In this week’s parashah, T’rumah, God explains to Moshe how to build the mishkan, the sacred structure that will capture God’s presence and place it at the center of the life of the community. The first step is for the people to come forward with free-will offerings of the materials that the mishkan will be made of:  gold, silver, precious stones, wood and fine cloth.

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav taught that those gifts symbolize our own best qualities, the unique points of goodness that exist within each person. In other words, the true mishkan is not a physical structure, but a structure that is made of us, which we create from our most precious inner gifts. By offering up the best qualities that each of us possess and sharing them with each other, we make community itself a sacred vessel.

Together, we have the power to bring God into the world in a way that none of us can alone. We do so by drawing out the best in others, allowing others to draw out the best in us, and weaving all of those qualities together into a larger whole.

May the mishkan that we build out of our love for one another bring a little bit more wholeness to this broken world.