By Max Hollander
Let them make Me a sanctuary so I may dwell among them.
Parshat Terumah opens with a detailed description of God’s instructions for how to build the Mishkan, or Tabernacle — the traveling sanctuary in the desert. However, when this happened is a matter of debate among medieval biblical commentators. According to Ramban, the instructions were given after the Ten Commandments and before the sin of the golden calf. But Rashi, employing a position in the Talmud that claims events in the Torah aren’t always presented in chronological order, wrote that while the instructions for the Tabernacle were written before the sin of the golden calf, retold a few chapters later, they were actually given afterward.
On the surface, Rashi’s position seems strange, but it actually represents a fundamental difference in what the Tabernacle represents. The Tabernacle wasn’t just a building in which to serve God but a response to the sin of the golden calf and an answer to human frailty. In the aftermath of the Exodus, the intensity of Mount Sinai and the disappearance of their leader Moses when he ascended Mount Sinai, the Jewish people returned to an abhorrent form of worship they’d been accustomed to — idolatry:
This he took from them and cast in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
“The sin of the golden calf,” Nehama Leibowitz explained, “indicated that the people were unable to grasp an abstract monotheism. They required tangible symbols of the Divine. The Tabernacle provided the form of worship which was the panacea — the cure and healing for their wounds.” (New Studies in Shemot, pg. 463) Rather than demand the Jewish people rise to God’s expectations, God gave them the structure they clearly needed in the form of a sanctuary they could ground themselves and their religious practice in. The detailed instructions of the Tabernacle that make up Parshat Terumah aren’t just plans for a sanctuary but for a path forward.
In a way, the Jewish people’s return to idol worship was a form of relapse. According to a 2024 study in the National Library of Medicine, relapse is widely understood as a part of the wider process of struggling with addiction, rather than a sudden event, often emerging when stress, emotional distress or life changes outpace a person’s coping skills and support systems. Common pathways include chronic or acute stress, reduced self-care, social isolation, exposure to triggers, untreated mental health symptoms and cognitive shifts such as minimizing past consequences or overconfidence in recovery. These factors can gradually erode resilience, leading from emotional and mental vulnerability to a return to substance use or addictive behavior if not addressed early.
Despite having just escaped slavery, the Jewish people longed to return to Egypt when faced with acute levels of stress. They asked to return when the Egyptians charged at them at the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 14:12) and when they ran out of food in the desert (Exodus 16:3). While God answered their prayers in each case — defeating the Egyptians and giving them food in the desert — the stress continued to build and ultimately culminated in their worshipping of the golden calf, which some scholars believe was a widespread Egyptian ritual. They did not have the structure or coping strategies in place to manage all the change they had experienced.
Like the Jews in the desert, it can be hard to resist falling back into old habits when roads to recovery and growth get hard, and it even makes sense. Yet when we think of the Tabernacle as a response to the Jewish people’s relapse into idolatry, it becomes a symbol of recovery and a reminder that it isn’t enough just to stop doing the things that are harming us. Taking away stress and changing our environment is not enough. We also need to build structures — schedules, treatment plans, etc. — that can guide us through the deserts of recovery.