This week with Parshat Terumah we have entered into the realm of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle that the Israelites built. They carried this structure through the Wilderness, grounding their journeys in religious practice, and the building of this project will take us through the end of the book of Exodus. Some of the instructions for building the Mishkan seem to be out of function, like the ark that holds the tablets. But some of the other parts seem to have other, perhaps spiritual, purposes.
One of those are the two keruvim, winged creatures on two ends of the ark cover, that spread out and cover the ark. They have faces, the Torah says, and these creatures should be made out of gold. Not surprisingly, commentators have no idea what these creatures are. Some say they are birds, some say they are like images of children. They know they don’t serve a purpose in the worship that happens in the Mishkan, but their presence certainly serves some role.
Remarkably, after the instructions to make these keruvim, God says what they are for: “I will meet with you, and I will impart to you from between the two keruvim that are on top of the Ark of the Covenant, all that I will command you concerning the Israelites.” It seems clear from the Torah that it is from the space between these creatures that Moshe would hear the voice of God speaking to him. Those creatures might be shiny and exotic looking, but the spiritual component, the part we should focus on, is what happens in the space between.
I find this to be such a powerful teaching for us and our lives and where we go to seek out meaning. God’s voice comes from between the keruvim. So often a sense of spirituality comes from between things. From the space between two people. From the silence between words. The gap between musical notes. The white space on a wall that speaks to us. The time between activities. So often we as humans have an impulse to fill the empty spaces. We fill time with extra things to feel busy, we fill the silence in conversations. Perhaps we feel scared by the emptiness, fearful and anxious of what may come when we step back.
Perhaps the keruvim are a model for us to invite in the empty space, knowing that perhaps that can be the place from where God’s voice emerges. When we stop talking and invite in the silence, when we stop filling the calendar and welcome in expansiveness, what might arise? In so many ways, Shabbat embodies similar values to the keruvim. We pull away not for the sake of reducing, but for the sake of enhancing. I hope that this is a Shabbat for each of us that invites in silence, a Shabbat that invites in the space between, and most of all, a Shabbat that invites in God’s voice to emerge.
