Parashat Terumah: The Role of Art

Exodus 25:8:  "Let them build for me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them."
How might a sanctuary of God appear?
Jewish prayer books are the realization of that sanctuary! They are the place in which God lives.
The first daily, intermediate blessing of the Amidah (Tefillah) thanks the gracious God for the rational mind (Atah honen l'adam da'at...), and Judah Halevi in The Kuzari says the reason is because that is how we draw near to God.
Medieval Jewish poets, like Halevi, composed love poems describing the love between God and Israel. Illustrators like 14th century Ashkenazi artist Yoel ben Simon, who painted the magnificent pictures of the Ashkenazi and Washington haggadahs, channeled their passion through God's art forms to extol God and inextricably tie the divine to the human. Human artistry, an expression of the divine flowing through the human, captures an imperfect but human glimpse of God's perfection and brings God into the world, fulfilling Exodus' command that God may dwell among us. That's part of what we mean when Genesis says "Let us create humanity in our image and likeness..." (Genesis 1:26) We translate the image of God into the world.
In Beth Torah's medieval, kabbalistic influenced Sefer Torah, still used today and in our ark, the inverted Hebrew letters "nun" in Numbers 10 appear in words rather than their typical places between verses. (To see what I am referring to in the ordinary Torah scroll, open any Hebrew chumash to Exodus 10:35-36) The kabbalistic explanation for the inverted "nuns" is that they stretch from heaven to earth, bringing down God from heaven, connecting the divine and human realms! That indeed is what Exodus 25:8 demands, and what the artistry of the siddur (prayer book) fulfills: the more artistic the more connection!
The artist and the prophet both dedicate their lives to putting in human terms the divine design. Many humans climb Sinai, each following her/his own ascent. When they return with their tablets, it becomes our privilege to experience their vision, for there lives within a portion of God's sanctuary on earth.