Terumah: Our Gifts

We moved alone and together

ascending, descending,

stepping towards,

moving away, our longing

mirroring the fire

and dark.

 

How could we

trust Moshe yet

or anyone who insisted

he alone would listen

would speak for us,

knowing as we do

what is always lost

in translation?

 

In wonder, wandering

under the unblinking

light we dared to plead:

give us something

to do with our hearts,

with our tender hands,

with the bounty and dross

of our new lives

and our old stories

caught in the dry

bramble

 

and so we awakened

to precise instructions

with the density of manna,

on how we might

dream our yearning

into new seemingly impossible form

we the impoverished, only yesterday slaves

feared that beauty might be

like the promised land

ever unreachable

and yet we began to see

through our dust and fog how

we live in the place

where a bush can burn

and not be consumed,

that any rock

might yield water, any

mountain thunder with speech,

any river become another miracle

of crossing over

 

and so we discovered

in our empty tents

the abundance of the ordinary:

tarnished gold stuck to our fingers,

our silvered wrists and ears, lapis and old

copper pots, tattered coats, a tatter of blue

from a daughter’s dress,

the skins of elderly ram and goat,

herbs yielding purple and crimson,

perfume and spice of flower and root released,

oasis of acacia, a gift of our wilderness.

We remembered the teachings of the body,

spinning of worms into silk,

of bees making honey mouth by mouth -

the common soil and seed of who we are

and what we can become and so

 

we built, we hammered,

we lost focus and

found our way back, making

a Mishkan to be followed

and to find us, learning

with our hands and sweat

how to loosen old distinctions

between inside and out.

We wove layers of curtains

around formlessness,

a dance of veils in a life

of doorways. We wove

into the innermost three,

a pair of golden Keruvim,

reminders of how Shekinah

dwells in the root-letters of Mishkan

sheltering us under Mothering wings

though our 40 years of wanderings

with the bones of Joseph, the broken tablets,

passing it all along through the generations,

each body an ark, carrying

our revered and repaired texts, our prayer

sounding from

the pregnant empty chambers

of our beating.