Tetzaveh | Our Actions Are Our True Belongings

...וְאַתָּה תְּצַוֶּה אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

And you will mitzvah the children of Israel...
Exodus 27:20

 

Tetzaveh, תְּצַוֶּ֣ה, meaning, you will mitzvah,  is the eighth parasha of the book of Exodus.

The word mitzvah is related to the Aramaic word tzavta, meaning to attach or join. In this sense, the action of doing a mitzvah- mitzvahing- bundles us into our actions. As we do acts of kindness we become mitzvot (pl).

Hassidic Rabbi the Svat Emet, in The Book of Truth, receives and offers the opening line of Tetzaveh as an instruction for how we ourselves, through our actions, can  become the light of consciousness in this world. By dedicating ourselves to mitzvot — holy acts that bring connection — we  connect and bring forth the Source of goodness into our world. He writes the opening instructions this way:

You shall bring mitzvot into the souls of the children of Israel, so that they themselves become mitzvot.

This is saying that our actions and choices determine who we are on a daily basis. They affect our very soul-essence. We are continually being born and created through our choices and actions.

Buddhist teachings say this is true for all our actions. Karma, often translated as action, is our beingness and our doing. Thich Nhat Hanh put it this way: "Our actions are our only true belongings."

Tetzaveh is one of five parashiot (weekly Torah portions) in Exodus in which Eternally Present sets forth detailed loving actions for the whole community.  Instructions for how we build and maintain a sanctuary for Enlightened Consciousness to travel in our midst as we journey through the wilderness of life. The opening phrase, you will tetzaveh, תְּצַוֶּ֣ה, reveals to us that our daily actions are themselves rituals that will determine our contribution to the continuing work of creation.

Actions Connecting us with the Light of Consciousness

...לְהַעֲלֹ֥ת נֵ֖ר תָּמִֽיד׃ ...אַהֲרֹן וּבָנָיו מֵעֶרֶב עַד־בֹּקֶר לִפְנֵי יְהוָה חֻקַּת עוֹלָם לְדֹרֹתָם מֵאֵת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

Daily, you will re kindle the light of consciousness...to bring you close to an ever present guide for you.
Exodus 27:20-21

The first action is participating in the daily rekindling of conscious awareness. Our actions are not separate from the consciousness we bring to daily life. The drawing-close actions ( mitzvah) are daily practices to  make of ourselves a sanctuary for this light of consciousness, the ner tamid,  נֵ֖ר תָּמִֽיד, the eternal light.

When we bring devotion and awareness to our daily actions, in this week's Torah, making oil to burn in the miskan, we rekindle our own fire of awareness. We get distracted and we rekindle, such is the flow of our lives.  This is the way to re ground ourselves in conscious awareness and conscious connection. Rekindling our awareness  from which we get distracted. Over and over.  This is how it becomes a chukat olam, חֻקַּ֤ת עוֹלָם֙,  an ever present guiding principle, for all of us who wander in the desert, as we seek a steady light to guide us to fulfill the promise of our existence.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this by offering the practice of washing the dishes to wash the dishes. Bring reverence to every action. Instead of washing the dishes to finish and do something else, or washing the dishes out of duty or shame, we wash them for the pure joy of breathing and being present. 

In the Hassidic Jewish tradition, this quality of mindful presence to our actions  weaves us closer to the divine energy within and all around.

Torah instructs us to build a society that centers the light of awakened consciousness, This is represented by the mitzvah, doing the action, of daily kindling the Always-light, the ner tamid,  נֵ֖ר תָּמִֽיד. This keeps us continually centering the mishkan, the dwelling place for the divine.  It protects us  from centering fear, hatred and materialism. It reminds us that any form of human supremacy- white supremacy, male supremacy, supremacy of one religion or culture over another, will lead us to take actions that turn us away from freedom; turns us back to the system of enslavement of ourselves and others

Actions Connecting us with our Hearts

The mishkan itself and all the work of building and consecrating it is a map of connection. The mishkan can only be constructed when the building materials  are brought with receptive hearts; hearts capable of connecting, of being moved. The connecting heart, we read last week in Terumah,  is the source of the materials we bring to fashion and maintain the mishkan and its rituals. The pattern and instructions for connection can only be actualized by willing hearts, hearts that are moved.

Actions Connecting us with Healing

This week Tetzaveh reveals to us another facet of heart-sourced action that is needed to build the mishkan. These are actions that come from hearts healed of jealousy and competition.

...וְאַתָּה הַקְרֵב אֵלֶיךָ אֶת־אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ וְאֶת־בָּנָיו

And you shall bring close your brother Aaron and his sons...
Exodus 28:1

In this Torah portion Moses is only present in the spaces between the letters. We presume these words are from Eternally Creating, instructing Moses to be in service to the whole community by being in service to his brother Aaron. Moses is instructed to create magnificent clothing and ritual objects for his brother Aaron. Aaron's sons are given a place of high honor in the society being built.

There is no room for jealousy, rivalry or positioning. Moses' name is not mentioned. He is present only in relation to his brother who is named and held up, over and over. Torah is teaching us to identify our meaning and purpose, our tikkun,  in relation to others. In the story, Moses represents the highest level of consciousness of humans. Only Moses is on the mountain in Eternal Presence.  Moses' role is to support his brother's light and bring his brother closer to the Divine Presence.

This tells us that the Beloved Community will be built from the energy of healing that comes when we connect to and celebrate each other's ways of contributing to the whole. The healing between brothers, never quite completed in Genesis, is needed to build the mishkan. To create a beloved community, each one of us is called upon to celebrate each other's gifts and contributions out of love. It is this willing heart that builds the mishkan. Fluidity with identification, freedom to change roles and share privilege and status, are the elements necessary to create the system that can maintain the mishkan.

Actions Connecting us to Creativity and Beauty

Great attention is given to the found items that are transformed into the Holy Sanctuary. Just as we are transformed by our actions, every item is transformed into an element of beauty and creativity to house the Divine Presence. Reverence for every heart and every thing is how we weave together a world filled with  beauty.

The mishkan pictured here is a world of beauty and transformation.  This toaster-size trailer was constructed at great risk in an Ohio prison by Dean Gillespie. Mr. Gillespie, wrongfully incarcerated for 20 years, constructed the silver trailer by spreading cigarette-pack foil across notebook cardboard and fastening them with used pins taken from the prison sewing shop. He fashioned the window curtains from used tea bags. Over the decades in prison, he created a rural Ohio downtown, many buildings featuring his childhood nickname, Spiz, with the street address 276, the number of his prison cell. (You can find the full story of this mishkan  "with a propane tank no bigger than your thumb” in The Atlantic Magazine, March 2021.)

A Meditation Practice

Bring Mr. Gillespie's mishkan into your mind. Create space  to receive how it weaves together his life and yours. The immensity of an unjust incarceration that weaves together human imagination, hope, dreams and objects most of us discard without thought. The found, recovered and smuggled objects are the jewels of the mishkan, a movable temple created to uplift, adorn and bring beauty  and joy into the wilderness of life.

Look deeply at the image of Spiz's Dinette. Visualize  Dean Gillespie in cell number 276, assembling, dreaming, breathing into life, Spiz's Dinette and its town. Bring it into your mind and heart as a shviti, an image of a sacred object used for meditation in mystical Judaism. Place it in front of you.  Perhaps you will receive its energy of love, devotion and patience. Perhaps you will receive its gift of heightened mindful attention and imagination. What speaks to you from the ingredients woven from Gillespie's heart and fingers into the objects that are no longer, if they ever were, mere objects.

Exercise: Learning To Meet Your Deepest Needs With New Strategies.

Imagine you are Moses and God has instructed you to perform the mitzvah of organizing the Israelites to protect their priestly class and rituals and create a society and structures that foster all of that.

Imagine doing this in a way that doesn’t prevent other peoples from similarly thriving in the fullness of their traditions and rituals. Can we make a mishkan of the whole world?

A Story That Inspired This Practice:

A few years ago I spent several hours in an Armenian shop in the Old City of Jerusalem. I wanted to hear the perspective of the two Armenian brothers, shopkeepers who have lived and worked in the Armenian quarter, just inside the Zion gate, as their family has done for generations. I asked them, what is their perspective on how to create peace in Jerusalem and in all of Israel? Their answer, with big smiles, was to love God and to live that love.

They shared with me how much they admired the Jewish people and also how hard life had become for the peoples living in Jerusalem for thousands of years who aren’t Jewish. And they said that the Jewish people must remember that Jerusalem has always been a holy place for everyone and that Jerusalem’s strength lies in its being a holy place for everyone, not just for the Jews.

I felt embarrassed because I know as a Jew how much I love the Jewishness that I encounter in Jerusalem — the deep teachings, the amazing array of teachers and synagogues and creative applications of Judaism to every conceivable aspect of life. And embarrassed because I know that the Armenians and Muslims and other Christians also celebrate holy Jerusalem and that I can’t imagine that holiness when one people monopolize it for themselves. Even when I am one of those people.

So I look again at Tetzaveh, to the mitzvah that we shall do so that God might abide among us. And I see the instructions are focused on beauty and service. I see that Aaron the priest is to carry the instruments of decisions over his heart. I see that the rituals are contained within this system ordained by God, all for the purpose of God and the people dwelling together.

And all of this in a very transportable mishkan — sanctuary — and I can’t imagine why we haven't yet as a human race learned to conduct our holy affairs and rituals in peace and reverence, next door to other people doing the same, and I can’t imagine a future unless this is what we learn to do.

 

Musing On The Afternoon Of Shabbat Tetzaveh
Jerusalem, February 8, 2014

On Assi Ghat in Varanasi, across from the Gangha View Hotel, there is a large tree, perhaps a banyan, I don’t recall right now. Each evening, the tree becomes a temple, filled with people chanting, praying, and just sitting at the foot of a tall slender sadhu. From head to foot, the sadhu’s skin is covered with gray ash. He wears a simple robe and carries a staff.  Many years ago, from the roof deck of the hotel, night after night, I watched this sadhu interact with the worshippers who gathered around him. I watched the transformation of a tree, of what had appeared, to my eyes, to be a simple roadside tree, into an altar.

A few evenings later, I joined the assembly, and asked the sadhu, who seemed to understand and speak a bit of English (he previously had been a lieutenant in the Indian Army), “what do you do when fear arises?”  “No fear,” he replied, and pointing to his arm, the skin covered with layers of ash, he said, “clothing.”

When you know that your skin is merely clothing, that your role is merely clothing, that your identity is merely clothing, gold-covered, or ash-covered, housing for your soul, spirit, light, purity…a covering for what is untouchable by this world of form and appearance, what is there to fear?

In this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, the entire community is in devotion to creating garments for the High Priests. Moses has heard the voice of God, now giving specific detailed instructions for the people to give up their most precious jewels and metal and linens to construct clothing and coverings for the priests to wear. When the priests, Aaron and his sons, wear the specific eight meticulously created bejeweled vestments, they “become elevated.” The donning of these clothes, made by the people, in an act of pure devotion, will elevate the priests to be in service to creating the space for God to live in our midst.

Sitting here in Jerusalem, I am struck by the interplay of devotion to role and freedom from role. Here, the streets are filled with men and women showing their devotion by covering their skin with an amazing array of hijabs and wigs and caps and scarves and fur hats and robes.  Whether they wear clothing inlaid with precious sapphires and gold trimmed thread or cover themselves with ash, the covering seems key to an expression of devotion that gives a deep sense of meaning and place to people.

The challenge may be for us to incline our hearts and eyes so we connect with the devotion, to the life-enriching meaning and purpose behind the clothing, and learn to give up fear that there is anything different under the skin.