April 2, 2009
At the moment of creation, our sages say, God gathered earth from the four cardinal points of the compass, as if to promise that wherever we die, the earth will be there to receive us. We are but borrowed soil, gathered and quickened into temporary life. Ever since, as the species made of gathered earth, we human beings have been social animals: Yearning for each other’s company, we gather still, like opposite magnetic poles that attract one another.
This week’s parsha addresses the need to gather, when it discusses meal offerings, only part of which were offered to God. The priests (kohanim) ate the rest, but only in a holy place of gathering, “the courtyard of the tabernacle.” Elsewhere in the Torah, that same enclosure is called the petach, the “opening” to the sanctuary area. In this chapter, however, it is labeled hatzer, a “courtyard,” to emphasize its function as a place of assembly. In time, the rules for this tabernacle enclosure were transferred to the temple parallel, where, again, the priests consumed the offering in question.
In addition to meal offerings, a daily offering called tamid was the rule. These sacrifices were wholly consumed by flame — nothing remained for priestly consumption. Still, people gathered to watch it, not just priests, but ordinary Israelites too. And at holidays, pilgrims from all over flocked to the Temple to gather in celebration. Temple sacrifices called for gathering.
Talmudic legend elaborates on the reason for gathering at the Temple, specifically. When God decided to gather earth from all four compass points to create us, God did not have to travel to the farthest points that the eye can see to get it. To God, after all, near and far are the same. So God just reached down and scooped out earth from four nearby symbolic spots, the way one might set up adjacent signposts on four corners of an intersection, labeled north, south, east, and west. The borrowed earth left empty holes, of course, which God did not fill in, there being nothing around with which to fill them, except more earth that would make four more holes, which would have required the earth of four more holes yet, and so on and so on. So think of it: All the millions of human beings that ever were and that ever will be come from four eternally unfilled holes in the ground. The Talmud calls them shitin (Suk 49a).
As the point where human life began, those primal earthen cavities were sacred, so God ordered the Temple built above them. The four corners of the altar were held in place by being inserted into the four shitin. Gathering in proximity of the altar evoked recognition of our mortality, since we could not help but think of human beginnings as just plain earth, quickened to be sure, but only momentarily, compared to a universe whose age boggles the imagination.
When the Temple fell, we replaced sacrifice with prayer, a new form of worship likened to the “offering of our lips.” For prayer too we were to gather, this time in a new sacred center, the synagogue, known in Hebrew as beit knesset, “place of gathering.” Even the English word “synagogue” comes from a Greek equivalent meaning “gathering.” To this day, synagogues are centers for the sacred act of gathering.
Since the impulse to assemble is inherent in our nature, we gather for just about everything: ball games, meetings, book clubs, and dinner parties. Not all gatherings are sacred, but synagogue gatherings should be. When the Temple became the synagogue, it is as if the shitin moved from the place of sacrifice to the place of prayer: the synagogue sanctuary. As the priests of old gathered after the sacrifices to eat in an adjacent Temple area, so we now accompany prayer by assembling in an equivalent synagogue space. We call it the kiddush (“sanctification”) or oneg (“celebration”).
If marked correctly, these synagogue gatherings are as important as the prayers they accompany. They “sanctify” and “celebrate” not just a personal moment of life-cycle exultation (an upcoming marriage, say), but the entirety of life itself, the cosmic moment in eternity when we get to share consciousness with God. The next time someone passes you a Kiddush cup at such a gathering, steal some time to imagine four tiny holes below you; picture a moment, eons ago, when God hollowed them out and packed their earth together to proclaim human life. Then think of it: Here we are, we humans, packed together still, but electrified with life and breathing — more like our Creator than the earth with which we are created. L’chaim, you will say, “To life!” — and you will really mean it.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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