Shabbat Shalom-March 4-5, 2011

Pekudei 2011
Fashioning Your Life
Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas

We are all builders.

Our lives are our most precious endeavor. Our daily living is in fact a lifelong barn-raising; each one of us, embedded in our family and our community sets the plan and lifts the struts that form our abode on this earth. We are the fashioners of our lives. Yet everyday many of us are lost in the monotony, spending our waking hours commuting to work, coming home, making dinner, and finally hitting the pillow exhausted at the end of the night just to start it all over again. Have you stopped for a moment and looked seriously at your life and asked, “What is all this toiling for? What are the foundations of my life? What am I building here, exactly?” This is perhaps the deepest and most important question of human existence. It is the “why” of living.

Every human being that has ever lived has asked questions about existence. In many ways it is our questions that make us human. But what are our answers to the “why”? The place in which we look for meaning when we build our lives will dictate those answers. Advertisers know this. The first place they want you to look is to the material world. If you purchase this house, this car, this techno-gizmo you will have meaning in your life. “It’s the best part of waking up.” “It’s the real thing.” “Can you hear me now?” They tell you that if you weigh and measure your life by the size of your hard drive you will find the meaning that you are searching for. Until, of course, someone else has a better-faster gizmo, a nicer house, a newer car. Then you realize that you didn’t answer the “why” of life, you sublimated with a “what.” And you can’t answer a “why” with a “what.”

It was nearly two thousand years ago when the rabbis taught that “blessing is not to be found in anything that has been already weighed or measured or numbered, but only in a thing hidden from sight (TB Ta’anit 8b).” You cannot build the meaning of life through material facts. The wondrous significance of your life goes beyond mere fact. To find true blessings you must cross the divide of experience from the “what” of living to the “why”. For that a more infinite answer must be sought. You must move from the world of fact to the world of value.

The Torah is a book that recognizes the depths of human striving. In this week’s Torah portion, Pekudei, Bezalel, the chief artisan of the Israelites, builds all the physical material that is necessary for the operation of the Mishkan. Given what we know, this seems to be the wrong answer to the right question. How can the Israelites, even at God’s behest, build a “what” to answer the ultimate question of human existence? The rabbinic tradition is of some help here. The midrash speaks of Bezalel as God’s partner in creation. After all, his name means, “in God’s shadow” or “In the image of God.” Bezalel had the knowledge of how to fashion the objects of creation from the values of creation. “He fashioned the menorah from the aspect of love in order to teach love…He fashioned the altar from the aspect of awe in order to teach awe.”

When he built the Mishkan, Bezalel knew that to be a partner to God, to live in God’s shadow, is to build a life in which facts are subservient to values. This is what separated the Mishkan from the Golden Calf. The yellow cow was a mere thing. The Miskhan, however, was a place infused with the sacred. It was where the “what” and the “why” met. At its center, lives a God who is not a mere fact, an object, but the Infinite loadstone of all value; a Being whose aspects can be represented by holy metaphors, but which no metaphor can wholly represent. The Mishkan is the place where human beings meet their “why”.

And so it is with us. Like Bezalel, we are created in the image of God. The craving we feel inside our hearts for meaning cannot be satiated by mere objects, because at the center of our existence, like the center of the Mishkan, is something much more Infinite. And as we fashion our life, as we search to fill that vacuum of significance, we must remember to place within our holiest place not mere objects, but sacred values. We must learn to answer the “why” not with a “what,” but with the Infinite, -the Holy One in whom we share a sacred space.

Shabbat Shalom