The cantor ran last Shabbat's Torah study, and he brought to us a text from Rabbi Arthur Waskow. I excerpt it here, but it really should be read in its entirety.
*****
"For twenty-five years, week in, week out, I have danced and wrestled with the Torah. I have always found new life in the weekly reading. Never, never, have I found a portion boring....
-- except for the string of readings near the end of Exodus. T'rumah (Exodus 25-27:19). On how to build the Mishkan, that portable golden sanctuary in the desert. And Tetzaveh (Exodus 27:20-30:10), on exactly how the high priest should dress.
Not to speak of their twins soon afterward, on the very same subjects all over again -- Vayak'heyl (Exodus 35-38:20) and Pekudeh (Exodus 38:21-40).
I confess. If it hadn't been for the Golden Calf in the middle, if there had been four weeks in a row of this drivel, I might have run wild-eyed out of shul, I might have forgotten to come back again.
All the details about how and when and where to design, and carve, and sculpt, and sew, and erect. Obsessive. Niggling. Petty. And then to repeat the whole thing, all over again in the later weekly portions!
Who cares where the grommets went? What were grommets anyway? Aha -- those connector loops and rings! But now that I know, I still don't know who cares. Who cares how long the hinges were? Who cares whether the skins were dolphin fur or badger fur, who cares whether the dyes were scarlet or purple or indigo?"
. . .
"Until the year that a friend of mine came back from the first great march on Washington for gay rights -- the largest march in fifteen years, she said.
She spoke on a Friday night in my congregation. She talked about the sense of joyful self-discovery, the liberation from years of secrecy, the tears of welcome that gay people gave their non-gay families and friends who marched alongside them in love and solidarity.
And then she talked about the enormous quilt, more than two blocks square, that the gay community had come to make together.
It was a Quilt of Names, a memorial for the thousands of people who had already died of AIDS. Each square was made by the friends and family of one person who had suffered and died -- most of them young, full of excitement and energy and hope until the disease laid hold of them.
A few of the squares were in dark and mournful colors. Many more were bright, crimson and purple and indigo, crocheted and knitted and embroidered with flowers and symbols and words and names. Each one a tombstone in cloth. There on the grass of the Mall in Washington, a whole graveyard in cloth. Thousands of squares.
And now the time had come, she said, to join these squares together in one gigantic quilt. Each one had been made with grommets so that it could be connected to the ones around it. Those who remembered each person who had died, those who had celebrated and remembered and memorialized each life, began to tie one grommet to another.
When the quilt was completed, she said, it was ready to be carried from city to city. A holy memorial to life much more than death, to hope much more than fear, to courage much more than pain.
The third time she mentioned "grommets," it came like a rush to me. The Mishkan, the golden Shrine. The great portable sanctuary in the wilderness, to be carried from place to place as the people journeyed. The people had come to build it with so much love, so many gifts, so much excitement, that Moses had needed to call a halt to the outpouring."
. . .
"The Quilt of Names was a Mishkan, I realized with a rush.
The newly free community of gay men and lesbians were celebrating their first taste of freedom with a first act of communal responsibility -- making sure that their dead were not forgotten. Making sure that the world turned its attention to ending this plague and curing its victims. Turning what the world called their "transgressions" into freedom and community.
Building. Creating. Sewing. Weaving. Carrying. Connecting.
A Mishkan not only in the sense of a portable shrine.
A Mishkan in the sense of a Place where the Shekhinah dwells, a Place where God's presence can be felt in our very midst.
God dwells where the newly free remember their pain with tears and create their future in joy."
*****
Amein.
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