Carving out the Gifts of T’rumah

l just started acupuncture in my umpteenth effort to get to the root of the twenty-plus years of migraines I have suffered.

The acupuncturist told me to take a hot bath with Epsom salts when I get home. Being the good patient that I am, I have listened to him.

Good patient! Ha!

It’s been two years since I’ve had a bath. I’m normally very bad at taking care of myself.

When my children were young, I hardly ever carved out time for myself. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t feel deserving. I was trying so hard to undo a bit of faulty parenting I’d had, and didn’t know how to find the balance.

Not that my mother neglected me, no. She just bought into society’s value of “career” over children—especially for a woman of Liberation! She was a woman who had to do it all, and do it well—which left her with little for herself. She had to be desperate—or sick—to rest.

So, like her, I have to be in a place of desperation to give myself the gift of a bath. Or to spend money on something like acupuncture.

But for the past three weeks, since I started acupuncture, I have come home, filled the bathtub, poured salts and a few drops of essential oils into it, and soaked. This week, I even added a candle! Then I got into bed.

This week in Torah, instructions are given for building a sanctuary in the desert.

The Israelites have walked from slavery to liberation; they’ve been given the ten commandments (“utterances” is a more correct translation); they’ve trembled as they heard and saw God through thunder, lightning, fire and smoke at Mt. Sinai.

But I think my mother missed the memo about the sanctuary you’re supposed to build after you’ve been liberated.

Yes, now it's time to build a structure to “carry” God with them through the wilderness. In the wilderness, they don’t know where they are going, or where they will end up, but they will have this sanctuary.

Whether the people actually need a container for God, or God thinks they need it, there are very specific instructions for its construction: precise measurements, and gold, silver, and copper; a certain type of wood; an altar with vessels, candelabras; tent cloth and coverings of special skins and threads.

The specifics are repeated again and again and again. They’ve got to get them right.

These are stated as gifts for God—t’rumah. Or are they gifts to the people? A beautiful space to retreat from the world…?

But then there’s a most striking thing. The doorway to the sanctuary must be carved with two cherubim embedded in it.

These cherubim are fiery, scary looking angels with huge wings spread out, guarding the sanctuary. They are not cute, fat baby angels with little wings like we see depicted in old European paintings.

And God says that God will appear between them, between that fire, and speak from there.

In this crazy world, where our lives are filled with busy-ness, it’s all too easy to allow the to-do’s to intrude on any private, quiet time we may try to carve out (get the pun?) for peace and beauty.

So the Torah is right; we do need a container. We have to be precise and intentional about it. We have to make it beautiful. It’s a place to “hear God’s voice.”

And we have to be fierce about protecting it.

Last week, I talked about being intentional about time, approaching it as sacred, choosing carefully how we fill it—not getting stuck in our human construct of it.

The sanctuary we are to build for “God” is in fact a true construct of humanity. It’s a sacred place, different from time in that way. We can see it and feel it with our senses, the water, oils and candle.

I remember times in my life when I tried to create that for myself, and when someone intruded on it, I would scream and yell. Looking back, that was because I didn’t feel deserving. Having waited until I was desperate, it came out in a fiery way.

If I’d realized before I was desperate that it was time to take space for myself, then maybe I wouldn’t have been so fiery about it. Maybe those fiery angels could have just been symbolic.

Maybe all we need is a fiery inner voice that tells us we are deserving. There’s enough loud clamoring in the world around us, full of unmet needs: desperate people not being heard.

But we can’t begin to hear each other if we ourselves have unmet needs.

Yet, maybe some of us with access to such a sanctuary don’t feel deserving of it, especially when so many others are suffering.

And at the same time, carving out a sanctuary for ourselves will make us people who are better able to respond to the clamoring voices around us.