Each one of us has certain abilities in some areas and certain challenges in other areas. For me as a child I was always musically challenged; I was that child who was told to mime while the rest of the class sang in the choir. But when it came to mathematics somehow I had a knack for numbers and the numbers always came that much more easily than anything else.
When
we think about those things that we're good at, and those things that we find
more challenging, many of us talk about our God given gifts. When working with Bnei Mitzvah students and talking
about their Mitzvah Project, one of the things that I always talk to them about
is the need to find ways to share our God given gifts with others to help make
this world a better place.
In
this week's Torah portion we see explicitly how these gifts come from God. Continuing from last week where we had all of
the instructions for the building of the Tabernacle, this week we move on to
the High Priest and the clothes that they should wear. Moses is told by God to bring forth his brother
Aaron, with his sons, from among the Levites to serve God as Priests. And then he is instructed to make sacred
vestments for his brother Aaron for dignity and adornment.
The instruction
then comes: ‘you
shall instruct all who are skillful, whom I [God] have endowed with the gift of
skill to make Aaron’s vestments’ (Ex. 28:3). In the Hebrew it is clear the people are: kol
chachmei-lev – all the wise hearted, asher miletiv ruach chochma –
whom I have filled up with the spirit of wisdom.
It's
very clear in this passage that the wisdom that these people possess comes from
God. And as such it is their God given
gift to have the ability to help in the creation of the clothing that the Priests
would wear. And while we might not be
endowed with gifts for the making of clothes for the High Priest; we, each one
us, has that ruach
chochma,
that spirit of wisdom in certain areas, that was given to us
by God.
The
Hebrew is beautiful, miletiv, has this sense of being filled up; we get
filled with the gifts. The challenge for
all of us is to take our God given gift, to identify it, and then to find a way
to use it in this world to help not just ourselves, but to help, as God's
partners, in making this world a better place.
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