Parshat Terumah: ‘Aiming at Eternity’
Sir Christopher Wren, the English architect, mathematician, and physicist, widely remembered as the designer of London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral, died at the age of 90 on February 25, 1723. That was 303 years ago this week. The black marble floor beneath the dome of Saint Paul’s bears a Latin inscription memorializing Wren, stating in part: “Lector si monumentum requiris circumspice” – “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”
While the cathedral, his masterpiece, is certainly an apt and enduring monument to Wren’s life and genius, it represents but a fraction of his work. Following the Great Fire of 1666 alone, Wren was responsible for restoring and rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London. He was thus speaking from ample personal experience when he wrote “Architecture aims at eternity.”
The nature of that “eternity” is open to interpretation. It seems clear that Wren was, in great part, asserting that an architect’s work should be executed in a solid, physically durable manner — long-lasting and all but indestructible — intended to stand and function for centuries, and thus to be at least suggestive of eternity.
As a celebrated architect of places of worship, perhaps Wren also was articulating his mission to connect mere mortals to the divine, and to those transcendent values and principles associated with worship and faith and religious engagement.
Yet another plausible understanding of Wren’s axiom is that he eschewed short-lived flirtations with fleeting fashions and passing fads. The aim of the master architect is to build in an idiom that will continue to speak to and to inspire future generations.
Conversely, some understand Wren’s sought-after eternity to mean that architecture should make room for inevitable changes in taste and technology, while remaining true to the original vision.
The Mishkan, the Tabernacle, is described in Parshat Terumah in comprehensive and minute detail, based on a design, a divine “blueprint” revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai (see Exodus 23:30). Every loop, hook, socket, plank, peg, curtain, and clasp is specified. Yet that architectural venture was but a temporary structure, designed to be portable. Though decidedly non-permanent, the Mishkan surely aimed at eternity, or, more precisely, at the Eternal: “Let them build me a Sanctuary that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).
It was not construction of a durable edifice, a “cathedral” in the wilderness, that was to convey a sense of the eternal to our Israelite forebears. It was the edifying and enduring structure of the covenantal lifestyle they shared. Not the priestly precincts, but the priestly spiritual and moral responsibilities of every single Israelite imparted a sense of the eternal to the former slaves now struggling to understand and to shape their own freedom.
As a practical matter, the non-permanent nature of that early sanctuary was, of course, necessary, and served the People Israel well during our wilderness wanderings. The message of a non-permanent sanctuary has continued to serve their often peripatetic, migratory, and marginalized descendants just as effectively at many stages of our history.
In the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe ben Chaim Alshekh, primarily of Safed and Damascus, wrote that “it is a duty for each and every one of the Children of Israel to make a sanctuary within his own heart, a place in which the Holy Presence may dwell. If all Jews build a tabernacle within their hearts, the Lord will dwell within the heart of each and every one of them.” The architecture (and the architect) of such a tabernacle aims at eternity.
The Amshinover Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Kalish (1860-1917) taught similarly that “it is the duty of every Jew to bring holiness into his own home, to make one’s personal life, the tenor and atmosphere in one’s home absolutely suffused with holiness, ‘that I may dwell among them.’”
In his commentary Nachalat Chamishah, published in New York in 1949, Rabbi Chaim Moshe Grotynski writes: “They asked Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk where the sanctuary of the Holy One is to be found. He answered, ‘Wherever we let him in.’”
Additionally, the contemporary Christian pastor Richard Ellis echoes these rabbinic luminaries: “Although I cannot build a tabernacle with a cover of pure gold and a table of acacia wood, I will try to make my home a tabernacle, suffused with God’s light. I will try to make my life a tabernacle as I try to open myself to God’s blessings every moment.”
The architecture of such a tabernacle aims at eternity.
The Mishkan was a temporary measure for those of the wilderness period. Its design — readily dismantled and repeatedly reassembled — reflected its provisional function. Yet that structure of principled impermanence continues, so many centuries later, to illuminate the meaning of the eternal more effectively than the most gifted architect might hope to achieve with brick or steel or marble.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, brings that message close to home: “The design for the tabernacle came from above, but the wherewithal came from below, freely tendered without a trace of compulsion…. The popular voluntarism that enabled Moses to erect Israel’s mobile sanctuary is the operative paradigm for the American Jewish community.”
We have long since left the wilderness. Gratefully embracing both our cherished freedom and the sanctified lifestyle first represented by the Mishkan, then faithfully transmitted to us, mutatis mutandis, through the millennia, may we continue to build tabernacles in our hearts and in our homes, with our families and with our neighbors. May we be open to God’s blessings and attuned to God’s Presence.
On this Shabbat Parshat Terumah and beyond, may we continue to aim at eternity.
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