Parashat Vayekhel/Pekudei: On Active Participation

I have never done well in lecture classes. Passive listening does not enter my brain in the same way that active participatory learning does.

I think it was the same for the Israelites in these parshiyyot. They had stood at Sinai and heard the commandments. Then they had waited passively for 40 days to “receive” the rest of the Torah that Moshe was bringing down from on high. But reception, kabalat haTorah, was not enough. They needed to take an active part in their religious life, not just to be receivers of Torah but to be makers of Torah.

The people’s enthusiasm for active participation is clear from the first of this week’s two parshiyyot, Vaykhel, in which we find that Moshe’s call for donations and volunteers is met by overabundant giving. Everyone’s heart was moved. They came “men on top of women,” until the point when they had to call out Day!, enough! Such was their enthusiasm, the level of their energy. People want to be part of things, want to use their hearts and their minds and their hands to create a communal space in which God can dwell. They just have to be given an appropriate opportunity.

The Sefat Emet reads this outpouring as a mark of the Torah Shebe’al Peh, the Oral Torah, that is inside of us, bursting to come forth. God gave us the (Written) Torah on Sinai, but then He also said: Kekhu me’itkhem terumah lashem¸”Bring from yourself a donation to God” (Exod. 35:5). Bring from yourself, from inside yourself. Be a contributing member of Torah. Do not just receive, but also give, create, participate.

Such was God’s plan. He gives to us, and we give to Him. It is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship. He created the world for us to dwell in, and we create a physical space for him to dwell in. Some have suggested that the command to build the Tabernacle was merely a result of the Golden Calf sin, not an original part of God’s plan. I don’t think so. The dynamic of receiving and giving between God and humans is intrinsic to the relationship -- the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, God’s word, and our word. The Golden Calf merely marks the border into idolatry, marks the place in which our word, our work, our creativity is no longer in dialogue with His word, but exists separately, on its own, as a form of hubris, an insistence that we alone are creators. But the need for a dynamic relationship of give and take between God and humans was always part of the plan.

The Sefat Emet calls this time of giving and creativity in relation to the Tabernacle a time of great simchah, joy. Indeed, the terms used here for contributions, nasa lev and terumah, both refer to a “lifting,” a lifting of the donation and the lifting of the heart. Giving, contributing, being a part of a divine-human communal project is something that lifts the heart and the spirit, one of the highest forms of joy.

Just as we imagine that every one of us stood at Sinai and received the Torah, perhaps we should also imagine that every one of us took an active part in the communal building of a divine space on earth, that every one of us is still engaged in such a project, each according to the gift and the skill that lifts her heart.