March 2025
Terumah
Haftarah Reflections 19
Torah portion Exodus 25 : 1 to 27 : 19
Haftarah portion 1 Kings 5 : 12 to 6 : 13
Listen to the Prophets
King Solomon builds the temple of the Lord. That bald statement does not do justice to the effort made by the tens of thousands of people who were involved.
As our parashah opens, it looks as though King Solomon was the inventor of the ‘fly in fly out’ workforce we see in our large remote mining towns in Australia today. Ten thousand workers at a time, one month away in a foreign country, then two months back home. A staggering organizational task. Thirty thousand workers involved in that part of the programme. Plus another eighty thousand quarrymen, and seventy thousand labourers. Amazing.
Those who have visited Jerusalem and walked through the excavated tunnel adjacent to the Kotel, and have seen the size of those foundation blocks of stone, (1 Kings 5:17) would agree that they are in themselves quite remarkable. Taking into account that they were quarried about three thousand years ago makes it even more so.
The parashah then describes some measurement detail of the building, another most important element of its design and construction. And it is not until we get to the very end of our reading that we find out the reason for this meticulous description.
It is repetitive of many other instances we have seen in our weekly ‘reflections’. “Concerning this temple which you are building, if you walk in My statutes, execute My judgements, keep all My commandments, and walk in them, then I will perform My word with you, which I spoke to your father David. And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake My people Israel.” It was to be the place where God would dwell amongst the people. A ready place of earthly identity for them. But we should also note that God is careful to declare the conditions attached to His statement.
Firstly, He undertakes to perform with Solomon, the covenant promises He made with his father David. It is a promise to continue that covenant. And secondly, it affirmed His covenants made with Abraham and Moses, to dwell among them and not forsake them.
The condition:-“if you walk in My statutes, execute My judgements, keep all My commandments, and walk in them”.
Now to the extent that the Scriptures are given to us as an example and as an illumination of God’s ways, it is vital that we discern to what extent these conditions, which are repeated over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures, from our God who declares Himself to be unchanging (Malachi 3:6), apply to us today.
Some may quickly remind us that our parashah was set in the days of the “old covenant’ and today we live under the “new covenant”. But as I read the terms of the “new covenant” (Jeremiah 31 and Hebrew 8) I cannot see any distinction between the two in terms of God’s Torah, other than the fact that the “new covenant” says that whereas the “old covenant’ was breakable, the “new covenant” is not. Read it carefully and honestly.
So the lesson for me in this parashah is this. God is clearly intent on bringing lasting blessing to His people. We are as much His people as the Israelites of old when we express our faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Yeshua. We are part of His kingdom. He is our King. The King has clearly laid out His instructions for holy and righteous living. His requirement is that we “walk in His ways”. So where is the problem?
Part of our problem lies in the very words used to describe the Scriptures as a ‘divided’ Old Testament, with connotations of antiquity and obsolescence, and New Testament, with connotations of modernity and freshness, even replacement.
If we see the whole Bible as the revealed Word of Almighty God, if we take literally the words of the Apostle John, that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. If we see Yeshua, not only as carrying a wooden cross up the hill at Calvary, but also on the mountain communicating His word, His instructions, to Moses. Only then, will we see the ‘reasonable service’ (Romans 12:1) which God requires of us, as His followers, today.
Shabbat Shalom
RS