mishkan – Sim Lev

This sermon will be addressed to two girls who are having baby blessings at Kingston Liberal Synagogue. Their names are redacted from this online version.

Girls, welcome to your synagogue.

I will address this sermon to you, but you will not remember it, and that’s OK, because I am really speaking to all Jewish children when I give this address. And you should know that all adults, no matter how big they get, never stop being children. So I am speaking to you, but really I am speaking to everybody gathered here today.

My message for you, girls, and for all Jews is: learn to be like a spider.

You see, from the moment a spider is born, she already carries everything inside herself to make a home. The silk with which she will construct her web is built into her body. Without ever learning from a parent or attending a school, the spider already knows how to build her home, wherever she goes.

In this way, the spider is the perfect Jew. Jews, wherever we are, carry in us all we need to make our home. Our home can be woven absolutely anywhere. Whether in a desert, an ocean, or an Arctic tundra, Jews will always find ways of creating our sacred spaces.

Our home is not made of silk, like a spider’s. Our home is made of the bonds we build with each other. Between every community member, there is an invisible thread. If you look around this room and squint in exactly the right light, you will see how one thread connects to each other, and every thread interlocks somewhere. That is the web of our community.

Our home is also made of rituals. In Hebrew, the word for a tractate of Talmud is masechet. The masechet is the page of our religious texts that tells us how to mark every moment and celebrate every festival. Do you know what masechet also means, dear girls? It means a weaving; a web.

Because our home is made of rituals, you can find yourself anywhere in the world, and if somebody starts a prayer, or lights a candle, or cooks a food, you will realise that you are suddenly back in your Jewish home.

Our home is made of stories. Yes, we sew together patchworks from ancient traditions and family tales and our life experiences and all of it comes together in this great big web, so that Jews are all brought together by these stories.

Now, some religious knowledge may be innate. Girls, there is a story that before a baby is born, her soul has already been to the Garden of Eden and heard the revelation at Mount Sinai. Perhaps you are sitting there, knowing far more about the secrets of the universe than any of us.

But the truth is, we are not like spiders. We can’t just weave the Jewish home from the moment we are born. We need to learn how to do it. We need teachers and elders who have learned to build the web from the generations before them. The thread we spin with comes from a yarn thousands of years old, and you need people who will pass on the tools to you.

That’s why, here, in your synagogue, you will be able to come to Kinderlach when you are small, and join Beiteinu as you grow, and come to many family services, and go on adventures with your youth movement. All of this exists to help you learn how to make your web, so that it is strong and beautiful and unique, like you.

Children, a moment ago, you came and were held underneath the tallit to receive a blessing. We call the tallit a “sukkah” – a tent, a tabernacle. It represents the Jewish home. “Sukkah” has the same root in Hebrew as “masechet” – the weaving we mentioned earlier. You see, the Jewish home is a portable prayer shawl, made by people skilled with textiles, and we can pull it out at any moment.

In the Torah portion we read today, on this day of your Simchat Bat, God tells us how to build a mishkan – a sacred place where God can live. I’ll give you one guess what it’s made of.

The tabernacle where God lives is made of wool and cloth and thread and yarn. Oh, it comes in so many colours! Blues and purples and crimsons all finely interlocking on a great stretched canvas made of animal hides.

That is where God lived with the Jews for the years we wandered in the desert. After slavery, the Jews had to learn how to be truly free. We needed to be independent of the great demands of Egyptian slaveowners and even the comforts of their homes. We needed to know how to live transiently.

Yes, we needed to learn to be more like spiders. We needed to build a home wherever we went.

And you, dear girls, need to learn to make a home too.

Girls, I have been to your house, and I know how lovely it is. Somehow your dads manage to keep it such a calm and clean place at all times. I don’t know how they do it. I hope they can manage some semblance of the same order when you both start crawling.

But even if you ransack the living room, and draw all over the walls, and leave your toys strewn across the stairs, they will still love you, and it will still be your home. You may move many times, or you may stay in one place, but your home will be the people you come back to. It will be the stories you tell, and the songs you sing, and the rituals you make up. Home will be your own private language that only makes sense between you.

You come today into this synagogue, and know that it will be your home. Around you, you have your whole community, who have come here to show that they will love and support you. They will teach you how to weave webs, and you will soon start wrapping your own silky strands into the patchwork of this community.

When I welcome you to your synagogue, I am not talking about the building. That’s not our home – it’s just the frame we use to make it in.

Our home is the web we weave together – the invisible threads that connect everyone in this community.

We are like the ancient Israelites who carried their home through the desert.

We are like the spiders who carry their homes in their bodies.

We build our home through connection and song and story.

May you build this home with us.

Shabbat shalom.

This is the story of how the Temple was built.

This story comes to us from the Talmud. It was copied from the Mishnah. It belongs to the folk legends of King Solomon that may have predated it by some centuries. This is an old story. I sincerely doubt whether any of it ever happened, but I assure you it’s all true.

This is the story of how the Temple was built by a rock-destroying worm. When King Solomon decided to build the Temple, he brought up entire stones from the quarry. He wanted to carve those stones without swords. He knew there was only one way.

Somewhere in his kingdom there was a rock-destroying worm called Shamir. This monster was created at the very beginning of time, during the six days of creation in which light and darkness were separated and the first trees were planted.

Some say the Shamir ate stones for breakfast; chewed through the hardest granite, making passageways like the holes in Swiss cheese. Some say it could cut through the rocks with only its gaze: a laser-like stare that sliced solid metal. Whatever were its methods, Solomon knew he had to have it.

In fact, the only way to catch this creature was to find something really soft. You had to wrap it up in cotton wool and barley bran. These materials would be too gentle and the Shamir would have no way of chewing through them.

Yes, this is all in the Talmud. This is our tradition. And if you feel like this rock-gobbling worm is far-fetched, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you that Solomon captured this creature by tricking the King of the Demons.

Solomon knew that Ashmedai, the world’s greatest demon, lived in the bottom of a pit on the top of the world’s tallest mountain. And the pit was filled up with gallons of rainwater that the demon swallowed whole every day, then waited for it to refill.

Solomon sent his servant up that mountain and into that pit. The servant drained the pit of its rainwater and filled it again with fortified wine.

You might think that the King of the Demons would not fall for such a simple trick, and you’d be right. Ashmedai scoffed at the wine-filled pit and refused to drink from it. But days passed and the monster missed his gallons of water. Oh, he became so parched. Eventually, he gave in and took several enormous mouthfuls of the wine.

Within moments, he fell fast asleep. Solomon’s servants tied him up and carried him back to Jerusalem. When Ashmedai woke up on the Palace floor, he roared at Solomon: “is it not enough that you have conquered the whole world, but now you must imprison me too?”

“I promise you,” said Solomon. “All I want is one creature. The shamir. The worm that eats through stone. I need it to build my Temple for God.”

Ashmedai sighed, and he replied: “I do not own the shamir. It belongs to the ministering angel of the sea, who has entrusted it to the wild rooster. Together they hide in the uninhabitable hills, where the rooster guards his eggs.”

I’m quoting to you from the Talmud directly here, so you know that what I’m telling you is true.

When Solomon knew where to find the wild rooster, he covered its nest with transparent glass. Seeing that it couldn’t get in, the rooster brought over the shamir to bore through the rocks. As soon as he’d seen the monster, Solomon knocked the chicken off of the nest and ran to collect his prize.

According to our tradition, that is how the First Temple was built. Overseen by Solomon, the King of the world, accompanied by Ashmedai, the King of the Demons, a stone-chewing worm carved out every brick. It snaked through all the pillars and ate at every rock. After years of winding through the granite, Solomon’s Temple was complete.

So, why did the Talmud come up with such a tall tale? Can it be that our rabbis really believed the Temple was built in such a fantastical manner? Somehow I doubt it. But nevertheless, I am adamant that this story is true. At least, I think it tells us something important we need to know.

Our rabbis were answering a textual problem. The Bible told us that King David was not allowed to build the Temple because there was too much blood on his hands. He had fought too many wars, subjugated too many peoples and built too much of his empire on the labour of others.

Only Solomon, whose name in Hebrew is cognate with peace, was able to overcome the violent tendencies of his father and build a Temple that would truly be fitting for God. How could he build such an edifice without getting blood on his hands?

When our rabbis imagine the construction of the Temple, they picture it as it ought to have been. No wars are fought to secure land. No natural resources are exploited to gain the raw materials. No workers are hurt in the making of the building. All that happens is a natural process, where a worm that would eat rocks anyway works its way through the stones to build God’s home.

The only people vaguely harmed are a demon who got drunk and a rooster that was knocked off its perch. This is the dream of how the Temple should have been made. It was created in complete peace and harmony with nature.

By encouraging us to inhabit this fantasy, the Talmud draws our attention to the harshness of reality. Even the greatest and most noble civilisations are built on violence. Cities, skyscrapers and the highest cultures are all products of real graft. Human beings do interfere with nature. We do exploit workers. We do plunder natural resources and we do secure territories through war.

When we imagine a world where rock-destroying worms can carve out our accomplishments for us, we know that we are imagining something impossible. But the nature of Talmud is to challenge us to do impossible things.

The Talmud asks us to picture a different relationship between human beings, nature, and civilisation. In a world where the climate is being damaged in unspeakable ways, such imagination is required of us again. Humanity is at a juncture when we must completely rethink how to use resources and what kinds of civilisations we build.

That is what makes it true and that is why it still speaks to us today. The Temple was built by a rock-eating worm. Perhaps one day, we will build the world that way again.

I gave this sermon for Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, Parashat Terumah, on 20th February 2021. For the sources, look at Sotah 48b and the sugya beginning in Gittin 67b

Tag: mishkan

Make like a spider and weave

A rock-eating worm built the Temple