Parashat T’rumah
D’VAR TORAH Parashat T’rumah February 20, 2026 3 Adar 5786
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington
Make for Me a Sanctuary that I May Dwell in You
וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃
“Make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among you.”
This is the command that God gives to Moses at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Parashat T’rumah. The portion is focused on generosity, and people voluntarily giving of their wealth, skills and time to create the elaborate tent that becomes the desert Sanctuary, known as the Mikdash or the Mishkan.
The Torah gives a great deal of space to the details of this Sanctuary, repeating and elaborating on them in tremendous detail. It says that Moses should create the Sanctuary according to the tavnit, or blueprint God showed Moses on Sinai.
Human cultures have long been very drawn to creating Sanctuaries, places where the divine can dwell, and where we sense the divine in more concentrated and powerful ways than we do in our day to day lives.
Of course, this eventually becomes Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the Rabbis made a radical and deeply meaningful shift in the Jewish idea of the Sanctuary. They charged us to make our homes a “Mikdash Me’at” or a small Sanctuary, where the divine dwells around our table and families.
But the Rabbis, interpreting this line from our portion, also offer a more personal understanding of what it means to “Make Me a Sanctuary that I may dwell among you.” In Hebrew, “among you” b’tocham, can equally mean “within you.” In this reading, the Rabbi’s teach that making a Sanctuary also means making of your heart a Sanctuary so that God might dwell within you, in your heart and your mind and your spirit.
This builds on many verses. Psalm 51 prays that God “Create a Pure Heart within Me” that I might have a willing spirit.
Deuteronomy 10:16 reminds us that in life, hurt and fear can create a hard heart in us, a calloused heart, and so we must “Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more.”
There are many Sanctuaries where we experience the divine. Maybe it is in nature. Maybe it is with family or our children’s eyes, or our pet’s eyes. Maybe it is in synagogue or at the Kotel in Jerusalem. But one of the most profound moves our tradition made was to name our homes as a key dwelling place of the Divine, and even more personally, that we must make our hearts into a Sanctuary so that God may dwell in us.
It takes work: the work of forgiving, the work of cutting the callous away from our hearts that we might have more empathy and love for one another and for the immigrants among us. It takes prayer, and helping the vulnerable, and a conscious effort to CHOOSE LIFE, to choose the path of love and care when we can.
And if we do this work, we are promised that the divine will be very near to us, in our mouths and our hearts. In a passage we read on Yom Kippur, we are told that if we live up to our covenant, “Then the ETERNAL your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring—to love the ETERNAL your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live.”
Ken Y’hi Ratzon
