sermon

18 months ago, I was excited to stand on this bima and talk about the Western Wall agreement that would give men and women the chance to pray at the Western Wall together, free from the shackles of ultra-Orthodox governance that has dominated much of Israeli religious policy. Although it was not a perfect agreement, it was a wonderful symbolic step toward acceptance, pluralism, and tolerance. It was a move toward Shalom Bayit, peace in the home, as Jews would acknowledge the legitimacy of other Jews, regardless of gender or halachic observance.

In this week’s Torah portion, a king named Balak hires the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelite people. But upon seeing the Israelites living peacefully, opening their homes and their hearts, building community, his curse turns into a blessing …

There’s a fantastic scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which Dr. Jones is explaining to his class the basics about archeology. Archeology, he says, is the search for fact. It is not the search for truth.

The reverse is true about our Torah: It is not a book of fact, but a book of truth. Whether or not God  it is a fact that God split a sea in two so that Israelites could cross the Red Sea, it is true that the Exodus narrative is essential to our identity.

I’ve talked before about the concept of *imitatio Dei.* It’s a religious concept in which we find virtue and blessing by imitating God. God creates Adam and Eve, we imitate God by creating life. God heals Abraham by sending three angelic messengers, we are taught to visit the sick. God loves, we love … And in this section of Leviticus we see that we can imitate God’s holiness as well. We have the opportunity to be God-like in our actions. 

Moses seeks reassurance. As the 12th century commentator Rashbam explains, Moses says go God, I know you said you’d send an angel to protect us, but I would much prefer if it was you, yourself.

This behavior hearkens back to the Moses we meet at the beginning of Exodus, the Moses that doesn’t want to lead the Israelite people, the Moses that thinks of excuse after excuse as to why he isn’t the right person for the job.

What might this mean, that none of us are able to see God’s face?

Rashi explains that it is a matter of authority and permission. Just after this, God makes all of God’s goodness pass before Moses, but according to Rashi, God does not allow Moses to see God’s face.

But another commentator, S’forno, has a different take, written from God’s perspective: Your inability to see what you would like to see is not due to My depriving you, personally, of such an experience, but is rooted in man’s inability to see such things unless you had died first, as an eye of flesh and blood cannot see such things. You would be fatally blinded before understanding anything you would see.

According to Jewish law, a sanctuary requjires three things to be considered kosher. The first is a Torah scroll. During any Jewish service, we never lose sight or focus on what is most important, the holy text of our Torah. The second is a bit harder to discern, especially if you are looking around in this sanctuary, because I have to let you in on a secret, we don’t have it. The second item is a window. Each sanctuary must look out onto the outside world. Please rest assured, however, the building plans for our renovated sanctuary do include the construction of beautiful window that will look out onto a garden. And the third item? It is the subject of our Torah portion T’tzaveh this week. It is the ner tamid, the eternal light.

You maybe remember that this Torah portion, Parashat T’rumah is the first example of a synagogue’s capital campaign. God tells Moses that the Israelites should give generously in order to hopefully be able to build a new synagogue in Athens, GA … Sorry, that’s not quite right … but God does command the constrcution of the first synogugue. This is what God tells Moses: