I’ll begin with a confession: I am a shoplifter.
Well, I was a shoplifter. As a little kid. My Mom and I were shopping at the grocery store. I saw a greeting card I really liked (I remember it being blue) and I wanted to buy it. For whatever reason, my Mom said no. I surreptitiously took it anyway and hid it inside my shirt. My Mom discovered it when we got home. After a serious talking-to about trust, we got in the station wagon and returned to the store, where I gave it back and apologized. Lesson learned.
Now, I’m proud to say that I have never shoplifted since, though I feel like that’s kind of a low bar. But perhaps the bigger imprint this event made on me had to do with trust—its importance and its fragility.
I have written about trust and trustworthiness here many times before. It’s one of my regular themes. In both my personal and professional relationships, maintaining trust and being recognized as personally trustworthy are a major focus for me—more than a focus, more like a preoccupation or a north star. (Plug: It’s why I’m proud that IJS has a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator and a Platinum rating on Candid.) That could come from being in the Boy Scouts or from the example of teachers and role models. But if I were on a therapist’s couch looking for my earliest memory dealing with trust, this incident with the greeting card would inevitably come up.
What’s clear is that the core animating issue, for me at any rate, was less the fact that the greeting card was someone else’s property (for fans of Les Mis: I’m not going to go all Javert on Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread) as the effect of the action on the way my mother and others thought of me—and the way I thought of myself (i.e., this is more Jean Valjean singing, “Who am I?”). I feel deeply driven to be, and to be known as, a trustworthy person. I credit my parents in particular with helping to make me that way.
Yet I think this is a pretty core issue for all of us. As a parent I have witnessed that some of the most difficult emotional moments for my children when they were young were just like mine—when they were caught in a lie, when they knew they had violated someone’s (our) trust. And I would speculate that that’s because, at root, our entire world depends on our ability to trust: to trust ourselves, to trust other people. Betrayal is one of the very deepest and hardest things to heal from—and so most of us neither want to be betrayed nor to betray others. We want to be able to trust and for others to be able to trust us.
Taking the phrase pekudei hamishkan in its most literal sense, the Midrash imagines that the opening passage of our Torah portion finds Moses sitting and making a public accounting of the Israelites’ donations in front of the entire people. “All of Israel came and Moses sat and counted,” the midrash relates. But as he counted, he forgot about the 1,775 shekels of silver that were used for the vavei ha-amudim, the little hooks that enabled the posts to be held together. Moses became nervous. He said to himself, “Now the people of Israel will think that I stole from them!” Like young Josh, like any of us—well, any of us who have a sense of honor and shame—Moses began to fear that his integrity would be impugned.
At that moment, the Holy Blessed One opened Moses’s eyes so he could see the hooks. Thus Moses told the people, in what reads like a just-in-time afterthought, “And with the 1,775 shekels he made the hooks for the posts” (Ex.38:22). “In that moment,” says the midrash, “the Israelites were reassured about the integrity of the process of creating the tabernacle.” (Yalkut Shimoni 415:3; my thanks to Rabbi David Schuck for reminding me of this midrash)
The process of building the tabernacle is the work of our collective human creation. It is a mirror to God’s creation of the world. That is why Shabbat is mentioned so frequently in these Torah portions, and it’s why the language of Exodus 39 sounds an awful lot like Genesis 1. And just as we depend on the trustworthiness and reliability of the world that has been created for us, our capacity to work and live together—to build a home in which the Divine can dwell among us—depends on the trustworthiness and reliability of our shared public life.
I would be pulling my punches if I didn’t make the implicit at least a bit more explicit: The behavior of many of our public leaders today, in the United States and Israel and in too many other places, does not reflect these values. As Jews who seek to live lives of integrity, whose mission is to build a mishkan and make the world a place in which the Divine may dwell, we should practice so that our lives may be models of integrity. And we should expect that and more from our own leaders.