This morning, I had the opportunity and honor to share a brief intention before a clergy meeting of a Faith 250 cohort (https://www.faith250.org/. You can listen to my remarks here https://recorder.google.com/4606edfd-3dad-4e40-be14… or read a transcript below).
TRANSCRIPT
Each week in the Jewish calendar, we read a parashah, a portion from the Torah. This week’s is vayakheil-pekudei. They are the final two in the second of the Five Books of Moses, the Book of Exodus.
As part of the instructions for constructing the Tabernacle, we are told, or the Israelites are told, to make donations. I’m sure all of us are very familiar with how wonderfully they always work, right? We have a fundraiser, please make donations. We know we just snap our fingers, and everything happens.
Impossibly miraculously somehow, Moses at some point goes back to the community and says, “Stop”. And through Betzalel, through the people who are building the Temple, Moses says, “Stop giving! You’ve given too much already!”, which is remarkable because this is a nomadic people. No real source of income or Revenue. They’re wandering in the desert. They only recently were freed from Egypt and granted, thanks to God’s generosity–they were able to take things with them when they left Egypt.
But, they are coming from a place of scarcity, and yet they gave as if they were giving from a place of abundance. And I’m thinking a lot about that in particular now because–I can only speak for myself, and I imagine that many of us might be in the same place–where we simply feel like we have a lot of scarcity right now.
If it’s time, if it’s energy. If it’s resources, if it’s simply wanting to do good and to help people locally, nationally, and especially internationally–I think so much of our attention is also international right now–and we often ask, “What can I do?”
And we are so great at getting frustrated and never feeling like we can do enough.
And yet I think we have so much capacity, and we have so much abundance. And I think the fact that we are all sitting here together trying to do this Faith 250 project: we want to bring some of this abundance to our community, hopefully to say it doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have everything, but whatever you can give, not only is it going to be enough, but I think we’re going to positively surprise ourselves and really be able to help in ways that we can’t even foresee and imagine.
And so my hope and blessing for all of us is just as the Israelites came from a place of scarcity and were able to offer abundance. so, too, may we gather our individual and collective resources around this table, and I am so excited for everything that is going to emerge, both the anticipated and the wonderfully unanticipated impact that we can all have.
Thank you.