Stop. Now Go.

Friday February 20, 2026/3 Adar 5786/Parashat Terumah

Hevre/Friends,

We’ve all had one. A flash of insight or discovery that brings us much-needed perspective; a revelation or epiphany that solves a serious, even existential, riddle with which we’ve been wrestling. “Aha” moments can happen anywhere, not only atop Mount Sinai where Moses is sitting right now in our Torah reading cycle - although, as a hiker, I agree that summit views can be revelatory. 

Years ago my yoga teacher opened our class with one simple instruction that would end up literally changing my life: Make sure all the bags you’re carrying through life have your name on their ID tags. She was so right. Too often we’re weighed down by shlepping around other people’s burdens. Those few words radically altered my troubled relationship with my father from one of anger into one of mercy. And just in time. He died two years later.

Last week in Costa Rica I experienced another “aha” moment. During an especially moving yoga class led by a teacher whose energy emitted a soulful combination of strength and serenity, he guided us into a standing pose while reminding us that even when we’re still, we’re moving; even when we pause, our breath and its rhythms maintain a vital flow. I held onto that idea as we progressed through the remaining poses, culminating in shavasana - corpse pose - which expresses this insight by having you lie still while your body absorbs and is transformed by all the work it just performed.

So many of us get this dynamic all wrong. We stay too long in one place - physically or emotionally - because we fear what movement or change might bring, or what we might be forced to leave behind. Sometimes we rush through life without stopping because we’re terrified of what we might discover if we pause long enough to look around - or inside. We fail to understand that even when we’re rooted, we’re meant to be evolving; that even when we’re moving, we’re meant to seek stability.

This week’s Torah portion, Terumah, offers a beautiful illustration of this. Describing the vessels in the Mishkan/desert sanctuary, the Aron/ark was extra special because of the combination of materials used in building it:  acacia wood and gold. Why wood and gold? Wood, coming from a tree, represents growth, development, and the ability to renew, especially following weakness or decline. Gold, on the other hand, is a precious metal that lies beneath the earth, never tarnishing or aging.  Gold is a reflection of what’s eternal. For the Torah to be carried with us throughout our journeys – as a people, as families, and as individuals – it has to be enveloped in both the durability of gold and the adaptability of wood. We have to be strong enough to hold onto the Torah - including our own personal Torah - and courageous enough to continuously negotiate what it all means in the ever-changing, broader world in which we, and it, live.

The Mishkan itself conveys the same lesson. It was known by two terms:  a Mishkan- literally, “dwelling place”, suggesting a home for the divine presence to live within our midst and permeate our lives; and an Ohel, a temporary shelter which moved with us along our wilderness trek and was continually set up and taken down. Like a portable tent that can be made bigger or smaller, round or square as our needs demand, so our sacred spaces, including our homes, are to adjust and adapt to be inclusive of our ever evolving lives; they must make space for holiness to always dwell within them, and within us.

Think also about the neighborhood of the Mishkan. The holy desert home designed meticulously with its blue, purple and crimson fabrics, its gleaming gold, silver and copper vessels and accents, its burnished acacia wood, aromatic incense, spiced oil, lapis lazuli and other glimmering stones -- it was all assembled against the backdrop of the vast desert. The desert: endless, edgeless stretches of undefined, unstructured beige, bland, sand. The contrast could not be more striking.  

But I think that was precisely the point. The Mishkan, the blueprint for our Jewish homes, could only fulfill its function of bringing holiness, stability and connection into our lives if it had the capacity to be continually reassembled, continually rebuilt, on the very foundation of endless change, represented by the desert itself. 

The Torah teaches us that to live life fully we must always be moving and growing. To remain in one place is to stagnate and die. This is why in the Torah the main paradigm is that of the Exodus, the process of moving out of Mitzrayim/Egypt, our meytzarim, our narrow places, into the vast desert plains of becoming; of growth and of possibility.  It is not Sinai that captures the Torah’s heart, despite the sacred exchange that took place there. Rather, it’s the notion of carrying Sinai with us wherever we travel that animates the Torah’s teachings, and the living Torah of endlessly evolving Jewish life which it inspires.  

The Torah often warns us against worshiping idols.  But idol worship is not simply bowing down to a rock; it’s worshiping anything that is unchanging, unresponsive, or inflexible.  It’s not only God who refuses to be limited in this way. The lesson is that we are not permitted to limit ourselves in this way either. We cannot turn our own lives into stone. Nor can we turn our leaders into idols by asking them to remain unchanged so we can grow only in relation to a fixed point.

When broken down, stone becomes grains of sand, free to be moved and reconfigured by the winds of life, free to assemble into formations that give structure and meaning, until they surrender to the winds of change once again.

The story of Sinai had the people standing at the foot of the mountain - a 

rock - for only a number of months. But they wandered and camped over the course of forty years in the desert with sand under their feet, with the constantly shifting ground under their soles, seeking holiness, groundedness, from the dynamism and instability that is life. Just like we spend just minutes in front of the ark each year and most of our time trudging through the dunes of Mondays, commutes, and meetings, seeking something of the sacred along the trail of living. 

Gold and Wood. Eternal beauty and instinctive dynamism. Mishkan and Ohel. Dwelling place and temporary tent. Rooted spirituality and fluid landscapes. Embracing and expansive. 

Rabbi Heschel taught that Shabbat is our sanctuary in time. Shabbat is a day filled with the same sacred alchemy of rest and movement, stillness and motion. Our bodies pause while our minds and hearts continue, as they must, to expand. 

Aha…

With blessings for a Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

(Photo by Ronen Avisror)