First Post - Really more of a blogette...

We all have short attention spans. I get it. Less very often can indeed be more. I'd like to offer just a single, quick insight from our Biblical texts, so you can connect to our ancient heritage each and every week. Just a morsel of Torah! So even though every weekly Torah portion is multiple chapters long, I am going to endeavor to pick just one idea in each parashah, and share a short idea or concept that I hope will be meaningful and worth your time. So we're still going to call this a blog, but really it's going to be more of a "blogette." I'm pretty sure that's a real word (even though I just made it up...). Sound like a good plan? Ok, here we go:

This week's Torah portion is Terumah, from the middle of the Book of Exodus. It's kind of an odd place to begin a new blog, being heavy on laws and not a lot of narrative. However, we really think of the whole Torah as a circle that we go around every year, with no beginning and no end, so I guess any place is just as good as any other. Much of Terumah focuses on building plans for the construction of a Tabernacle, which is sort of like a synagogue-on-the-go for the Israelites wandering in the desert.

With God decreeing such specific plans for how to construct this holy space, it's fascinating to me that the Tabernacle looked nothing like the later, permanent structure in Jerusalem, namely the Temple of Solomon. A thousand years later, after two Temples had been destroyed, we shifted over to synagogues... which again looked nothing like either of these ancient models!

Do any two synagogues look alike today?? This may seem surprising, given the Torah's instructions, except there's a key phrase at the start of our Torah portion which might help us make sense of this. God instructs Moses to accept gifts for the construction "from every person whose heart is so moved." Worshipping God isn't meant to be uniform. In each generation, our hearts have moved us to pray, connect, and converse with the Divine in our own unique ways. Our prayer spaces across Jewish history reflect that diversity, and it sounds to me like God is thrilled that this was, and still is, the case.