Points to Ponder #19: Terumah ⎸Translated by Leah Hartman
Painting by Michelle Calkins
God is infinite. The whole world is filled with His presence, and “no place is void of Him.” His holy Name suggests the words “was,” “is,” and “will be.” He is the place of the world and the world is not His place. It is forbidden to “capture” Him in a statue or image. So where on earth did the strange idea of building Him a tabernacle (a mishkan, literally a dwelling place) come from? Can you squeeze infinity into a box?
The Heavens and the Earth Cannot Contain You
Interestingly, the people in charge of building the Tabernacle and the Holy Temple asked the very same question. In his speech at the inauguration of the Holy Temple, King Solomon said:
But will God really dwell on the Earth? Even the heavens to their uttermost reaches cannot contain You, how much less this House that I have built! (Kings I 8:27)
King Solomon’s question was never answered, but the Jewish Sages placed his perplexity in the mouth of Moses, the builder of the original Tabernacle, and there offered an answer to the question:
When The Holy Blessed One said to Moses, “They should make me a Temple,” Moses said: Master of the Universe, it is written “Behold the Heavens to its uttermost reaches cannot contain You,” and You say, “They should make me a Temple?!” The Holy Blessed One replied: “Moses, it is not as you think. Put twenty boards in the north, twenty in the south, and eight in the west, and furthermore I will descend and contract My presence below.” (Yalkut Shimoni Exodus 25, 365)
The question that Moses and King Solomon pose is asked by anyone who senses God’s infiniteness, and therefore fails to understand how it is possible to contain Him in a finite and limited structure. This question applies not only to the Tabernacle and the Temple, but to every instance of God’s revelation that manifests in specific details and not others, e.g. the choice of one nation, one language, one land, one Torah, one system of commandments, etc. All of these things beg the same question: Why this particular thing and not that particular thing? How is it possible to sanctify anything specific when no finite framework can ever contain the infinite?
My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts
A trace of an answer can be found in God’s response to Moses’ question, “It is not as you think.” This answer is a variation on the well-known verses from the book of Isaiah, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts and your ways are not Mine… As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts [higher] than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
One of the questions these verses raise is why do they speak of “thoughts” and “ways” in the plural? This suggests that there are at least two types of human thought, both of which fail to grasp the mystery of God.
The first type of thought may be called idolatrous thought. Idolatry seeks to capture Godliness in a statue or an image, to give it a face and even grant it facial features. It wants to concretize and anthropomorphize the Divine to make it fit into a human measure. In a certain sense, idolatry seeks to “create” God anew, this time in the image of man.
That idolatrous thought is fundamentally different from Divine thought is relatively clear (at least to us who live in a culture shaped for millennia by abstract monotheistic thinking). We desire to go beyond the details and grasp the general pattern behind them—the laws behind the phenomena, the reasons behind the results, etc. But what is the second kind of thought that fails to grasp Divinity?
The second kind of thought is that which insists God remains abstract and indifferent to details, and to which God replied, “It is not as you think.” This thought, which we can name intellectual thought, is the polar opposite of the idolatrous one. It does not concretize Divinity but rather makes it abstract; does not diminish it but expands it; does not anthropomorphize it but elevates it and distances it from humanity. Nevertheless, God is not “satisfied” with this thought either and brushes it away. Why?
The answer is that even though intellectual thought arises from the highest layer of man, it is still human thought. We humans, as we become intellectual and sophisticated, begin to look down upon “small and insignificant” details, and we view any interest in dealing with them as belittling. We regard the abstract and general as superior to the concrete and specific. But who says they are? If an infinite and unlimited Creator so desires, He can dwell even in small and specific things.
The Kabbalist Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai put it this way: “If you say that God has power only in the unlimited [=abstract and general] and not in the limited [=tangible and specific], then you take away from His completeness.” If God is truly infinite and unlimited, then He is not limited to the realm of the abstract either.
Everywhere and Somewhere
Okay, so God can dwell in details and not just in the realm of abstract ideas. But why would He choose certain, particular details—this dwelling place in that land etc.? Why not dwell in all details equally? The English poet William Blake wrote beautifully about how Divine infinity dwells in every detail:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
If we adopt this line of thinking, every flower and grain of sand could be a tabernacle for God, and we’d have no need to build Him a single specific one!
Here we reach the deepest point of all. According to Blake’s approach, God resides in the details, but He resides in all of them equally. Such a descent into the world of particulars does not go the distance because it is still present in the particulars in a very general way. A true jump into the world of details will penetrate it with all its specificity, i.e. will prefer one thing over another. Without this, the Divine will be present only in a general particularity, not a truly particular one.
When God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” He wants to shatter both types of thought—the idolatrous-materializing one and the intellectual-abstracting one. He shows us that He can be both everywhere and in one specific place. Can you squeeze infinity into a box? No, but a truly boundless infinity can be simultaneously both outside all boxes and inside one .