By Yael Polunsky

How to build a community (and a community centre)

A few years ago I was on Shlichut in Indiana and one of the synagogues asked me to talk about Parashat Ha’shavua at Shul. It was the first time I had to do something like that and I had no idea what to do. The Parasha was Parashat Truma. I read the Parasha maybe four times and got really frustrated. If you read the whole Parasha, you will see that it talks about how the Temple should be built; basically it’s the blueprints of the temple. G-d tells Moses how big the rooms should be and what wood it should be made of, what tools should be used in the Temple, and what color they should be in (a lot of gold). I could not figure out what I could possibly talk about in the Shul that the community will care about and that would make sense. Finally I started reading again and realized I missed the first two Psukim of the Parasha-

וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר.

דַּבֵּר אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְיִקְחוּ-לִי תְּרוּמָה: מֵאֵת כָּל-אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ, תִּקְחוּ אֶת-תְּרוּמָתִי. (שמות, כה, א-ב)

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying; Speak unto the children of Israel, that they take for me an offering; of every man whose heart maketh him willing ye shall take my offering. (Exodus XXV, 1-2)

So before G-d tells Moses how to build the Temple, he tells him how he should get all the materials to build it (all that gold sure doesn't grow on trees). There could be a few ways to get all those materials for the Temple: someone can donate all the money or materials, Moses can collect a tax from the people of Israel, 10 golden coins from each family, or maybe 15% from the salaries. But what G-d asks is different. G-d says that Moses should tell the people of Israel that they can give a donation.

Every person should donate what and how much they feel like (the Hebrew phrase is much better than the English one, it basically says ‘according to the generosity of their hearts’).

Why would G-d ask that? We can understand why one donor is not the best situation; when building a Temple, it would be better to have the whole community involved in the making of it and not just one person. Let’s go back to the tax then. On one hand you could say that asking for a flat rate from everyone is not fair because some people have less the others. But G-d doesn’t follow the percent method either; he says that every person can give as they please and he refers to it as a Truma, a donation and not a tax.

I love this concept. I think that G-d isn’t building a centre for himself; he’s building a community centre, and more than that, he’s building a community. By letting people choose to give to this cause, they choose to be a part of it. And by letting people choose what they want to give, they choose how they want to be involved. When a family decides to donate their rug to the Temple, they take something from their home and put it in the community home. This represents something from them in the community. Every time they then go to the temple, they see the rug and know that that’s a little part of them.

Now take this idea and think about your Eizor and Machaneh. No one is forced to be a part of the Eizor. Every person chooses how involved they want to be and what they put into it. We can’t demand people to be a part of a community. What’s unique about our community is that people choose to be in it and they choose what they bring into it.

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