Congregants and Chaverim,
Please join us for our lovely Kabalat Shabbat services tonight at 7pm. All are welcome to our meaningful and inspiring services!
Tomorrow morning, February 22, our services start at 9 am, with the Torah service at 9:45 am. We are having a special baby naming or Simchat Bat in honor of Yaara Sternfeld, daughter of our Hebrew school teacher Sharon and her husband Lior and big sister Shira. Please don’t miss this special event at Congregation Beth El tomorrow morning. Thank you to the Sternfeld family for sponsoring the delicious kidush following services.
Cantor Ben-Moshe’s Weekly Message: In this week’s parshah, Vayak’hel, Moses assembles the People of Israel in order to instruct them in building the Mishkan, the Sanctuary in the desert which served as the home for the Ark of the Covenant. Just after the debacle of the Golden Calf, when the people eagerly gave gold for the purpose of idolatry, they now gather together to give generously of gold and other precious materials for the purpose of serving God. Interestingly, Moses prefaces his instructions with a reiteration of the commandment to observe Shabbat, placing the holy time of Shabbat over the holy place of the Mishkan. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Shabbat “a cathedral in time”-a religious monument that cannot be destroyed, and which indeed outlasted the Mishkan and the First and Second Temples. Tents and buildings may fall, and the Ark of the Covenant can be taken into captivity. Shabbat endures as long as we observe it, and Torah endures as long as we study and teach it. These are our lasting monuments, and as the philosopher Ahad Ha’am put it more than one hundred years ago, “More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews”. May we continue to keep Shabbat, and it, us. Shabbat Shalom.
The Weekly Parashah is brought to you by:
Rabbi Peter Tarlow of The Center of Hispanic-Jewish Relations at Texas A&M Hillel
This week’s Torah portion is called “VaYakhel”. You will find it in the Book of Exodus 35:1-37:38. Next week’s is called Pkudei, and this section begins in Exodus 35:21 and continues to the end of the Book of Exodus. These two sections complete the Book of Exodus. Many readers may feel a bit of a let down with these two final sections. Exodus begins on a high note taking us from slavery toward liberation but ends in a sea of bureaucratic detail.
A more careful reading however, makes us realize that while the text appears to speak about what may seem to be superficial detail, in reality it has a much more profound goal. The key to understanding this text may be found in the text’s dominant word: “esh”. We often translate Esh “fire”, but this translation is simply not adequate to express the true message of the word. Esh is the combination of energy and matter, the point where nouns and verbs unite into a single unit.
Any Hebrew reader will quickly note the spelling of the word: alef-shin and how close that spelling is to the word for human/man “ish” (alef-yud-shim = ish/man or person). The Yud in Hebrew often indicates the Divine. This Biblical play-on-words makes the text’s Hebrew reader question what is relationship between the words esh and ish? Does the letter Yud change not only the meaning of the word, but also changes the meaning of the entire Book of Exodus?
Is the text in its subtile manner indicating that we are composed of two elements? The first we may call “esh”. It is the verbal-noun combination of energy and matter. An esh (the energy/substance of fire) is a clearly thing, but fire cannot be touched or held. Esh is the “nothing” that is “something”. We classify fire as a noun, yet in reality it is pure verbal energy. The second element is the divine spark, the flames that reaches out to us with a sense-of-purpose and makes us more than just an object, but a creative force.
Might the text be teaching us that left alone energy is amoral, neither good nor bad? What changes this uncontrollable energy, the “esh” into what we call “ish” (a human being made in the image of G’d) is the addition of one letter, the letter Yud. It is as if the Hebrew text is teaching us that only when we take the power of the “esh” combined with the spirit of the “yud/G’d” do we have the “ish”, the whole person.
The Book or Exodus is about forming a nation. The Jewish people is a nation forged from the energy of the spirit combined with that of determination combining the energy of creativity with the goodness of G’d. Does Exodus then take us one step further than Genesis toward the Promised land by making is G’d’s partners in creating the “holiness of action”?
Exodus is about more than a mere escape from Egypt. It teaches us to transform our hopes into accomplishments, and the daily tasks of life into dreams. Think about your energy, is it energy of worry or of building? Does negative or positive energy dominate your life?
