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LABOURING FOR THE FUTURE
Most of us live inrone house or one flat, if not all our lives,
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than for a good many years.
‘is that we can
This has many advantages.
M‘
One advantage
worship in the same synagogue week after week.. But what
wuv- oJLW
would we do if we stew: g§gzeah
the mode of travel.
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f‘ “Wm-1‘
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aggiignu? We11,that depends on
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If, for example, you spent all your time crossing-
and re—crossing the Atlantic on one of the big liners of Cunard'e
Shipping Company, there would be no difficulty, for each of these
liners has its own synagogue.
The huge new liner which Cunafd's are
building at the present time, which is to be known as the Queen Elizabeth
II, is going to have a very beautiful synagogue.
on foot,
But if yog travelled
never staying in the same place for more than a day or two,
then you would have a problem.
The only thing to do in such a case would
to carry a synagogue with you - a tent or something like that which could
serve as a portable synagogue.
That is exactly what the ancient Israelites did on their forty years'
journey thfough the Sinai Desert.
They made themselves
a
portable temple.
They called it the mikdash, which means 'sanctuary', or the mishkan, which
means 'tabernacle'.
It was a tent, but a very large one - what we would
call a marquee tent. NEW a tent, as you_know, is made of canvass. But
the canvass can't stand up by itself. Ifi has to be supported by poles
of one kind or another.- In the case of the tabernacle of the wilderness,
these poles were made of acacia wood.
But this raises a question: where did the Israelites get the wood
from?
After all, there are no trees in the desert.
teli us the answer, but the Rabbis do.
The Bible does not
According to the Rabbis, the
poles were made from trees which had been planted four hundred years
LEO BAECK COLLEGE
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Liaiuafi‘f
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earlier by Jacob‘s sons.
__.,2
_
Jacob, so goes the story, when he went down
to Egypt, said to his sons:‘ "This is the place from which God will redeem
eMh)
‘
you in time to come.
Therefore plabt trees now, so that when the téaa of
redemption comes, yéur descendants will be able to cut them down and use
the timber to build a tabernacle in which to worship our God” (Tanchuma,
Terumah).
Of course we don't know whether this story is true, but if it
is, you will agree that Jacob acted very wisely.
And talking of wisdom; you will recall that this is the quality for
which King Solomon was esneciallyrenowned. We are tdld, for example, that
he knew a great deal.
He knew a great deal especially about trees.
this knowledge proved very useful.
And
For one of the great tasks which
Solomon was called upon to perform was to build a Temple.
The old
mishkan, the portable shrine, was no longer necessary. The Israelites
were no longer wanderers. They had settled in Palestine, especially in
Jerusalem. They now needed a permanent place of worship; Already
Solomon's father, King David, knew this, But he was too busy fighting wars
to get on with the job.
So it was left to Solomon.
Now if you need timber
for a marquee tent, you need a great deal more for a Temple. And Solomon
knew exactly where to get it from. The best forests were on the island of
Tyre, great forests of Lebanon cedars._ And so Solomon)made a pact with
the king of Tyre, whose name was Hiram, and under this pact Hiram agreed
vto supply Solomon with'all the timber he needed to build“;
Temple.
Of coubse it took many years to build the Temple, and while the work
was going on, Solomon had his douhts. Will it ever be finished? he asked
himself.
And will
I
still be alive then?
And if not, what is the use of
it? H)According to Jewish tradition, and indeed according to the Bible
itself, Solomon wrote several books.
One of these books is known a;
.
_.3 _
.
in Hebrew as Kohelet and in Latin as Ecélesiastes.
In that book the
authob keeps on saying, "What's the use of all the work we do here
on
earth, seeing that sooner or later we shall die and then others will
reap the benefit?"‘
One verse, for example, goes like this: "And I hated
all g§§ labour wherein I laboured under the sun, seeing that I must
leave it unto the man that shall be after me" (2:18). If the book was
indeed written by Solomon - Whiéh is, by the way, doubtful — he may well
have been referring to tfigg¥éggie.
Nevertheless, the Temple was finished. Therefore, presumably, Solomon
had a change of heart. And the Rabbis tell a story which illustrates
‘
how this might have happened.
Roman
The story is about the/Emperor Hadrian.
one day Hafirian was taking a walk through the streets of Tiberias when
he'noticed a very old man, with a long white beard, trying with great
exertion to pull out a shrub in his front garden.
"What are you doing?"
said the Emperor to the old man. '"I am trying to pull out this shrub
so as to plant a fig—tree in its place."
the Emperor.
"And how old aresou?" asked
"A hundred.years," said the old man.‘
years old and you want to plabt a fig—tree?
"You are
a
hundred
Are you out nfyour mind?
Do you honestly expect to live long enough to enjoy the fruit of your
fig—tree?"
long enough.
To which the old man replied: "If
I
am luckly,
But if not, I shall still be content.
forefathers worked for my benefit, so
I
I
shall live
For just as my
work for the benefit of my
children."
The story, by the way, has a hapwy ending.
The old man lived for
several more years, and when his fig—tree started to bear fruit, he
remembered the conversation with the Empenior.
So he took a basket of
figs and presented tham t0 the Emperor at his palace.
Hadrian, in one
-u.—,
’
of his rare moods of generosity, took the figs and ordered
the old man's
basket to be filled With gold.
(Kohelet R. 2’ cf. Lev_R. 25) Lg:
But the happy ending is not important. What is
important is the old
man‘s answer: "Just as my ancestors worked for
my benefit, so I work
the benefit of my éfg§2éwfié."
for
It was a wise answar.
It is a wise person -
mature person - who realises that the things we should do in our daily
life are not nnly the things which are of immediate benefit to us or which
a
give us immediate pleaSure.
And as we grow older we realise more and more
that we must often do things for the sake of the future, our own future
.and that of our fellow—men.
We plant a bulb, and for months to come there
nothing to Show for our labour; but in the end we see the flbwer coming
fiut, and we know that it was Worth while. We learn at school all sorts of
subjects which me may or may not enjoy; but in years to coma the knowlgdge
is
will enable us to earn
a
living.
In the same way we learn about Judaism
when we are young so that when we are older we may know how to lead a Jewish
life and to transmit the Jewish heritage to our children. We do not live
only for the moment, and we do not live only for ourselves. Just as Jabob
instructed-his sons to plamt trees to fifixfifififixfififlxfifii§fi provide timber
centuries later; just as King Solomon built
a
Temple which he might never
have seen completed; just as the old man planted a fig—tree so that his
chiWGren might enjoy the fruit; so we all have a job to do, not only for
ourselves but for mankind, namely to make the world a better world, to
build the Kingdom of God on earth, even if it may take cefituries mt
millennia before the ideal is fully realised.
V'asu ;; mikdash, V'shachanti b'tocham. "Let them make Me a sanctuary,
that I may dwell among them" (Exod. 25:8). That, above all, is the task
in which we are all required to participate: to make the whole womld into
- 5 ~.
‘
a temple where
God is worshipped from one end of the earth to the other.
it is an unfinished task, and it will still be unfinished when we die.
-The only question is whether we shall have contributed something towards
its fulfilment.
Anfl therefore everything
I
have séid this morning
can
be summed up in the words of an ancient rabbi: "You are not required to
finish the work, but neither may you refrain from it" (Avot 2:16).
(Lg alevcha hammelachab ligmor, v'lo attah ven chorin libbatel mimmennahfi