Parashat Vayakhel – Pikuday
March 13, 2015

This week's combined portions open with Moses congregating all of the people to hear about shabbat observance. In Rabbinic accounting, it's the day after Yom Kippur, and Moses has important stuff to share about God's desires for his people, having brought them out of slavery and to the mountain of God, Mt. Sinai.
Six days the people may work, but the seventh day is a qualitatively different substance. It's holy time. Even building the Tabernacle in the wilderness, clearly sacred work belonging to the realm of the holy, must cease. What's more, in celebration of that holy time, no one may burn a fire in any of their towns or homes. Burning constitutes a category of work, and all preparations for Shabbat must end before holy time begins.

That addition, prohibiting cooking at home for instance, or building a fire for warmth, becomes quite complex. For one, cooking is allowed on festivals, the first and last days of Pesah and Sukkot, as well as Shavuot. Festivals are also a kind of shabbat, a sacred time. For another, sacrifices continue, indeed additional sacrifices are commanded on Shabbat and festivals, and these burn all night. Why no fires in homes or villages?  Why the more stringent prohibition on the weekly shabbat and lesser prohibitions on festivals? Why fires on the altar of God but no fires for warmth or food?

Clearly we witness here a hierarchy of holiness! Shabbat is most holy! The Tabernacle may be built all week because it is holy space and can take place at any time. But sacred time happens only in specific moments, and therefore defers building in sacred space. Time supercedes space!
But sacred time also contains degrees. Festivals are slightly less sacred than Shabbat. Space is less sacred than time. And public fires on the God's altar celebrate connection to God and Shabbat, while home fires are exclusively for private use and are not holy.

Let's examine the spiritual insights here rather than attempting to debunk the arguments.

We have 3 distinctions: communal (fire on the altar) is preferred over personal (fires for family needs at home); sacred time is more important than sacred space (observing shabbat defers building the Tabernacle); and shabbat overrides festivals.
In our liberal Jewish culture, we have reversed each of these! We sacrifice communal interests for personal interests; we often prefer space over time (think large homes and the time and money to purchase and maintain them, and what else might we do with that time?); and we pay more attention to annual holy times like festivals than we do to weekly shabbat.

Perhaps most important about such texts as this is the process.  What do I mean?  I mean that we Jews examine everything, and that includes the hierarchy of spirituality in our lives. The fact that the Talmud and midrash ask these questions, that we are willing to say, "Am I prioritizing my life correctly with regard to God and the Jewish community," testifies to our constant concern for God's will and discovering the holiness in life. The process of examining the quality of our lives and considering the responses provided by Jewish debates is holy.  Study is holy in and of itself because it brings us closer to God.

Naturally, if we make all of our decisions based solely on personal outcomes without regard for community, both the community and the process will eventually vanish. The community invented and preserves the process of holy inquiry. How each of us participates in and adds to that process of study, inquiry (midrash), and personal decision making will determine the health of the future community from which we benefit today. Past generations have preserved both the place of individual inquiry and the communal body in which the process itself resides.

Shabbat shalom.