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Shalom Shir Tikvah Kehillah Kedoshah,
When is a tent not a tent?
When is it a sacred space?
….and when is it illegal?
It’s not the tent.
Our parashat hashavua this week is, as is often the case, doubled: we read both VaYakhel and Pekudey. The first term means “come together as a community” and comes from the same root as the term kehillah, “congregation.” The first of these two parshiot describes how, finally, the tent that was to be the holy meeting place was erected, after the perhaps inevitable mistakes and false starts.
The second parashah is called Pekudey, meaning “pay attention”; it refers to the records carefully kept of each person’s offering to the collective creative effort. In Judaism, anonymity is not necessarily conducive to holiness; we know that to be true, for instance, in the ways that people talk about each other instead of to each other. Or the way that we let others become anonymous to us when we are angry, or tired, or overwhelmed.
This Shabbat is also called Shabbat HaHodesh, the Shabbat of The Month - the month of Pesakh, the first of our calendar year. We are nearing the holy day period of Passover (Pesakh in Hebrew), a time when we are to deliberately engage in actively being part of our holy community - helping to together raise the holy tent, and inviting all to join us inside. Kol dikhfin yeytey v’yeykhol, “all who are hungry, come and eat” are possibly the most ancient words of our Haggadah.
As Jews on this most important holy day of Jewish identity shaping, we are taught that we must notice each other and include each other - we must attend to each other’s humanity. Otherwise we cannot possibly fulfill the moral imperative repeated more than any other in Torah:
וְגֵ֖ר לֹ֣א תִלְחָ֑ץ וְאַתֶּ֗ם יְדַעְתֶּם֙ אֶת־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַגֵּ֔ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם
You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt (Shemot, Exodus, 23.9)
This mishkan, this holy tent which our ancestors are finally putting up, is just a tent, unless they see and value every little aspect of it. The key here is in the word for sockets in Hebrew, which is adanim (for an example see Shemot, Exodus, 38.30). The phrase “socket of the tent” therefore comes out to "god of the tent" - reminding us that HaShem is in the details, and that every person involved in our effort to create a holy space must be seen as a reflection of HaShem’s divine presence - every tiny little crucial socket.
Tents are a highly charged image in our city right now; the city council’s recent decision to stop making tent shelter available to the houseless among us has caused outrage among many who see this as a regressive, cruel act cloaked in the false premise that there are adequate facilities for those who suffer in Portland and Multnomah County.
According to a recent DHM survey, 56% of Portlanders believe that most of our houseless neighbors are mentally ill, not just too poor to afford to pay rent. The sad truth is that being forced to live on the streets is enough to make anyone mentally ill; but taking away the tent is not the same as funding adequate treatment. It’s not as clear as the city would like to make it. If it were, Governor Kotek’s first move would not have been to issue an executive order calling for the building of more housing. The real statistics on where people can go when their tents are taken away is more complicated, and more bleak, according to this article from the Oregonian.
One hundred and ninety three people died while homeless in Multnomah County in 2021 according to this OPB report. They died in an anonymity dangerous to you and me precisely because if we accede to it, we have allowed the community we are part of to lose its holiness.
We cannot simply blame our city and county leadership. They are not uncaring, nor without human feelings. But they can only do what we direct them to do, and we spend too much time and energy looking away. As long as we allow them to criminalize sleeping outside in a tent when there is demonstrably no other alternative, we are accessories to those who sleep in tents because they have to, rather than you and I when we choose to.
It’s painfully ironic: I have a tent packed away in my home in case of the catastrophe of a major earthquake. But those who have already experienced their disaster and are using a tent to survive are persecuted by sweeps. No, tents are not the answer, but to take them away from first responders is to look away from the grim and murderous reality that we have not created housing.
What kind of tent are you helping to build by the choices you make in the way you engage with community? When you feel overwhelmed by it all, hold on: don’t give in to the urge to be angry or despair. You are not alone; we are all seeking the path toward a better world. We will only get there through being kind to each other, and insisting that kindness must be expressed in the community we live in, in all the tents we put up.
Shir Tikvah leadership is seeing to highlight the need for more housing by challenging the city's ban on distributing tents (based on the false premise that there are resources for every homeless person, and that it's their fault that they are homeless). We know what it's like to be disadvantaged by the law of the land, and then punished for it, for it has happened to us, and therefore we must not do to others that which is hateful to us, nor stand by while it happens. May we come to see our community as a holy tent that we are raising, and each one adanim, reflecting HaShem as we do our best to be steadily kind to each other.
Learn more about homelessness in Portland here: Homelessness In Portland And may those of us with reliable shelter over our heads never lose our awareness that all deserve what we are grateful to have.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Ariel
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