make it. We are not given a full rendering of a finished structure. We are offered pieces, a pattern, a peek into what could be. What we are given is not certainty, but an invitation to participate in the steady work of shaping something sacred from that which we can only partially see.
The act of making this unlikely, gemstone-adorned, shimmering sanctuary teaches us how to become the bridge between what is—the world we know—and what has not yet come into being—all that we dream of, yearn toward, imagine. As Terumah shows us, we do not wait for complete clarity before we begin; the work itself—the building, shaping, creating—becomes a way of knowing. The way forward is discovered not in theory, but in the making.
The 19th-century Hasidic master the Sfat Emet teaches that the Mishkan was built not only so that God could dwell among the people, but so that the people themselves could become vessels capable of dwelling with God. In his language, the work of building the Mishkan is about forming kelim—vessels—not only of wood and gold, but of the heart. The creation of sacred objects becomes the path toward the creation of sacred selves. The Mishkan is not the final destination. It is a prototype, the construction of which teaches us that as we create, we are being created.
Unlike the pyramids—monuments fashioned to freeze power in form, to immortalize rulers and entomb certainty—the Mishkan is made to move. Precise yet portable, sturdy yet able to shift and change, it shapes us into the kind of people we need to be now. In the wilderness—where nothing is stable and nothing is promised—the creation of the Mishkan is how we learn, in our bodies, hearts, and hands, how to be responsive, flexible, and open. It’s how we learn how to celebrate beauty even in our anxiety and fear. It’s how, even in the face of the scariness of an unknown future, we learn how to be courageous and creative and alive to change. The construction of this outer structure becomes a way of developing within ourselves the inner capacities we will need to build a life in the new terrain in which we find ourselves, on this side of the sea.
And what of this ornate and opulent beauty? What is beauty for? What does it do? In times of anxiety, fear, and collective grief, it can feel as though beauty is an affront to the very real, very serious, very heavy nature of the world, of the work we’re called to do. The Israelites, too, were in a moment of deep trauma and uncertainty. So we might ask: why must the Mishkan shimmer? Why the crimson curtains and carved cherubim, the hammered gold and woven blue? If what we needed was shelter, structure would suffice. But what we are asked to build is something else entirely—something that could draw the Divine down into our midst.
Here the Torah hints at something that reaches far beyond the desert: beauty is not ornament; it is invitation. And this is not only a spiritual truth—it is how living systems work.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, botanist and author, teslls about her childhood question of why asters and goldenrod tend to bloom together each September. As Zoë Schlanger describes in Light Eaters, “The blazing yellow goldenrod beside the royal violet asters produced an intoxicating visual dynamic. Why, [Wall Kimmerer] wanted to know, were they so beautiful?” Years later, after being dismissed by botany professors and told that beauty is not a suitable line of inquiry for science, she discovered that both flowers rely on bees for pollination—and that flowers are essentially billboards for pollinators. Purple stands out against yellow; yellow bursts like sunshine through the purple. Bees arrive. Butterflies gather. Pollen passes from bloom to bloom. What first dazzles the eye becomes generative—color turning into fruit, into future.
Beauty, these plants teach us, is not extra. It is essential. It is how the living world signals vitality. It is how a system draws life toward itself.
Suddenly, Terumah feels less abstract. More than a building, the Mishkan appears as an ecosystem—a garden of color and texture, object and ornament, all brimming with beauty. Not because God demands baubles and finery, but because beauty is how relationship is activated, how presence becomes palpable, how vitality becomes possible, and new futures begin to unfold.
Like our ancient forebears, we are living in our own kind of wilderness. Amid division that runs deep and grief that settles in the bones, at a time when the ground feels unsteady and fear presses close, when the path toward the future we desire is difficult to discern, we too may yearn for clearly labeled maps—or instructions for building foolproof fortresses of protection.
We may feel we must wait for guaranteed safety before we can sing or pray or create or build anything beautiful. But, as the aster and goldenrod teach us, plants do not wait until survival is secured before flowering. Their blooming is part and parcel of how they survive. So too the pigment, pattern, and fragrance of the Mishkan are not indulgences; they are invitations to a future waiting to unfold.
Terumah teaches us not to wait until we have found our way out of the wilderness. It tells us to make. To create. Right here, right now. To place our hands on whatever material we have at our disposal—time, words, relationships, stories, images, instruments and sounds—and shape them into something beautiful, sacred, radiant, and new. Into a beauty that says: this place is alive. This place is open to relationship. This place is worth coming toward.
In a world that so often pulls toward contraction, this sacred creation—this bringing forth of beauty—becomes a way of cultivating a habitat for holiness wherever we are. To see beauty is to fully enter a moment, to relax into the magic of being, to return as a full part of life living itself.
V’asu li mikdash, v’shachanti bitocham. May the work of our hands make real the work of our hearts. May the spaces we shape become habitats where holiness can dwell. And may we each help draw life, connection, and the sacred into our midst—creating beauty wherever we go, even here, even now, amidst it all.