Parashat Vayakhel: A Home for Our Needy Hearts

This week we come to the end of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) parshiyyot. We began with two, Terumah and Tetzaveh, and we end with two, Vayakhel and Pekudei, and sandwiched in between these two double-layered walls is Ki Tisa, the story of the Golden Calf.

The story of the Golden Calf is, in some sense, then, at the heart of the Mishkan, standing right in the middle of its sacred sanctuary walls. It is as if the divine sanctuary is there to hold, to embrace, to surround the very human neediness displayed in the act of the Golden Calf, our own tender human heart.

Let me explain. What happened at the Golden Calf? The people saw that Moshe was gone a long time and they began to wonder what had happened to him and to feel insecure and uncertain, a little like a small, bewildered child who suddenly finds herself alone in a vast terrifying place, the only source of comfort and security nowhere in sight. She feels lost and abandoned, desperately in need of something to attach herself to, to calm the feeling of being afloat without an anchor.

The Golden Calf is fundamentally an expression of deep human suffering. Coming down from the mountain, Moshe hears a sound. Yehoshua thinks it is the sound of war, but Moshe corrects him – this is not the sound of winning of losing, but rather kol anot, which, although not usually translated this way, can be understood to mean “the sound of suffering,” from the root inui, for suffering, the same word for the suffering the Israelites felt in Egypt.

I think most of us know what this groundlessness feels like, the sense of uncertainty and aloneness, this hole inside of us that desperately needs to be filled by something, to be attached to something, anything, in order to feel that we have some ground to stand on. So we, like the Israelites, look to some other source of security and attachment; there are many kinds of idolatry – substance and food addictions, money, success, ego, even the worship of another human as wholly powerful in some way.

In the end of the day, none of these prove to be secure enough for us; none of them totally fill our gaping open heart.

There is, it turns out, nothing to do for this groundlessness, this desperate neediness of ours. God knows this; what he offers us is simply accompaniment, a dwelling place for this heart of ours. The Mishkan is a symbol of God’s embrace, of the ability of the divine to HOLD all of this human brokenness, to surround it with Presence.

This needy heart of ours is not a bad thing; left on its own, it constructs idols, but it is actually made of pure gold, and, when it feels the accompaniment of the divine embrace, it is elevated and raised up to unimaginable levels of service. The response to the request for donations for the Mishkan in Vayekhel is “over the top”; the people come tripping over themselves, their “hearts raised up” (nesa’o libo), to give more and more until a halt is called; there is more than enough. This needy heart has an intensity to it; it is not just the source of idolatry, but also the source of our yearning for connection to something larger than ourselves, of our ability to give limitlessly, to be part of an eternal project. In the Miskhan, in God, this searching heart finds a home, finds security, finds the ultimate neverending Ground.