Parashat Terumah: Jo, Walter and the Ark of the Covenant
Jo and Walter were born nearly fifteen years apart. Jo, on 5th September in Chicago and Walter, on 19th March in Idar-Obestein in what was ‘West Germany’.
Her father,
Armando Tejada, was a Bolivian aeronautical engineer, whilst her mother Josephine
was of English descent and the daughter of an architect. Jo was the eldest of three children. The family moved to San Diego when Jo was two
years old and she attended the Pacific Beach Presbyterian Church with her mother
every Sunday morning. At the same time, her
mother enrolled her in ballet lessons. Many
years later, she recalled her father as being a ‘dominating and tyrannical figure’
which led to her parents divorcing around the time she was finishing high school.
Blessed with
beauty from a very young age, she won a number of contests which led to her being
crowned the ‘Maid of California’.
Walter’s father
was an American soldier and when he was two, his parents moved to Carney’s Point
in New Jersey. He had a younger sister and
two younger brothers. His mother obtained
a job working in a bank whilst his father held down a number of occupations which
included being a welder, factory worker and master mechanic. In school, Walter had a noticeable stutter and
he later recalled:
‘I had a terrible stutter. But then I did some theatre in high school and
when I memorized words, I didn't stutter, which was just miraculous. That was the beginning of the gradual dispelling
of my stutter. I thought I was handicapped. I couldn't talk at all. I still stutter around some people now’.
In terms of
his background, he described himself as coming from ‘a long line of blue-collar
people’.
Who were Jo
and Walter? Both individuals achieved worldwide
fame as Raquel Welch and Bruce Willis (dropping their true first names).
Sadly, Raquel
passed away on 15th February at the age of 82 and a day later, Bruce’s
family announced to the world that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia
and that his condition had progressed to the point that ‘challenges with communication
are just one symptom of the disease.’ He is only 67 years old.
In the 1960s
and 1980’s, Raquel Welch and Bruce Willis could have been compared to Barbie and
Ken as examples of their respective aesthetic forms.
As ‘The Times’
wrote in their obituary of Raquel:
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and with only
three lines in the film ‘One Million Years BC’, Raquel Welch said considerably fewer
than that.
Yet the image of her in her costume (I have edited the exact description for appropriateness)
was far more eloquent. The New York Times
called the shot “a marvellous breathing monument to womankind” and, even before
the film reached cinema screens, a publicity still of Welch in her cave woman outfit
became a bestselling poster and had turned her into one of the world’s most alluring
____ symbols (fill in the blank)
Bruce, meanwhile, particularly
in his John McLane ‘Die Hard’ role, represented many of our visions of what it meant
to be a ‘real man’. He was there, in the
thick of the action fighting for justice against some really nasty individuals (who
were more often than not, British) and getting really badly hurt in the process. We felt his pain, yet we came back for more. You knew that if you saw a ‘Bruce Willis Movie’,
you wouldn’t leave the cinema disappointed; and we never did. When he wasn’t running around barefoot in a tattered
shirt and shredded, bloodstained feet, he was impressing us with his performances
in critically acclaimed and commercially successful films like ‘Pulp Fiction, ‘The
Sixth Sense’, ‘Twelve Monkeys’ and ‘Armageddon’, not forgetting his memorable
earlier work on television in the series ‘Moonlighting’.
The same Bruce who stuttered. The same Raquel who spent her life asking people
to look beyond her outer beauty and consider the intelligence below the surface. On one occasion she told a director that she had
been reading the script and had (according to the Obituarist) ‘been thinking’. He cut her short and told her, “Well, don’t!”
How demeaning must that have felt?
I thought
about these two actors when I considered this week’s Parasha.
The Torah
tells us that Gd spoke to Moses and gave him detailed instructions on how to create
many of the Holy objects that would populate the Mishkan (Tabernacle).
Exodus
Chapter 25
Make
an ark of acacia wood...overlay it with pure gold, inside and out and around it,
make a round rim...make a table of acacia wood...overlay it with pure gold and around
it make a gold rim...make the staves of acacia wood and overlay them with gold…
Many of
the holy objects, such as the Aron Habrit, the Ark of the Covenant, which would
house both the broken tablets as well as the second set of the Ten Commandments,
were made of acacia wood, overlaid with gold.
Using a material
as simple as wood to construct and house such holy objects seems inappropriate. Rashi tells us that the Ark consisted of three
boxes. The wooden box fit snugly inside a
large outer gold box. Within the wooden box,
a smaller gold box was inserted. The outer
exposed wooden rim (of the middle box) was covered with a gold plate. In other words, the wooden box sat in the middle
of the largest and smallest gold boxes.
Why not place
three golden boxes, one inside the other?
Rabbi Shamshon
Raphael Hirsch (d.1888) gave a beautiful explanation.
He said that,
just like the Ark, we are the vessels that hold the Torah. The Ark was made of two materials, namely gold
and wood. We are human manifestations of
the Ark, in that we are living receptacles that hold onto the teachings of the Torah
as we try to lead our lives according to its ways. Like the kind of metal it is, we too have the
purity of gold in our thoughts and actions.
However, there are always challenges from within and without that try to
water down our faith, our belief in Torah and in this metaphor, pollute our gold. Though gold as a metal is beautiful, it is indeed
that – a metal. It is static and cannot fight
those who wish to sully it. Wood, however,
is different. It is organic and like a tree,
can grow and develop. Wood is alive. It gives us the strength to hold onto our faith
and fight back against those who try to rob us of our beliefs and deny us our heritage. The Ark had a gold surface, but at its heart it
was made of wood. As we say about the Torah
every time we close the Ark:
“Etz Chayim Hi Lemachazikim Ba – It is a tree of life to
those who grasp it”.
On the surface,
Raquel and Bruce appeared to be human embodiments of gold. Coruscating in their beauty but underneath they
were, and are, just like the rest of us - organisms that are imperfect and vulnerable. They remind us that, ‘not all that glitters is
gold’. Sometimes we need to scratch the surface if we want to reveal the real people
behind the studio-manufactured product.
The Ark of
the Covenant and its companions may have been covered with gold, but beneath their
exteriors lay the true beating heart of the Jewish people –the Torah that we cherish
today. Its wooden structure held firm and
protected it, metaphorically and physically.
Gold might be beautiful but it is soft.
Wood may not be as aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but it is very strong. It was the perfect combination.
We are the
spiritual descendants of the Ark of the Covenant. May Hashem bless us with the coming of the Moshiach
so that we may finally see the Ark returned to the Third Temple – may he come speedily
in our days – bimhera beyamenu, Amen!
Shavuah Tov
Sources for this Drasha (for
Raquel Welch and Bruce Willis):
·
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/racquel-welch-actress-dies-illness-lqffj9gwb
·
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raquel_Welch
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