Holy Work

Construction, destruction, and our capacity to create holiness

Dearest followers,

I wrote much of this sermon before the events at Temple Israel in Detroit yesterday. This morning, I altered it. Not a lot, but when I realized that this parsha actually teaches us how to respond when others try to destroy us. With construction, rather than destruction. I hope that its lesson brings you hope, and solace.

With prayers for a shabbat that is a reprieve from this terrible week,

Rabbi Gerson

Shabbat shalom.

One of the great triumphs of Judaism, and perhaps the greatest gift it has given the world, is shabbat. A single day of rest, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously called: “A cathedral in time”. While other traditions were busy sanctifying sacred space, Judaism, after years wandering the desert, the destruction of the temples and subsequent centuries of exile and expulsion, found a way to sacralize time, so that wherever in the world Jews have been, we could enter into the sacred not by being in a specific place but by observing shabbat.

So integral is this practice to our identity and psychology that 19^th century Israeli essayist Ahad Ha’am famously said: “more than the Jews have kept shabbat, shabbat has kept the Jews.” This is both true, and beautiful. On a personal level, each week I look forward to shabbat with great anticipation. It is the one day of the week I don’t go for runs or do Pilates, allow myself naps in the middle of the day, eat food I don’t allow myself the other 6 days, and gather with friends to linger over long meals. Other weeks, I simply spend the afternoon reading in front of the fireplace, and in the summers, go for long swims, and take lingering walks with my dog. It is sweet, and restorative, and sets a rhythm to the week that in the most chaotic of times is grounding and relaxing – because it doesn’t feel indulgent. It feels, somehow, both mandatory, and liberating.

But this week’s Torah portion Vayakhel-Pekudei, suggests something both radical and subtle: holiness – and sacred time - can be found in work, too. See, Vayakhel Pekudei contains the instructions for building the mishkan, or tabernacle in the desert, and goes into precise detail about the materials that must be used, the blueprint for the design, and the clothing that the priests will wear. It is exhaustive. And it is also extraordinarily lovely – these descriptions of the fabrics and materials, animal skins and sculptures that will frame the most sacred place in the Israelite universe while also serving as an invitation and entreaty to God to come dwell among the people. In this way, the act of building becomes a kind of embodied prayer, a way to quietly connect to the holy not through rest, but work, or melacha. And it suggests that there are ways of building, creativity and generativity, that are just as holy as Shabbat. That if we use the right materials, and build something with our days that is beautiful, intentional and positive, the act of building can itself be holy. The language of the parsha makes this explicit. In Exodus 35:1-3 we read: “You shall have a shabbat of complete rest, holy to God.” And the three letter root, or shoresh of the word holy is kuf daled shin. But it doesn’t end there - the same shoresh, or three letter root, appears immediately after the commandment to keep shabbat in the word Mikdash itself, whose own shoresh is also kuf daled shin. Which means that the word Mikdash, or tabernacle, is literally the noun version of the word holy. The literal translation is thus “place of holiness”

The parallels don’t stop there. The term for all the building and creative work of constructing the mishkan is assiyah – or creative doing, or work, which shares the same root as, you guessed it – la’asot shabbat, to make shabbat. Think of the liturgy of the V’shamru: “V’shamru v’nei Yisrael et hashabbat. La’asot et ha shabbat l’dorotam brit o’lam.” And the people of Israel will keep shabbat. And MAKE shabbat for generations as a covenant for all time.” Because even shabbat requires holy doing and making: the lighting of the candles, the blessing of the wine, the eating of the challah, the preparation of the festive meals; it is all a form of sacred doing.

And all of this holy building of the mishkan and shabbat? It’s no mistake that it comes after the construction of the golden calf. The message is clear: if you’re going to build something, build it well and wisely. Build a mishkan, not a cow. Even in you feel lost in the desert, take what little you have, and build a glorious space with emptiness at its center, so that God can dwell among you. Build something to inspire. Build something so that people who feel abandoned or scared or afraid will find healing and hope. Build a place that will reassure them that even when God feels absent or hidden, She is right there with them. And don’t stop there. When that work is done, build a castle out of time - a sacred, beautiful, cathedral, and call it shabbat. Build something that tells your story – of God’s 6 days of creation and then rest - rather than the Egyptian Gods of your taskmasters who did not allow you rest. Build something holy and you will become, in the building, holy yourselves.

And guess what, 2026 Jews? Great news: There are still more opportunities to build. After all, Jewish history, and human history, are, at their core, stories of building. Because wherever we Jews have lived, we have built communities, like GRS. Even the current building that you’re now sitting in was built by a small group of deeply committed congregants. But Jews have also built more than synagogues. We’ve helped build hospitals and orchestras and universities. We’ve built museums, and symphonies, and nonprofits, and against all odds, a group of us left our homes and families, traveled to our ancestral homeland, and built a nation, so we would never be exiled again.

And we didn’t stop there. We also built on a much smaller scale. Families. Businesses. Gardens. And, as Rabbis learn when they write eulogies, we also, each of us, will build a life. And at every moment of building it we can choose if it will be building in the service of something greater than ourselves (like the mishkan) or building to inflate our egos (as in the building of the golden calf). We can choose to build things that are mostly a testimony to our own greatness, or part of a story bigger than us, that honors something that will last far beyond our years.

Yesterday night, as I was putting the finishing touches on this sermon, I knew that, after the attack on Temple Israel, there was more to say. Because it’s one thing to build when you feel safe; another when you feel frightened and under attack. So I want to bring you a thought from Elie Wiesel, ““Faced with despair, the Jew has three options. He can choose resignation or seek refuge in self-delusion… But there is a third option — the most difficult but most powerful of all. To face the human condition and do so as a Jew. Which means we will not allow them to tell us when to be joyous and when to mourn, when to sing and when to be silent… Never mind that they seek our destruction. We shall resist in our own Jewish way.” (Elie Wiesel, 1978, A Jew Today)

Or, to put it in the words of this week’s Torah portion; when antisemites seek our destruction – we resist with construction. Yes, with pragmatism and sobriety about the world around us and its attendant threats, but we don’t stop building. In fact, our resolve becomes even stronger: to build spaces and communities that will hold our joy, and our songs, and our story. When they seek to destroy - we insist on building; communities, relationships, and holiness. This is the secret of our resilience, and our survival.

So, tonight, let us l’a’asot shabbat. Let us make of this particular shabbat something of great beauty and solace – a reprieve from the world outside, a day that feels inviolable, and a reminder of our capacity, even in a desert of fear, to build places of holiness and goodness.

Shabbat shalom.