Minyan Replay with Rabbi Lizzi — Parashat Vayakhel

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this half hour dose of weekly Jewish spirituality. Jews have a tradition of praying three times a day and at Mishkan. We have a daily virtual minion at 8am Central to get your day started. folks join us from across the country and across the world as we begin each day with words and songs of gratitude, inspiration, healing and Torah.

Without further ado, I invite you to breathe a little deeper, connects a little more with yourself with God with Torah with this community and with the world around you, wherever you are, whatever your timezone

Dawn, my Tallis here

creating a little Mishcon for myself. By Rohita I don't I don't no matter how let me check gentleman's fatality manually, he typed safe, but seat seat

just taking a moment to breathe in. Even if you're not wearing a Tallis, it's a great moment to even if you're not wearing a Tallis, it's a great moment to sit up a little straighter.

Breathe in and feel a sense of divine aura around you, the shipping is embracing you.

And breathing into all your bones and sinews and muscles and ligaments and everything holding you together this morning.

I'm gonna put my talus down on top of my shoulders and take the opportunity to roll my shoulders a little bit

to work out any of the tension that might have built up overnight.

I want to give a shout out to Susanna Darwin, who always joins us from Florida. But when she was here in Chicago a couple of weeks ago for her bat mitzvah, also 60th birthday, celebrating all of the above. She brought me this guitar that she has had for years I should have brought the the little booklet that she made me explaining its whole story downstairs to so you can see that but it's this beautiful guitar. And I wanted to say thank you because this week's Torah portion is all about the gifts that people bring for the Mishkan. And we'll read a little bit about it later. And, you know, some people's love language is physical touch some people's love language is words of affirmation. Some people's love language is acts of service. You know, when people do nice things for you. And some people's love language is gifts. And it sort of seems In this week's Torah portion, like God's love language is gifts. But not necessarily because God likes fancy things. But maybe because when we give gifts we feel we like feel really good when you give a good gift. You're like, oh, I nailed it. Anyway, so Susanna, I just wanted to say thank you because I played this I compared the sound of this to the sound of my other guitar for my children. And they couldn't tell how much higher quality of a guitar this was.

So well. Part of the gift was you saying yes, I would be delighted to play this guitar.

Thank you for that. Hmm. And just so you all know she didn't buy it for me she bought it for herself years ago and then bequeath it to me literally it was in my will and then I thought wait a minute I'm not playing it was a sure play it

Oh, all right, here we go. Alright, so as we as we get into Modena, Nemo Danny this morning, and we sing the line Vasily Mikdash, Misha hunty, Beto ham, the the line is from a few weeks ago and make Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell inside of you. But the theme is repeated in this week's Torah portion

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Grateful Am I,

as I sit

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this soul you gave me your grade faith in me. May I be grateful?

May I be good

SULI me

I won last year

right we're just having fun here, you know, just just little morning playtime. I want spoke to somebody who was really trying to get into Jewish ritual, but also found it a little intimidating and complicated and wordy. And he said his morning ritual was to sit at the table and draw for an hour. I said

do you have anything in particular like a coloring book? And he was like, No, I just take you know, I just have a journal and I draw I said for a whole hour every day, you know? So

as my friend who's a meditator says, you can turn zipping and unzipping your pants into a spiritual ritual if you bring enough consciousness to it, you know? And so I feel like we are we're just trying with these words these melodies to bring consciousness and also playfulness and gratitude into our day. Begin the day there so Oh, Happy Birthday Irene

Yong Woo, that it's I'm so young with that. It's I'm yeah, I'm glad it's me. That it's on there.

All right.

Think about any any little bit of wisdom you might want to grace us with at the end of minion think about it, you know, birthday wisdom. All right, let's go into a little cool honey Shama every breath every breath is praise Every breath is a gift.

So go ahead and take a few take a few more breaths into all the tight places in your body. We're going to see how this one goes I'm going to attempt to do this one with you know sort of two parts but I'll first play with the individual parts are so that you can hear them

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you will light up the world and the heavens with kindness every new every day you renew them, make them new. All these works of creation from the beginning of time until this moment or hydrogel to entire bodies can hold on to Mahira they will borrow Hurtado I yield Sahami Auro

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I was talking with somebody about what they're expecting for and hoping for when they come to services. Are you hoping for hard hitting sermons? Where you hear the Rabbi say exactly what you want to hear? What are you hoping for?

You know, are you hoping to sing? Are you hoping to see friends, and the person said, I'm coming to be filled.

I'm coming to be filled and refilled. And they cited this, tune this, this prayer right before the Shema, I have our Rabbi, I have to know that we are filled, God fills us up with love with breath with all of the capacities to navigate the harsh cruel world that we live in. But then we affirm that we're connected to it with the Shema and then we say, You know what, and we're going to put love back out there. But in order to put love back out there, we also have to receive it. And we can receive it not just from people who love us, although people who love us really help. But also being in environments like this where we remember that just fundamentally we are loved we are in community.

We're children of the Divine.

So I want to just invite you to take a moment right now. Place your own hand on your heart, I'm holding my seat seat along with it

and just say to yourself,

I am loved

I am loved

as you breathe in and breathe that I am loved

I am loved

Hey, Rabbi, I have Daniel I am loved deeply, abundantly completely.

With all my secrets and flaws I'm loved

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Alma Zuzo with beta Ha, we shall rehearse.

All right, I want to go into a healing prayer.

And so go ahead and share the names of anyone you're thinking of this morning.

Can everyone on arenes long list

of course, anyone else in your life you're out on the second the second screen of the list

anyone else who wants to take a moment to put names in the chat?

I wanted to give us

a little visual this morning. I know every single day. We're praying for the not just the health and welfare of everyone who's still being held hostage in Gaza and all of the millions of people millions of Israelis but millions of Palestinians are also

sitting waiting with bated breath to know if they will be okay if they will have food to make it through the day.

And so

I wanted to just share with you

picture a couple pictures from the trip that I took a few weeks ago.

This is from the tent that is outside the Prime Minister's house. This says road SEMO Tom Hyeme we want them alive.

And it's a tent it's called hostage square there's a much bigger one in Tel Aviv

but people are eating and sleeping and living in this these tents this tent outside of the Prime Minister's house to say we want a deal we don't want to fight if it means not getting our people home and so they're just out there every day trying to pressure the government to bring their family and friends home alive and so you can just see every single one of these people is a person and

I feel like just knowing

a face and an age

and so I have you know I have these faces and ages you can see their faces here

and more

more and more

people sleeping out here

and there's this feeling of we don't know where they are we don't know if they're safe we don't know if they're still alive.

And so I just I want to hold all the people whose faces we can see and imagine and hold inside of our inside of our hearts and all the people whose faces we don't know you know and can't picture because there aren't pictures of them on posters all over

all over the world

that because they're just average everyday people who are trying to make it through the day

so I just want to hold I want to hold all of them

as we pray for healing

and we pray for an end to bloodshed and violence

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complete healing of body and mind and spirit

lasting healing to everyone whose name you read you wrote every one of your thinking about

our hearts today

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Okay, I wanted to take just just a little minute for a little Torah, little minute for a little Torah

show you this

This small section of the nope, nope, no. Is that it? Is that what you're seeing? Are you seeing my screen? Are you seeing too far? Yeah. Okay. So the Parsha begins

with these are the instruct and get what God says to Moses gather the people. But yeah, kill. That's the name of the Parsha

which, you know, like we've just been through a whole we've just been the whole thing last week was the golden calf, you know, like the most devastating internal incident thus far in the journey of the Jewish people since Egypt. And Moses needs to kind of help the Jewish people heal, and help them get refocused. And so, the first instruction given is Shabbat. You know, a reminder that Shabbat is gonna be really important for you guys. And then the rest of the Parsha is is all this stuff, you know. And I wanted to just, I wanted to, you know, it seems like a bunch of repetitive stuff men and women all whose hearts moved them. Via Vova Anna sheme. by Nassim calm, the Dave Lev, anyone who had a generous heart, made an offering and elevation offering of gold bringing brooches, earrings, rings, pendants, gold objects of all kinds. Does this remind you of anything?

Gold objects of all kinds?

What just made the calf? Yes, yes, it's it's sort of like what my friend Yael said about the zipper. And the pants, like anything can be turned into an idol or can be made spiritual. Almost Yeah, I don't know, there are probably limits to what I just said. But the gold that was put in the service of idolatry, and the service of doing something that was like profoundly unhealthy for this people,

they're now going to put into the service of a community building project that will create space for the divine. And for the divine and each other, they will work together to do that. And they will bring precisely the things that were kind of tainted by their use and the golden calf. No, now they're going to be redeemed by their use in the Mishkan. And then it talks about all these different, you know, pieces of all this stuff. Anyone who possessed blue, purple, crimson yarn, fine linen, goats hair, all the things we've we've read this list before, because this also appears before the incidence of the golden calf and Porsche Truma. And Porsche titsa Vai, you see all of the same stuff, everyone who would make gifts of silver or copper and bring them as gifts to God, everyone who possessed acacia wood, which, by the way, apparently doesn't even grow in the desert. And we learned that maybe Jacob way back when planted acacia trees, because he knew that his grandchildren were going to be liberated from Egypt or grandchildren's grandchildren, and would need a specific kind of wood for the Mishcon. And so he thought about it decades, years in advance,

sort of like the definition of really sustainable, really sustainable living and thinking, and the women spun with their own hands, and they brought what they had spun all of these different yarns. Anyway, all of this whole section

is part of for me, why the concept of Mishcon our Mishkan is so powerful, because it this is one of the only sections in the Torah, where you really see men and women mentioned almost equally, which I know it's, it's pretty binary, but also it's Torah, it's 5000 years old, 4000 years old, whatever it's old. And the fact that they're mentioning here, women and men and women and men that this like really feels egalitarian on some level.

And that that was a value, not just the egalitarian, but also there was a real value on what people brought on their own gifts of the heart.

Anyway, in looking at this, is there anything that this just like, brings up for you or as you're seeing this makes you makes you think?

I have one question going way back to when they left Egypt. Yeah. And I think we've asked this before, but wasn't a lot of this valuable stuff the Egyptians originally. So I'm kinda like, what does that say? Like?

And I can't remember if that was given freely by the Egyptians or if they took it. So

does anybody want to respond to that? I mean, I I definitely have thoughts on that. But I wonder if anybody wants to jump in. I

think it depends upon your perspective and who you're asking whether it was freely given or whether it was taken.

I'm not sure I agree. Oh, yeah, Susanna? Well, Hashem told them to take it

at least twice.

And why might she have done that?

Because for all the labor that they did this is what the Rabbi's, do. They interpret it for all the slave labor, they were finally paid for it. And I just think it's a cop out. But that's the tradition. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of COP outs from me, those men, male rabbis, that's one of them. So that very interesting. I mean, this is one of the places I don't think it's a cop out, I think that they were way ahead of their time. And that was reparations. It was exactly what you said, these, these people did free labor for hundreds of years. And if they left Egypt, with the resentment of hundreds of years of labor, without anything without a dime, or a piece of gold, to show for it, they would leave resenting the Egyptians. But instead, God says, Ask for all this stuff, like get get stuff on the way out, so that the Egyptians have the opportunity to give you reparations and to feel in some way that they have, not that they could possibly make chuva for years and years of slavery, but that they that they did something to begin to pay you back. And that will lighten their conscience, and it will ease your sense of resentment that you may be leaving here with, it will make it easier when I tell you in the Torah later, you shall not hate the Egyptian. Because they because you were strangers in the land of Egypt, it will help you remember when the Egyptians were good to you, you know that people human beings are not firm and fixed, you can't just decide, oh, that kind of person. They're bad. And they're always going to be bad to me. Because actually, the Egyptians, they were good to the Israelites for many, many years before slavery. And then right at the tail end, God says, Let them show you that they have it in them to be good and generous. Take, you know, take stuff with you. And so the Israelites take stuff with them. And it is with, you know the stuff who knows, they might have produced some of this stuff themselves for their masters in Egypt that they then took with them. So I think that there's you know, it's it's like every conversation about reparations. Is this like, is this like blood money is this should we feel good about this? When you ride in a cab in Israel in a Mercedes, you know, that was like a basically a gift from the German government in perpetuity because of the Holocaust. You know, do you feel sort of like yeah, thanks. Because you owed us one? Or does it feel kind of like you like, gross? Yeah, just like real, real serious, live grown ass adult conversations.

Alright, so Susan, now do you think

it's complicated? So, yeah.

I mean, yeah, go for it. But they're just thinking about those connections that you bring with you. And whose load did it lighten? You know, and there's a lot of, because now they're, they're carrying all the heavy stuff with them.

Yeah, yeah. But maybe putting into the stuff.

Those, like you said, feelings of resentment. So now we can lay that aside.

But you're going to be reminded of it every time you look at this Mishkan. So there it is. But, yeah, I'm reminded that you took it, I just feel like,

I have been a problem that I don't feel good if I don't, not that I didn't earn it if it wasn't part of the deal. So I feel like would be reminded that I took it

very interesting. I still I still imagine that that might feel different depending on who you are. You know, there are some people who are like, I would never take a gift, I would never take a handout, you know, like, I need to, I need to do this work on my own, and other people who are like, Oh my god, I will take whatever I can get Thank you, like I need, you know, like, I need help and I need to, I want to feed my children and I want to be healthy on the road. So thank you.

And then every prep like everything in between complex feelings, feelings of gratitude, feelings of you know, lingering anger that will never go away.

We're all built a little bit differently.

And then Alright, so I'm just going to move on here and then we'll we'll wrap up. But we meet here bit silo, son of Ori, son of horror of the tribe of Judah, who is endowed with a divine spirit of skill, ability and knowledge hakama tuna with that.

And this guy becomes the master craftsman making the designs for all of the work and the stone setting, giving directions. There's a major art school in Israel called the bit sallow school.

And we see that Moses is not just you know, it's not it's not all Moses here doing all the work. Moses is delegating to artists and artisans and architect

Let's stone cutters and designers and interior designers

to create this beautiful beautiful space for the people to connect with the divine

All right, I'm gonna I'm gonna close it down here and we're gonna go into Katy Chateau mourners Kaddish

both to honor all the learning we just did and also to honor the people who you're thinking about.

Is there anybody who wants to leave Scottish this morning and also share the name of whoever it is that you're thinking of?

I can Licata tion memory of my husband's grandmother, who was born and actually this is our Hebrew death date. Giselle wuogon star.

And David Rose anyone else?

Cash for my mother Muriel corn but

thank you, Glen.

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I want to do one more I want to do one more tune with the loop pedal for fun because we're here

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are pleased to be with you. And with you and all of you. Ah figuring it out figuring it out week by week making them happen. All right. Have a great Wednesday, everyone.

You've been listening to contact high up production of Mishkan Chicago. If you are inspired or informed by this episode, please leave us a five star rating on Apple podcasts so that others can encounter our work. And if you appreciate what Mishkan is doing, I invite you to join as a builder or make a donation on our website at Mishkan chicago.org Shabbat shalom.