Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

In this week’s parsha, God tells Moshe that the people are to create a sanctuary, a dwelling place for God in the desert. The Mishkan, or God’s dwelling place in the desert is famously built from people’s heart contributions and from their skills, a gigantic, prototypical example of Project Based Learning. The concept of this heart contribution is beautifully captured in the song Wise hearted men by musician Alicia Jo-Rabins. The details of this construction are immense and at times overwhelming in their architectural detail. If we consider the Mishkan to be the very earliest construction of a shul or house of worship, it is worth paying attention to some of the details, because these details connote what is of value to the Jewish people. For example, copper was required for the basin in the Mishkan. We are told in Exodus that the copper for the Mishkan was contributed by the Israelite women who offered up their copper mirrors.

This mysterious contribution of the mirrors is elaborated on in the Midrash, our rabbinic interpretations of the Torah. Initially, when the women brought their mirrors, they were rejected by Moshe. Moshe felt that symbolically a mirror which can be used as an object of vanity and also temptation should not be used in the spiritual enterprise of building God’s home. Surprisingly, the Midrash elaborates that God disagreed with Moses saying ‘Accept [them], for these (mirrors) are more precious to Me than anything.’

It’s fascinating to pause and consider why was God the great advocate of mirrors? Is God a selfie fan? The Midrash delves a little deeper into the story behind these mirrors and reveals the ways in which a mirror and the act of mirroring can be used for something much deeper than mere narcissism.

The Midrash explains that part of the dehumanising practice of slavery resulted in the loss of desire between one person and another, specifically between husband and wife. This was part of Pharaoh’s plan to break down the partnership between man and woman, so that people no longer saw themselves as relational beings, people who have the capacity for love and longing. In the Pesach story we tend to focus on the harsh labour that was endured by the Israelites but the Midrash is sensitive to the more subtle dynamics of slavery, the dehumanisation of slaves which results in people forgetting their being-ness. This strategy of seeking to break down relationships has been cruelly adopted up by oppressive systems all over the world. In South Africa, for example, during Apartheid, the migrant labour system sought to break down the structure of the family, forcing men to leave their families, work in the cities and live in overly-structured compounds.

In the context of relationships being severed, the Midrash weaves a fascinating story about desire and awakening. It says that at the peak of slavery, when the men and women had been separated from each other and had forgotten their human capacities for love and longing, the women undertook to re-establish connection with their men.

It is worth quoting the beautiful Midrash from the Tanchuma in some detail:

Said R. Shimeon bar Chalafta, “What did the daughters of Israel do? They would go down to draw water from the river, and God would prepare for them little fish in their buckets, and they would sell some of them, and cook some of them, and buy wine with the proceeds, and go to the field and feed their husbands.

And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say, ‘I am more comely than you’; and he would say, ‘I am more comely than you’. As a result, they would accustom themselves to desire, and they became fruitful and multiplied, and God bestowed pregnancy on them immediately.”

Mirrors! Moses wasn’t wrong to associate them with vanity. In modernity, we might think of mirrors in relation to narcissism and self- absorption, taking us back to the Greek myth of Narcissus who falls in love with his mirror image in the water. But in the Midrash, the women used the mirrors for a much deeper end: to help their partners remember and recall themselves during a very difficult time.

On an interpersonal level, we might meet people all the time who have experienced some kind of loss of self. It could be a refugee from another country who has experienced a cultural displacement, it could be any person who is going through a hard time who has lost touch with their own aliveness. The women in Egypt show us that we all have the potential to be mirror holders for people around us, for our children, our spouse, our friends, our -workers; to offer up a mirror that leads to remembering, recalling and re-awakening. In Jewish tradition, this kind of mirror is a holy mirror. The mirror of remembering is incorporated into the holiest space of the sanctuary.

No matter how many selfies we take, a selfie we will never get to the deeper aspects of who we are. This week’s parsha and the copper mirrors offers us a tool towards a deeper mirror, one that can we can use to remind friends, our loved ones, the ‘stranger’ in our midst and even ourselves of the things that keep us alive and enthralled.

Shabbat Shalom