What Does G-D Really Want? Reflections on Parashat Terumah (Exodus 25:1–27:19)

There is a moment in this week's Torah portion that is easy to rush past, but if you slow down and prayerfully consider it, it changes everything. G-D says to Moses: "Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him." (Exodus 25:2)

Not from every person. Not from every taxpayer. Not from every dues-paying member. From every person whose soul wholly moves them.

This is the opening of Parashat Terumah — the portion that launches one of the most architecturally detailed passages in the entire Torah — and it begins not with a blueprint, but with a call to the soul. There is not a promise of return or a guarantee of blessing only a call to those who wholeheartedly desire to give to the L-RD that HIS presence would dwell among them.

A Sanctuary Built on Willingness

The Israelites have just left Egypt. They are weeks out from slavery, still learning what it means to be free people in relationship with a G-D who liberated them. And now G-D asks them to build something. A Mishkan — a Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary, a dwelling place for the divine in their midst.

What strikes me every time I return to this portion is the deliberate emphasis on voluntariness. The Hebrew word terumah (תְּרוּמָה) means an offering or contribution — something set apart, something elevated. But it is only a terumah if it comes freely. Coerced giving has a different name entirely.

This is not tax. It is an invitation. It is not coerced it is to be given freely from the whole soul. But it participation with G-D for HIS purposes.

The Architecture of Meaning

From that invitation, the Torah launches into extraordinary specificity. Gold, silver, copper. Blue, purple, and crimson yarn. Fine linen and goat hair. Ram skins dyed red. Acacia wood. Oil for lighting. Spices for the anointing oil. The list goes on. Then come the dimensions — cubits and handbreadths — and the construction details of the Ark, the table, the menorah, the Tabernacle curtains, the altar.

Some Modern readers sometimes find this section tedious. We want the drama of Sinai, the thunder and lightning, the burning bush. What do we do with instructions for tent curtain hooks? We are drawn to the miracles, the prophecies, the charismatic leadership not the specifics of building or the details of setting up a sanctuary.

But I think that's exactly the point.

The Torah is teaching us that holiness is not only found in the spectacular. It is built — painstakingly, carefully, lovingly — out of ordinary materials by ordinary hands. The same people who stood trembling at the foot of the mountain are now being asked to pick up tools, to measure wood, to spin yarn. Revelation becomes residence. The overwhelming divine encounter gets translated into something you can touch, something you can carry through the wilderness. It is realized in the regular prayers of the people. It is seen in through the regular morning, midmorning, afternoon, and evening prayers, the sacrificial patterns of setting up before Shabbat service, the prayerful ordered entry into Shabbat.

G-D Wants to Dwell Among Us

The theological heart of this portion comes in verse 8: "And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them."

Not in it — among them. The Mishkan is not a house for G-D to live in while the people remain outside. It is a center of gravity for communion with HaShem. A location where heaven invades earth. A place that pulls the people together around a shared project, a shared purpose, a shared sense of the sacred, a powerful visible entry of heaven’s realm.

The medieval commentator Nachmanides (a 13th‑century Spanish-Catalan rabbi, halakhist, biblical commentator, philosopher, physician, and early kabbalist, and one of the most influential medieval Jewish thinkers) understood the entire Tabernacle as a portable Sinai — a way of carrying the moment of revelation forward through time and space. The cloud that rested on the mountain would now rest on the tent. The intimacy of encounter that happened once would become a daily possibility.

What does it mean for the divine to dwell? The Hebrew root sh-kh-n (שכן) — from which Mishkan derives — is the same root as Shekhinah, the term Jewish mystics would later use for the immanent, indwelling presence of G-D. Not the G-D of cosmic distance, but the G-D of nearness. The G-D who can be found not just on mountaintops, but in the middle of your camp, in the middle of your life.

What We Build Together

Parashat Terumah raises a question that is just as alive today as it was in the wilderness: What are we willing to contribute, and why?

There is a kind of giving that comes from obligation, from guilt, from social pressure, or promise of return. And there is a giving that comes from the heart being moved — from recognizing that something matters, that you want to be part of it, that your participation itself is a form of meaning-making. It had — gold and silver, yes, but also time, attention, expertise, effort. The artisans Bezalel and Oholiab (introduced later in Exodus) would not be able to do their work without the community's generosity and the anointing of Ruach ha Kodesh (the Holy Spirit). And the community's generosity would have no outlet without the artisans' skills, gifts, and vision.

This is the model of sacred community: each person contributing what moves them, and those contributions being woven together into something none of them could have built alone. This is intertwined with the sacred chorography of the Triune.

A Closing Thought

We live in a world that is constantly asking us to give — our money, our time, our attention, our outrage, our loyalty. It can be exhausting. The noise of competing demands makes it hard to know what is worth pouring yourself into. Where do we allocate our time and resources?

Terumah offers a quiet counter-wisdom: Give from the place that moves you. Not from fear. Not from performance. Not because someone is watching. Give because something in you recognizes that this matters, that you want to be part of building it.

And then — build carefully. Build with specificity, craft, and care. Because the way we build a thing shapes what that thing becomes. A sanctuary built with intention becomes a place where the divine can actually dwell.

That is the promise at the heart of this portion. Not that G-D is far away and occasionally visits. But that if we create the conditions — if we show up, willingly, with what we have — holiness can become a permanent address.