ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם
Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst (Exodus 25:8).
God is wanting to dwell in our midst, betokh, inside, each one of us. It’s like the whole universe – everything that happens to you – is really God knocking at your door, asking to be let in.
But the thing is, in order to let God in, in order for God to actually dwell in you, you have to make space inside. I don’t know about you, but my inner world is pretty crowded, stuffed tight with worries and thoughts and judgments and self hatred and pain. It’s so crowded in there, it’s no wonder I often can’t feel the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence.
The Shekhinah needs a room of Her own. That’s what the Torah is telling us – make a mikdash, a sanctuary, for her, a special place that is marked off, designated, just for her, where everything else recedes. If you really want to spend time with someone, you don’t take along your kids and your dog and all your other buddies. You designate this time and space to be alone with that special person. Shabbat is like that, a mikdash of time, time set aside for God, and we guard it against the intrusion of the weekday with great zealousness. That’s what the mikdash inside you needs to be as well: a sacred space that is set aside for the Divine Presence, with boundaries and walls – like a physical structure – that ensure its purity.
But if it’s so crowded inside us, how do we find the space? What do we do with all the worries and judgments and thoughts and pain that are constantly demanding our attention? Sometimes, in fact, it can be just one of those, a particularly anxious thought, for instance, that can, all on its own, overwhelm us and take over the entirety of who we think we are, crowding our psyche with its energy. How can we possibly make space when we are like that? We ask the parts to help us. We ask the anxious part and the sad part and all the others that have joined the party to please pull some of their energy out of us, to just pull back a little bit so that there is room inside us for something else, so that there is room for God, too, to dwell here.
Our parts are the building blocks – they are the gold and silver and wood and tapestries from which we make the container. It is their stepping back that creates the walls of a sanctuary, that creates the empty space, the openness into which the divine can enter.
And it’s worth their while. It’s worth it for the anxious part and the depressed part to step back a little. We can explain that to them: It’s worth it for you because then you get company, and not just any company, but a special kind of company, divine company, presence and compassion and peace and love, unconditional love, right there beside you, with you, in whatever you are going through.
The rabbis say that the windows of the Bet Hamikdash (Temple) were made in an unusual manner. While it was the normal way of windows to be narrow on the outside and wide on the inside, to let the light from the outside shine and brighten the indoor space, the opposite was the case for the windows of the Temple; they were narrow on the inside and wide on the outside, in order to let the divine light shine outward.
It is the same with this mikdash inside us. It doesn’t consume light. It provides light. If we can get all the flooding parts inside us to take one tiny step back, then right in the center of us, we can open up room for the divine to dwell. And out of that central space, mimkomkha, “from Your place,” the energy can flow out to all the aching parts of us that need it. The light can spread into the darkness, just as Shabbat infuses the week.
That’s what wants to happen. That’s why God was (and is) knocking at your door in the first place – in order to be there with you, in order to be a Presence in the angst and the turmoil and the pain of being a human in this world, in order to love the parts of you that feel unloved and unlovable.
We desperately need the Light, but She can’t come in unless She has a room of Her own.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska at Pexels
