I live in Manhattan. Which is to say I am familiar with the need to downsize. Special stores and sub-industries exist for fellow city denizens like me who are space-ially challenged. Coffee tables turn into dining room tables, beds disappear into walls or sofas...anything that can do double duty does double duty.
In this week's parsha, God performs the ultimate decorating trick -it's more like a magic trick and it involves the ark ("aron"). The ark was located in the holiest room of the Temple ("beit hamikdash"), and it occupied center stage. Inside the ark were the ten tablets (aseret hadibrot) and on top of the ark were the two cherubs ("k'ruvim"). So the ark was a pretty big deal, pun intended.
Only one problem: when we pull out our measuring tape and try to chart where things were, there's no room for the ark.
The room was 20 cubits wide. Fact # 1.
To the right of the ark there were 10 cubits. Fact #2.
To the left of the ark there were 10 cubits. Fact #3.
Leaving exactly..NO room for the ark itself.
And so long before me, or AutoCAD, the Rabbis all wonder --both HOW the ark took up no space, and equally at WHAT this might mean for us.
In his work Meged Yoseif, Rav Yosef Yehudah Leib Sorotzkin (1) comes up with an ingenious answer, at least as to the why.
In many areas of our lives, there is a competitive dog eat dog reality: I am the boss or I report to the boss, I own the house, or I pay rent to the man or woman who does.
But Torah, symbolized by the ark which housed the earliest form of the Torah, is something quite different. Torah is something that we can all equally own and share. My scholarship is not achieved at the expense of your scholarship, in fact, we learn best together.
That, suggest Rav Sorotzkin, is the deeper significance of the ark taking up no space: Torah does not intrude on anyone else's space, read: it does not impede on anyone else's needs, territory, or obligations.
Rav Sorotzkin's thought is beautiful and inspiring on its own, but allow me one tiny addition that is already fairly implicit.
Torah is more than the study of Torah. The symbolism isn't merely suggesting that when we sit in the study hall, or sit through the Rabbi's sermon, we can all succeed without cutting each other off at the knees.
It's saying something far more profound: Torah, religion, and spirituality should not come on the back of others.
God should not be served at the expense of people.
Take Torah seriously, very seriously, but do so in a way that won't interfere with anyone else and their needs.
Ennoble others at the same time you work on raising yourself.
The idea of the ark/Torah taking no room away from anyone else, while still being very much PRESENT, is a powerful metaphor, and model.
If a child wants to only keep Glatt kosher, how can the same child also be Glatt about respecting their parents' needs, and communicating their own choices?
None of this is easy. All of this is vital.
The angel is in the details.
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(1)Yosef Yehudah Leib is the grandson of Rav Zalman Sorotzkin, the Lutzker Rav, and the son of Rabbi Eliezer Sorotzkin, founder of Kiryat Telz-Stone in Israel.
(2) Glatt kosher technically means that the lungs of an animal were smooth before death. This is not an actual requirement, but an extra precaution (it stems from the need for an animal to have been basically healthy at the time of its death and so with a great set of lungs like these...we can be extra sure). That said, Glatt kosher is also, even among the religious who know its true meaning, a synonym for "extra kosher" and it is true that it reflects extra caution to be kosher. In the same sense of extra kosher, I suggest being glatt/extra in our dealings with each other.
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