Last Shabbat, I witnessed the hundredth anniversary of the SAJ , Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s home base on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Virtually, of course, but I felt very much present in the small bright sanctuary of what was once called the Society for Advancement of Judaism. Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann, the current occupant of the rabbinic post began the service by quoting our patriarch Jacob who once said about the location of a ladder extending between Heaven and earth, “Mah Norah HaMakom Hazeh, How Awesome is This Place, “It is here in this sanctuary,” Rabbi Lauren told us (and I paraphrase), “that so many services, weddings, funerals, baby namings, have occurred over the years. It is here that life happened.”
When the Israelites embark this week to build a Tabernacle in Parashat Terumah, they are not striving to build an ordinary place, but an extraordinary one. They imagine a place full of color and light, one that even God would be proud to reside in. The description in the Torah is meant to bring this unique environment to life, even thousands of years after its construction. And, while the Torah does manage to do so, it rarely is able to show us the life that occurred inside of that sacred space. We cannot smell the sacrifices, nor hear the songs of our ancestors, nor picture the thousands of individuals impacted by it.
This is true of our own CSS sanctuary as well. Most times when I come into it, especially during the pandemic, it is empty. And, yet life throbs within it, much the same way Rabbi Lauren described the SAJ sanctuary. The countless lives impacted by the space are embedded in the room: they sing, dance, cry, shout and laugh, a living memory of the amazing community we have created in Western New York. The joy of building places like our own, is the way they will be used to enhance our lives and the life of our community. In this way, they are more than physical spaces, they are traveling Tabernacles each of us carry within us wherever we go.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex
Bonus: My article in eJewish Philanthropy – “Two years is a really long time”