I asked Rita Losch to lead off tonight with her poem about Notre Dame to put us in mind of sacred space, of holy architecture, and of what it means to design for the Divine. Whether it’s the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, or the marbled basilicas of Italy, or the lofty, star-ceilinged Great Synagogue of Rome. Or even the humble wooden embrace of Ner Shalom.
I got to see some sacred spaces on my vacation over the last two weeks – churches, synagogues, Greek temples. I love visiting such places. I am drawn to them; I am a sucker for a sanctuary. It is hard for me to pass by a church in Rome without going in. Many of them are too much for me – too much decoration, too much paint in too many colors – too busy. But some are surprisingly soothing even in their busy-ness.
For instance, last Sunday morning, I sat through mass at the Basilica di San Lorenzo di Lucina. Full of warm-colored marble – mauves, grays, and browns – with Renaissance paintings strategically placed. In the US, an ornate, art-filled space like San Lorenzo would be a big tourist attraction. In Rome, it was just a parish church, a place of routine communion and well-worn worship. It was busy, visually that is, but it also felt earthy and gentle, as I sat there trying to make out the priest’s Italian-language drash; tensing up when I would hear the word sinagoga, but ultimately relaxing once I absorbed that the overall theme of the homily was God’s love for everyone, across race and religion and ethnicity, ending with an imperative that we hold love for each other in the same way.
On another day of the trip, Oren and I visited Paestum, an ancient Greek city an hour south of Naples. The houses there are now just ruins, laid out in the original city grid. But the great temples dedicated to the gods stand. A massive temple to Athena at one end of the complex, worthy of the Acropolis, and two side-by-side temples at the other, one thought to be dedicated to Poseidon and the other to Hera. At 2500 years old, they are still magnificent. They are built to a larger scale than the churches and synagogues we know. They are massive, and the steps leading up to the threshhold are nearly 3 feet high each. This is not human scale, but a staircase for the gods, who are not bound by our puny physicality.
Oren and I spent last Erev Shabbat at the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Rome, taller than it is wide, as if it were a spaceship ready to launch. Its footprint is square but it gives way to a roundish cupola at the top. It’s built tall, perhaps to make sure it is seen by the eyes of the Vatican, just across the river. The inside of the Great Synagogue is one tall open space, creating an echo that makes it almost impossible to understand the words being chanted by the hazzan. Still, there is magic in being there, seeing the rabbi and the cantor in their formal robes, with tall black hats – also architectural, echoing the very shape of the building’s dome.
I sat in the resonating chamber of the Great Synagogue, just as I had stood at the Temple of Poseidon, and wondered about this human impulse to build a house for the gods. Why? Why this need for containment? We could go outside and worship on a mountain, or before an altar of ocean, or in the Italian countryside among colonnades of umbrella pines. But no, instead we build structures of great weight, at great expense, even though their bulging doric columns are designed to call to mind the trees just outside the door.
What is it that inspires humanity to create space for worship, when arguably the whole world is already just that?
That question is hovering in this week’s Torah portion, Terumah. In it we are introduced to the great building project of the mikdash, the “holy place,” which later we come to call the mishkan, the God-dwelling place, or the Shekhinah place (the word shekhinah coming from the same root as mishkan).
God says in this portion, וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם, v’asu li mikdash v’shakhanti b’tokham – let them make for me a mikdash, a holy place, and I will dwell among them. (Exodus 25:8). And then the blueprint begins to roll off the Divine tongue. Acacia wood and crimson thread. Gold, silver, fancy skins.
This is not a tax or tithe, not an obligation or commandment. But instead, תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כָּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ, terumah me’et kol ish asher yid’venu libo, a contribution from anyone whose heart moves them. This might be volunteer labor, but it is not slave labor. This community of former slaves is being invited, not required, to create something together, something bigger than any of them. It is perhaps their first chance to make something beautiful.
But back to our question: why? Who needs it? The Children of Israel, just a couple weeks ago, received the Ten Commandments directly from God at the Mountain, in the Wilderness. No doors or arches; no naves or apses; no steeple, just people. So why now this request for an enclosed or at least partitioned space? Was the Wilderness too vast, too limitless and frightening? Is that why God requests a sanctuary with measurable and finite dimensions – 200 cubits long, 80 cubits wide?
In the midrash (Exodus Rabbah 12:3), the question of why is explicitly asked. Why the need for containment? In the midrash Moshe is troubled by this problem. How could they hope to build something to contain the Deity? After all, as it says in the first Book of Kings (8:27), “The heavens cannot measure Thee.” As it says in Jeremiah (23:24), “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” As it says in Isaiah (66:1), “The heaven is my throne and the earth my footstool.” Moshe considers these verses and sees no possibility of containing the vast Divine.
But God replies to Moshe, saying:
אֵינִי מְבַקֵּשׁ לְפִי כֹּחִי אֶלָּא לְפִי כֹּחָן
“I do not ask for you to make a mikdash according to my power, but according to the people’s. If I were to ask the entire earth [to be a sanctuary] it could not contain my glory... But all I ask of you is 200 cubits by 80.”
And this is the answer – that it is all a matter of scale. We don’t attempt to manufacture a sanctuary at a global scale because we don’t live at a global scale. I can sit in a wilderness or on a mountaintop or in a forest and feel the flow of the Divine all around me. But eventually I need enclosure; I need the more intimate embrace of space scaled to my size.
I cannot understand all of the biology and physics that make Creation a complex and glorious sanctuary. But I can get my brain around architecture – proportions, materials, adornment, arrangement. I feel the personal capacity to contribute something at this scale, even if it is just to say, “Move the Caravaggio a little to the left.”
I can understand a cathedral. Because it is like a house, and I can understand a house, even if the cathedral is like the greatest and most lavish house. I can understand a mishkan because it is like my tent. But my tent pushed, stretched to something bigger and more opulent than my tent could be. The mishkan lives inhuman scale; it lives within the limitations and ambitions of human industry. And in a way, isn’t that just what Shekhinah is? God, at human scale.
So we might also ask, in these pandemic times in which we make our sanctuary here on Zoom, what are you moved to offer to enhance this mishkan? Fabrics and acacia wood won’t do it in this medium. But is there something else? Something spiritual or energetic that you might offer out of the generosity of your heart? Consider that for a moment.
And if we’re really serious about the idea of God being able to dwell at human scale, we might also consider our human lives themselves as a mishkan. Take a moment to close your eyes and see your life, your whole life, as a temple or a cathedral or a holy tent – a dwelling place for the Divine. What are its fixtures and its decorations? What relationships and practices and loves and losses and words form its architecture and adornments? An invitation to look around in it, this mishkan of your life. Look around in it with wonder and gratitude for what you have designed and built. And ask yourself: what might I offer it next from my generous heart?
A couple additional souvenirs from Rome. First, a poem by Fr. Jean-Pierre Sonnet, from his beautiful collection of prayerful poems, Le Messie aux Portes de Rome. Second, the Lecha Dodi melody used at the Tempio Maggiore di Roma.
Roma
LA LUNE S'ÉVADE, croissant ou ballon blanc, des coupoles oblongues. Catholique à l'excès, le soleil se couche derrière – ou serait-ce dedans ? – le tambour de Saint-Pierre. De la rive d'en face, la synagogue interroge affranchie le grand dôme chrétien. Plus bas, entre les quais, coule la mémoire.
Rome
THE MOON, a mere crescent or a white balloon, escapes the oblong domes. Catholic to a fault, the sun sets behind – or inside? – the drum of Saint Peter’s. On the far river bank, the synagogue freely queries the great Christian dome. Down below, among the quays, memory flows. (Translation: Irwin Keller)