Our Rabbi's Message
June 12th 2009
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThe Torah portion that we read this week begins with a lesson that is TV fare for most of us. It holds that one cannot see the light of the menorah until the lamps of the Menorah are kindled. Or, in modern parlance, one cannot win the lottery unless one buys a lottery ticket.
Dreams are nice to have, and in fact we cannot live without them. We are people because we, unlike all of the rest of the animal kingdom, have a future. We can see beyond the moment and can, in fact, develop a plan to create the kinds of moments that we desire in the future.
A prerequisite of that process necessitates work. One cannot just dream and hope that his or her dreams will come true. We have words for the dreams of non-starters. We call them pipe dreams, and we call their dreaming day dreaming.
In Today's sedra our people erected the Mishkan. It was the sum of the dreams of a people, which were organized by Moses and created by Bezalel. For centuries we had lived in Egypt where we lost our ability to pray or to sacrifice to God. Our redemption from Egypt did not change our inability to find God in a regular fashion. We were hardly more than a swarm of people with a common memory. We did not know much about our heritage. We had lost the customs that made us unique in that foreign land. In distant memory we knew that we were all the scions of Abraham, Isaac Jacob and Joseph, but we did not know what that meant.
Freedom gave us the opportunity to recreate ourselves. We did that through dreams. We dreamed what we wanted to be. We set priorities for ourselves. We acted on those priorities, and worked by a general plan, which was our future.
With the lighting of the Menorah we were able to make our future the present. It was from that moment that, without divine help, we became a people. It was by that act, and not by miracles, that we finally redeemed our past. It was through the use of the instrument called future we were able to become a people in the present.
That moment is defined by light, just as a more famous act of creation was defined by light. In the latter divine instance the future began with light. In the former human instance the future became present with light.
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