One of my seminary students shares a deep message from this week’s Torah Portion – Trumah
The Parsha deals with the donations the Children of Israel gave in order to build the Tabernacle in the desert.
Kailah is one of a group of young Jewish women who have chosen to spend a post-highschool gap year in Israel. They study Torah in the mornings and their afternoons are spent being “big sisters” for children who for various reasons cannot live with their own parents. They live at Beit Elazraki Children’s Home which also hosts our Seminary Program – MTC
And now for Kailah’s words…
In the Torah portion of Terumah – תרומה (Exodus 25:1 – 27:19), God says to Moshe “and you should take for Me a donation, from every person for whom his heart wants to give/be generous, you should take the terumah (gift) תרומה.” Strangely the language that God uses is “TAKE for Me a donation”, rather than saying “GIVE Me a donation”- why?
Many of our Torah Sages suggest that this phrase teaches us the power of giving- when someone gives, they not only benefit the recieiver. The giver often benefits much more than the receiver.
Giving is a two way street. In fact, we see this idea in the hebrew word “נתן”, “to give”. If you spell the word backwards the meaning and the word do not change- showing us that giving works in both ways, as the giver also receives.
I heard another proof to this idea from the Manager of Bet Elazraki this week. He explained that the root of the word Terumah תרומה is Leharim להרים, “to raise.” When a person gives, he raises him or herself to a whole new level. His soul is lifted, and he gets a feeling of reward.
This week at the “Children’s Home” I was putting one of “my 10-year-old girls” to sleep. We played a game where she’d look at my hand and “tell me my future.” She predicted that I will have four kids in the future and I responded by saying “בעזרת ה” – B’ezrat HaShem – With God’s Help. She looked at me with the biggest smile, put her hands on my cheeks, and said (in Hebrew) “ that’s so nice, and so cute, cutie!” She was so excited to hear those words, to hear that I believe that we need God’s help for all our blessings.
She then began to ask me about my family, and my religious views. She was so excited to hear me say that I go to Synagogue and keep Shabbat. In this moment I realized how much my girls look up to every staff member and volunteer at Bet Elazraki. They don’t know how people live outside of the Home, so to hear that I come from a religious home made her so happy and proud to see how normal it was.
When I learned about the Parsha I could not help but think about the conversation I had this week. ״תרומה״ – to raise- I had just raised this little 10 year old girl’s hopes for religion and Torah in her future. By saing those two words it gave her so much hope, but at the end of the night, when I replayed it in my head- it was I who gained the most out of it. She gave me back just as much, if not more, than I had given her.
I will never forget the feeling I got when I saw the smile on her face- I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to help guide her just a little bit. These moments are the ones that will never leave me, these are the moments that make the tougher days not so hard- because at the end of the day, these special moments and powerful conversations raise us all.
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