Not According to Plan (Parashat Terumah)

 

Not According to Plan…

Probably the most famous Yiddish saying is: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Or, in sadly unrhyming English: Man plans; God laughs. 

(Incidentally, if I ever write an autobiography, I think that would be the title: Mann Plans; God laughs. “Mann”, of course, with two Ns.)

It’s a saying we often use to express something about the unpredictability of life. The later version from Robert Burns, perhaps more popular as an English phrase, is: “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” We spend so much of our time making plans, but have little control over the actual outcome. Though Burns has a different feeling to his statement: “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry / And leave us nothing but grief and pain.” The Yiddish proverb, on the other hand, leaves God laughing at the idea that we set the plans in the first place - that we keep setting them, despite how little we can actually predict. It’s not presented as tragedy, but as affectionate humour at our persistent hubris. 

This week’s Torah portion is a parashah about plans - plans for sacred construction. And under the surface, I would argue that it is also about plans going awry. And this time, the plans aren’t only ours; they’re God’s, too. When the plans of man and God go awry, I’m not sure who gets to laugh. 

These final sections of the Book of Exodus outline the construction of the Mishkan, the portable sacred space of the wilderness. The primary focus of these final chapters is a series of precise plans for the meeting-place of the People of Israel and the God of Israel. The lengths of the beams, the shapes of holy instruments, the walls, the curtains. Surely, if anything can go according to plan, it would be the blueprint for building this space, designed by the Divine. 

Here’s where it doesn’t go according to plan: at the end of the first aliyah, in the description of the Holy Ark. The Ark is to be adorned, to be placed in the Holy of Holies where only the High Priest may enter. And there is a plan for what will go in the Ark: the Eidut/Testimony; meaning the Tablets of the Ten Sayings that Moses is going to write atop the mountain. The Ark is even referred to as the “Aron haEidut”, the Ark of the Testimony, because it is intended to house the Luchot haEidut, the Tablets of the Testimony. 

But the Ark never holds just one set of tablets. That first set of tablets gets smashed, when Moses descends the mountain to find the people engaging in the worship of the Golden Calf. The plan was neat: retrieve the tablets, and put them in the Ark. The reality was much messier. The complete set of tablets ends up being a second set, and while the words on them might have been the same, the way they are written is profoundly different. The first set of the tablets is described as being entirely made by God; the second set has to be carved instead by Moses. This does not seem to be the plan. 

The plan does not come into fruition - at least, not the way it is initially described. But what occurs as a result of this has its own beauty and poignancy. Because the rabbis, in reading each letter of the Torah carefully, come to the conclusion (Bava Batra 14b): הַלּוּחוֹת וְשִׁבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוּנָּחִין בָּאָרוֹן - the Tablets, and the broken Tablets, rested in the Ark. The second set of Tablets, and the broken first set of Tablets, rested together in the Ark. It is a breathtaking image. In the most sacred space of our history, brokenness and wholeness sat beside one another. Even when the brokenness was a brokenness in our relationship with God, it still had a home there. We are not taught to shy away from those jagged edges, to pretend they don’t exist, or to view them only with shame. They’re holy even in their brokenness. 

It was not the plan. But there’s something profound about this outcome that we only gained due to the initial failure. From these broken tablets in the ark, Torah teachers of our history have woven many important teachings: about the importance of treating the elderly and infirm with honour, about how faith sometimes needs to be broken, about how a broken heart can be the perfect dwelling-place for the Divine. Profound and significant teachings about brokenness which exist because the Ark of the Testimony did not go according to plan. 

And that sacred space, that dream of a central place of worship for the People of Israel, continued to not go according to plan. 

Let’s take a brief walk through the history of this most sacred space. 

The Mishkan was in its temporary form for hundreds of years before King Solomon managed to realise the dream of building the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (as we read about in the Haftarah). The people are united under a monarchy and have a permanent and glorious centre for worship. 

And yet…

Despite a centralised place for worship, we know from the historical record that the Israelites were not unified in worship. They continued to worship other gods, and continued to worship at the high places the Torah forbids. And after Solomon’s death, the kingdom itself was split in two, with the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. The symbol of their unity does not fix the problems of a divided society. And while moving from a Mishkan to a Mikdash, from a Tabernacle to a Temple, should have provided a sense of stability - in reality, the choice to build something solid and stable presented its own vulnerability. What can be built can also be torn down. And that’s precisely what happened. 

The First Temple does not go according to plan. 

And that First Exile is what truly shaped us as a people. That we needed to learn how to be Israelites while taken from the land ultimately saved us. We became better at this concept of One God when we had to learn what it meant to believe in a universal God outside of the native homeland, away from the apparently attractive idea that gods are attached to specific places. And I would contend that it is due to this First Exile that we were able to sustain ourselves through the Second. 

And then we returned to the land and built the Second Temple. When it was built, the prophets of the era described their elders as being disappointed. This was nothing like the glory they recalled from Solomon’s Temple. This newly-returned people lacked the wealth and political capacity of Solomon’s era. If you are imagining a grand Second Temple, it is because you are picturing Herod’s enhancements some 500 years later. For most of its existence, the Second Temple was modest and functional. And lacking something of utmost importance: this Temple, in its Holy of Holies, had no Ark at all. The Ark was never recovered after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, and was never found again. The place of God’s most intense presence was to be empty. 

That was not the Torah’s plan for sacred space. But perhaps an empty Holy of Holies has its own meaning. The central space of divine intensity in other temples of the era would have had an idol inside. Choosing the Ark over an idol was a theologically significant decision. Choosing emptiness over an idol might be a step even further. Our God is not a God of physicality. 

And speaking of physicality. When this Temple was reconstructed into its fullest glory, it quickly proved that the most glorious of physical structures are still impermanent. Its destruction was devastating. The Jews were scattered, many taken to Rome as slaves. The centralised worship space was never rebuilt. We went from an Ark with more than planned inside it, to no Ark at all, to no building at all. 

To be frank, it is an absurdity that we survived the overhaul of Jewish experience that occurred. A miracle, one might say. But with lessons learned the first experience of exile, with hard work from the rabbis, and with the admirable resilience of our people… Here we still are. Somehow, we came full circle, and learned how to develop a sense of what the Tabernacle was in spirit: a portability of worship that proved ultimately to be a strength. 

Nothing we read today, or will read over coming weeks, will prove to be a plan that was well-laid and did not go awry. But every step away from the original plan created or revealed something we needed, some new pathway to the Divine. Each gap became a place for holiness after all. 

That’s the history, from Parashat Terumah until today. And it shows, I think, something so significant about the human condition. Our tendency is to respond to the unpredictability of the world with fear, and to yearn for control. 

But sometimes, failure is precisely what we need. Sometimes, we learn more from failure than from success. 

So perhaps that’s a good reason for God to laugh.