Carrying the Sacred Space of Freedom

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Carrying the Sacred Space of Freedom: T'rumah

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow*

Almost fifteen years ago, the gay community in America began to make a Quilt.

Each square was made by the friends and family of one person who had suffered and died of AIDS — most of them young, full of excitement and energy and hope until the disease laid hold of them.

Thousands upon thousands of squares, enough to cover huge areas of the Mall in Washington, D.C., where all the squares were brought and tied together.

A few of the squares were in dark and mournful colors. Many more were bright, crimson and purple and indigo, crocheted and knitted and embroidered with flowers and symbols and words and names. Each one a tombstone in cloth. There on the grass of the Mall in Washington, a whole graveyard in cloth.

Each square had been made with grommets so that it could be connected to the ones around it. Those who remembered each person who had died, those who had celebrated and remembered and memorialized each life, began to tie one grommet to another.

When the quilt was completed, it was ready to be carried from city to city, from country to country. A holy memorial to life much more than death, to hope much more than fear, to courage much more than pain.

A sacred work of art, the first public art made by a community that had been hidden in the narrow place of secrecy.

We meet this Quilt in words of Torah that are almost three thousand years old. The passages of Torah that describe the Mishkan — that portable place in which God's very Presence loved to hover.

The children of Israel had been locked tight in a Narrow Place, Constricted Space, Mitzraiim. In Egypt, the country that was long and narrow, the empire that was narrow-minded. Its prisoners had broken free, had turned the Narrow Space into a narrow birth canal. They had broken the birthing-waters of Mother Egypt when the waters of the Red Sea split. They were new-born.

And from the Voice that had beckoned them to birth and freedom, they heard the Vision of a sacred space (Exod 25). Full of scarlet and purple and deep blue. Woven of cloth, fashioned of fur. Shaped in sections that could be grommeted together. Light enough to carry on their journey, place to place.

The Mishkan. A Quilt.

The Ivrim or Hebrews — the scornful word, like "wetbacks," means "cross-over" folks, "trans-gressors," the free-ranging people who like wetbacks swam every sea and river, danced across each boundary —- were just newly free when they started gathering colors and textures and shapes for their Mishkan. Newly ready to create their own culture, their own sense of holiness, their own art, their own music, their own stories. Their own physical space.

Each earring tossed into the simmering pot of molten gold was a gift in memory of some slave who had died sick, starving.

Each curving wooden pole and pulley was carved in memory of some boy-child bashed and beaten by the Pharaoh's bullies.

Like those just freed from Egypt, the newly free community of gay men and lesbians celebrated their first taste of freedom with a first act of communal responsibility — making sure that their dead were not forgotten. Making sure that the world turned its attention to ending this plague and curing its victims. Turning what the world called their "transgressions" into freedom and community. Building. Creating. Sewing. Weaving. Carrying. Connecting. The Quilt. A Mishkan.

A Mishkan not only in the sense of a portable shrine. A Mishkan in the deeper sense of a Place where the Shekhinah dwells, a Place where God's presence can be felt in our very midst.

For God dwells most deeply where the newly free remember their pain with tears, create their future in joy, and carry their vision into every journey of their lives.

______________________________________

* Rabbi Waskow is director of the Shalom Center, a network of Jews committed to healing the world in the spiritual tradition of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He is a Pathfinder of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and author of Godwrestling — Round 2, Seasons of Our Joy, and Down-to-Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life, and co-author of Tales of Tikkun. In 1996 the United Nations named him one of forty Wisdom-Keepers from around the world to advise the Habitat II conference in Istanbul. Copyright (c) 1999 by Arthur Waskow.