Parashat Terumah: Where We Can Still Hear God's Voice

In this week’s parsha, we read about the mishkan, the building of a dwelling place for God on this earth. And we feel a twinge of envy – they had access to God; God dwelled in their midst; we are left alone to wander the world, searching for His Presence.

But certain features of the mishkan give me hope for today. Look at the aron, the ark. It is arguably the most important part of the mishkan – being the first to be mentioned here, the only item in the Holy of Holies, and most importantly, the site of God’s voice when it spoke to Moshe.

Now what is in the aron? The tablets, the Torah itself. In other words, access to God’s voice, to God’s continued messages to us today, is present in the Torah. As if to emphasize this point of the Torah’s eternal ability to speak to us, there is a special mitzvah when it comes to the poles used to carry the aron – they are not allowed to be removed from their rings. Lo yasuru mimenu. Rashi adds: le’olam, forever. The poles, symbols of mobility, the ability to carry the aron and its Torah wherever we go, must always remain attached. The kli yakar relates this verse to one in Isaiah, which says in similar language: lo yamushu mipikha umipi zarekha . . . ad olam (59:21). They, i.e. the words of Torah, should not leave your mouth and the mouth of your descendants forever. We carry the Torah around in our mouths and, like the poles of the aron, we never detach. And so, through the Torah, we do still have access to God’s living voice.

But it is not just the Torah that we need in order to hear God’s voice. God did not speak directly out of the aron, but rather spoke from between the two keruvim (cherubim) that stood affixed to the cover of the aron. And these two keruvim were arranged in a very particular way. Their faces are said to be turned doubly – turned toward one another and turned toward the cover, the aron itself ( Exodus 25:21). What is required in order to hear God is a double orientation – it is not enough to be oriented solely toward the Torah, the aron itself. It is not enough to study Torah alone. God’s message reveals itself through our double encounter with the Torah and with one another. The Torah is continually revealed through our joint encounter with the Torah and with each other.

The image is of a hevruta, a learning partnership. I once attended a teacher’s workshop on the hevruta method taught by Orit Kent and Allison Cook and the visual they used was of a triangle. On one side of the triangle is one person, on the other another person, and on the third is the Torah. They emphasized that the key to a good hevruta is that no corner gets lost, that all three voices are respected and heard and integrated. Looking back now, the keruvim above the ark also created a kind of triangle, and this triangle became a channel, a conduit for God’s voice on earth.

None of us as individuals can contain the Torah or its truth. It is only revealed through our joint efforts and our genuine engagement with one another. The keruvim stood, facing one another and also bent over, with wings spread above them, in a gesture of humility and protection in relation to the ark. And out of this space of humility, oriented not proudly outward, but toward each other, came the voice of God on earth.