This week we are introduced to the concept of the mishkan. The word mishkan, normally translated as tabernacle, literally means something like “dwelling place,” from the root shakhen meaning dwell or abide or reside, implying a permanent settling down and inhabiting. God’s dwelling place.
Looking For God
But where is God’s dwelling place? In synagogue? In that original desert mishkan or the bet hamikdash, the temple of long ago? Where does God dwell now and how can I find God? Ok. I know that God exists and I know there is a way of accessing that presence and calm and strength and support. But how do I get there? I want that, I know there is that inexpressible substance that could nourish me and comfort me and calm me, I know it’s somewhere, but where? Feeling the urgency, the desperation, maybe the panic, the restlessness, the sense of searching around high and low, grasping, begging, wanting, looking: Where are You? Where do You dwell now?
The Israelites, too, were struggling with this question. They had just come away from an intense experience of divine revelation at Har Sinai and before that, at the Red Sea and the exodus from Egypt. They saw God’s hand in the world, they saw thunder and lightning, they heard God’s voice. But how is such knowledge of God sustained in one’s daily life? To have such a peak experience would only make you all the more hungry and desperate for it – I’ve tasted those drops of honey, they are so sweet, how do I get that back? Where did it go? How do I keep that nourishment coming? I need more of it, grasping, looking, where are you? How do I get there again?
Where? Inside You
And so the answer our parsha offers is – ve’asu li mikdash veshakhanti betokham. Make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst (Exodus 25:8). Veshakhanti betokham. I will dwell in their midst. You want to know where God dwells? In your midst, collectively and personally, in the midst of the camp and in the midst of you.
Betokh. Inside. Inside, not outside. This is really important. Our habitual tendency is so strongly to look outside ourselves, to look to another person, to an authority, to external success and validation, something, anything, that might feed us. Maybe feeling again that desperation, your hands out like a beggar, please, sir, may I have some more. Perhaps that’s what idolatry is, what the golden calf was about, the need for something outside of us to sustain us.
But here we learn that God’s dwelling place is betokh, inside. All that external search – turn it around, turn it inward, betokh, inside your very own body.
Your Body As A Mishkan
Perhaps imagining your body as a physical mishkan. Indeed, all the details of the mishkan have been compared to the human body. The menorah is like your eyes, the altar like your stomach, all the external framing and curtains like your skin and bones, and in the middle, the centerpiece, in the innermost Holy of Holies, the aron, the ark, is like your heart, the place where God dwells.
Taking a minute to feel all your organs and limbs, your whole body as a walking mobile mishkan, the dwelling place of God on earth. Your body is God’s house. You are the merkavah, the chariot that carries God through the pathways of this world as you traverse your journey. You carry the Shekhinah, the divine presence – from the same root as mishkan – you carry your piece of that Shekhinah inside you. Sensing the inner space inside where that might feel true, all the organs like furniture that support the working of the house, and throughout the space of your whole body, especially your heart, there is this divine substance that suffuses you. Perhaps feeling it as your neshamah, your soul, the soul that God breathed into you and continues to breathe into you with each breath, your divine life force. There is something so non-concrete about that, that soul that God placed inside us, like air, like a breath, unseen yet powerful, that pure soul that belongs to eternity, that is housed inside this physical frame of ours. That is God dwelling inside us.
Hayei olam nata betokheinu, we say. Eternal life You have planted inside us, betokheinu, inside us, that same word betokh. What has been planted in us, what resides in us, is a piece of eternity, this sacred life force that is beyond this moment, beyond this time or this world. Maybe imagining yourself walking along and feeling the power of carrying that divine spark with you wherever you go, being God’s mishkan, God’s dwelling place, how sacred and honored and dignified and essential that makes you. Yes, essential, very much needed in this life to carry God in the world.
Pausing The External Search
And so going back to the desperation and restlessness of our constant search for God, for peace, for succor and support. Where are You? Where is it? I want You so much. But You feel hidden so much of the time. How do I find You?! Going back to that sensation and asking those searching parts that are always looking outward, asking them to pause their search for a moment, to turn around and face inward. No longer running, but being right here, exactly where you are, turning towards yourself. God is right here inside you.
Relaxing Back Into Yourself
Ok. But still, where exactly is it inside? How do I find it in me? It is less a looking and finding and more an uncovering, a relaxing back into yourself, like lying back into the grass or into a net that holds you, lying back into yourself, back into what is, into your own presence. It’s like you’ve been looking frantically everywhere for your glasses and then you discover they are right here on your nose. No more searching, just a feeling into their presence. Or it’s like looking everywhere for a lost key, running around to all the places you’ve been, and meanwhile, they are sitting right here in your pocket. All that is required is to pause the frantic search for a moment and relax into exactly where you are, resting into yourself. Sometimes it’s the search itself that prevents you from feeling it. It’s the energy of desperation that does not allow you to relax into what always has been true. God is right here inside you. It’s not a finding, but a return, that’s why it’s called teshuva, a return to home inside you, to a familiar place that fits you exactly, that is you, like lying back into the molded place in your mattress, there is no searching, only a relaxing back into the familiar, into yourself, into your soul essence, into the God spark that resides in you always.
Always
That’s the thing about this divine spark that resides in us, this veshakhanti, this “I will dwell” part of God in each of us. It is permanent, it is steady, it is for good. That’s what the word shakhen means. It abides. It stays. It is not a yes or no question, sometimes we have it and sometimes we don’t. It’s not – if you’re good, you get it, if you’re bad, you don’t. It is simply always there, awaiting our discovery, like a tree rooted firmly in the ground. Indeed there is an etz hahayim betokh hagan (Genesis 2:9), a tree of life betokh, in the middle of the garden, in the middle of your garden, too, inside you. A tree of life giving energy that stands rooted and steady. Maybe you’ve passed by the tree a thousand times and never noticed it. Just take a minute to pause and notice it now. You have a God tree planted inside you that you’ve been overlooking your whole life. It lives inside you. It abides.
In the Midst of Our Mess
Yes, lots can be going on around that tree. Most of the time, a storm rages around it, and yet there it stands, steady and unmoving, only its top branches swaying in the wind Later in Leviticus, the Torah says that God is shokhen, dwells, betokh tumotam, in the midst of their impurities (Leviticus 16:26), in the midst of our mess, of our weakness and fears and challenges and striving and wounds and mistakes, in the midst of all of those hurricane winds, that God tree in us stands steady as ever, calmly witnessing it all and loving us through it. It is a place of abiding calm.
The Calm Alongside The Stress
Abiding calm. Can you sense that there is such a place in you? Don’t try to shift out of where you are right now into that place; it exists right alongside whatever else you are sensing, anxiety or rage or hurt or fear. You can be anxious and still the abiding calm abides. If you let yourself be anxious, if you don’t fight it, if you are present with the anxiety, then actually you become the calm that sees it, you become the tree that stands betokh, in the midst of the garden, perhaps a wild garden at times, but here you are in the divine calm of the tree alongside, amidst the wildness. You become that presence, the Shekhinah, the one that dwells, simply dwells with it all – yes, it can be so hard and sad at times, but it’s ok – not running away from the experience, but being present to it, abiding in it, betokh, in the midst of the camp, in the midst of your own chaotic emotional experience, whatever it is.
Not Abandoning Yourself
Which means not leaving yourself. To have God residing inside you means to have this divine presence that stays with you no matter what. It walks with you through the desert with all the confusion and doubt and struggle the Israelites experienced in that desert, still the mishkan stayed with them, still that divine abiding calm stays with you. it is inside you also as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, ki atah imadi (Psalm 23:4), for You, God, are not just with me, but within me, imadi; I carry You right here inside me, a little light always lit inside as I walk through the dark, as I go through life as well as come close to death. You travel with me wherever I go. The difference between a mishkan and a temple is that the mishkan is mobile, a mobile dwelling place for God, carrying that God spark along right there tucked inside us.
Staying As a Form of Love
I want to say that there is love here of the highest quality. To stay through the desert and the valleys, through our very lowest moments of shame and grief and fear, to hold our hands and not abandon us when we are a crying sniveling mess, that is how God loves us. It is a love that is shokhen, that dwells calmly and imperturbably through time, year after year waiting patiently for us to awaken to our light. God wants us so much that no matter how many times we shut the door and turn away, still, God is shokhen, God stays on and lives inside us, in some tiny corner of our heart, even when we say no, still, like that undaunted lover, God abides, ever awaiting our return, ever awaiting our acknowledgement and claiming of this piece of ourselves, of who we really are.
Because perhaps it is ultimately not so much about who God is but about who God made us to be and to become; it is about our own blossoming into that divine potential for abiding loving calm planted inside us long ago. And it’s ok if it takes time. Of course it takes time. Being patient and gentle with ourselves in the process is itself part of learning to be shokhen, to abide with love, like God, through it all.
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