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The summer I was thirteen, my mother took us all to a reunion of her side of the family in Lake Luzerne, NY.  Excited as I was, I also felt a bit apprehensive.  Who were these people exactly?  What if we had nothing in common?  What if this reunion turned out to be three days of awkward and boring… one of the worst combinations I could imagine. 

After the initial introductions, things ceased to be awkward.  And the rest of the reunion was anything but boring.  It opened me to a world beyond my immediate family, made up of some fascinating individuals.  By the end, I could hardly believe how connected I felt to all of them.  How had such strong feelings grown in just this short time?  I came to understand my family’s history, and therefore my own, in new ways that weekend.  It was with a strengthened sense of belonging and perspective that I returned to my everyday life.

Terumah, our upcoming Torah portion, is not about family in the ways we might expect.  And yet it is, very much so.  The narrative centers around the building and ornamentation of the desert sanctuary, also known as the Mishkan.  It will be the Israelites’ spiritual home, their anchor during the long time of desert wandering to come.  The instructions as to how to make it are incredibly detailed and specific (think cubits!)  And there is one more purpose of the Mishkan, if an unstated one.  When the people come together within it, God’s presence will dwell among them.  As they create that space, they will paradoxically draw closer together, taking those first important steps towards becoming a community.  A family.

Earlier today beneath an impossibly blue sky, Shiri Bibas and her sons, those beautiful red-haired little boys, were laid to rest.  For over a year, their family and people closest to them hoped and prayed they would be returned to Israel alive.  And those of us far from them, who did not know them, absorbed them as a symbol of the terror and trauma of October 7.  Their loss is personal and familial.  Ariel and Kfir and Shiri have come home.  But not in the way they should have.  Never in that way.

As their caskets progressed, thousands of Israelis lined the streets like human watchtowers, draped in Israeli flags or holding them aloft to demonstrate their loving presence, their outrage and their grief.  As mile followed mile, they created a mishkan together.  A place of shelter and someday, in time we pray, of comfort.  Because when we come together in these ways, we become something greater than ourselves.  We become a family.

“All of Israel is responsible for one and other,” our sages taught.  Let the mishkan we create and travel forward with in our day be one within which this truth bears out.

Shabbat Shalom,