What You've Got

Everyone keeps lists. Grocery lists, packing lists, the running mental catalog of things you meant to say before a conversation ended. I keep one on my phone: Hebrew words I mispronounce at shul. It's longer than I'd like. I cross one off and ten more appear, like a liturgical game of whack-a-mole.

God, it turns out, also keeps lists.

Parashat Terumah opens with one of the most specific inventories in the Torah. God tells Moses to ask the Israelites for contributions — terumah, gifts, an offering — and then dictates exactly what to bring:

דַּבֵּר֙ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְיִקְחוּ־לִ֖י תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כׇּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ תִּקְח֖וּ אֶת־תְּרוּמָתִֽי׃

Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.

— Shemot 25:2

Thirteen materials. Gold, silver, copper. Blue, purple, and crimson yarns. Fine linen and goats' hair. Tanned ram skins and something called tachash — nobody agrees what this animal is; suggestions range from dolphin to badger to unicorn. Yes, really. Acacia wood. Oil for lighting. Spices for anointing. Gemstones for the priestly garments.

This is not "bring whatever you can." This is a procurement list.

If the Mishkan — the portable sanctuary the Israelites are about to build in the middle of the Sinai wilderness — were a government contract, this would be the materials requisition form. Specific. Itemized. Down to the dye colors.

And yet. Right there in the second verse, embedded in the inventory, is the clause that reframes the whole enterprise: kol ish asher yidvenu libo — every person whose heart is so moved.

The project is communal in scope — there's a sanctuary to build — and voluntary in spirit. No quotas. No assessments. No one checking your income against a giving tier. Bring what your heart moves you to bring.

The rest of the parsha reads like architectural blueprints. The dimensions of the Ark. The design of the menorah, hammered from a single piece of gold weighing one talent — roughly seventy-five pounds of solid metal, beaten into shape without seams.

The cherubim on the Ark's cover, facing each other with wings spread. The table for the showbread. The curtains. The planks. The rings and poles for carrying it all when the camp moves. And tucked into the middle of these engineering specifications, one verse:

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃

And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.

— Shemot 25:8

B'tokham. Among them. Not "in it." The Alshich — a sixteenth-century commentator in Tzfat — catches what most readers miss: God doesn't say "I will dwell in the sanctuary." God says "I will dwell among the people."

The building is made of acacia wood and gold thread. The dwelling happens somewhere else entirely.

I think about this on Shabbat mornings in Atlanta, when I'm still stumbling through Musaf and the man a couple rows bac has been davening since before his bar mitzvah—which was many decades ago. My Hebrew is a construction project. My knowledge has gaps you could drive a truck through if you were blindfolded.

But the text says kol ish asher yidvenu libo — everyone whose heart moves them. The requirement isn't fluency. It isn't expertise. It's the willingness to show up carrying whatever you've got.

This past Monday, at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Israel's two-man bobsled team completed its final heat in twenty-sixth place out of twenty-six. Dead last. AJ Edelman jumped out of the sled and celebrated. The Israeli bobsled program didn't have world-class bobsledders. It had Edelman, a skeleton athlete from Boston who spent eight years building the team from nothing. His brakeman, Menachem Chen, was a discus thrower. The four-man squad includes a pole vaulter, a sprinter, and the first Druze athlete in Olympic history. They had no full-time coach. They barely qualified after the British team passed on a slot. They brought what they had and they slid.

That's terumah. Not the gold and silver on God's procurement list — though those are there. The terumah is the discus thrower who learned to push a bobsled. The skeleton athlete who wouldn't let the program die. A team that showed up in Italy with borrowed time and a flag.

The Mishkan wasn't built by artisans imported from Egypt's professional guilds. It was built by a community of recently freed slaves in the middle of a desert, working with whatever they carried out of bondage. Gold earrings. Goat hair. Ram skins. Willing hands. The text says they brought so much that Moses eventually had to tell them to stop — the only fundraising campaign in the entirety of Jewish history that had to be shut down for excess generosity. The Federation should be so lucky.

Terumah means "offering," but the root carries a sense of elevation — something lifted up, set apart. The materials on God's list were ordinary before they were offered.

Gold is just a metal until someone takes it off their ear and places it in a collection.

Goat hair is just goat hair until it becomes the wall of a place where the divine presence rests.

The elevation isn't in the material. It's in the giving.

Twenty-sixth out of twenty-six. And AJ Edelman standing on the ice in Cortina, grinning, wearing a uniform that says Israel. Some offerings look like gold. Some look like goat hair. Some look like a discus thrower learning to brake.

The sanctuary gets built from whatever people bring. That's the whole design.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham