Parashat T’rumah: Giving, Not Taking, Leads to Love
(delivered by Rabbi Sacks on February 4, 2022)
Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler[1] was an important figure of the twentieth century. A Talmudic scholar and Jewish philosopher, he served as the mashgiach ruchani, “spiritual counselor,” for the Ponevezh yeshiva, located in B’nei B’rak, a center of ultra-Orthodox Judaism just east of Tel Aviv. His teachings are especially associated with musar, which promotes and emphasizes Judaism’s ethical strain.
One of Rabbi Dessler’s most well known essays is Kuntres Ha-chesed, literally, the Booklet of Kindness. It was later published in his collected writings, a six-volume work entitled Mikhtav mei-Eliyahu,[2] a “Letter from Eliyahu,” and has been studied and taught by students and teachers throughout the Jewish world.
In this essay Rabbi Dessler addressed the relationship between giving and taking. What are the origins of giving and taking? What is the relationship between the two? Can people be described as “givers” or “takers”? Can they be described as “givers and takers”? What might such a brief description actually tell us about the individuals it purports to describe? What is the relationship between giving, taking, and love?
As to whether people can be described as “givers” or “takers,” Rabbi Dessler taught:
These two powers—giving and taking—form the roots of all character traits and of all actions. And note: there is no middle way. Every person is devoted, at the deepest level of their personality, to one or the other of the two sides, and in the innermost longings of the heart there are no compromises. It is a basic law that there is no middle path in human interest. In every act, in every word, in every thought…one is always devoted either to lovingkindness and giving or to grasping and taking.
According to Rabbi Dessler, while people can be divided into “givers” and “takers,” just as important is that “all actions” are characterized by either giving or taking. Every action that we do, everything that we think or say, is directed either towards lovingkindness or taking.
That is an interesting position for us to ponder. When we consider our actions through this prism of giving or taking, I wonder what we will find, and I wonder how we might respond.
Rabbi Dessler not only addressed the relationship between giving and taking, but also the relationship between giving and love. He wrote that most people think that we give to someone because we love them, but this understanding may be mistaken.
Here we come to an interesting question. We see that love and giving always come together. Is the giving a consequence of the love, or is perhaps the reverse true: is the love a result of the giving? We usually think it is love which causes giving because we observe that a person showers gifts and favors on the one they love.
But there is another side to the argument. Giving may bring about love for the same reason that a person loves what they themselves have created or nurtured: one recognizes in it part of himself or herself. Whether it is a child one has brought into the world, an animal one has reared, a plant one has tended, or even a thing one has made or a house one has built–a person is bound in love to the work of their hands, for in it one finds herself or himself.[3]
Rabbi Dessler understood the relationship between giving and love to be different from what most people think. According to Rabbi Dessler, and this is worth pondering, we do not give to someone or nurture them because we love them; rather, it is through the act of giving and nurturing that we come to love someone or something. Let me repeat that: We do not give to someone or nurture them because we love them; rather it is through the act of giving and nurturing that we come to love someone or something.
The Israeli journalist and popular commentator on the weekly parashah, Sivan Rahav Meir, expands Rabbi Dessler’s approach to the relationship between giving and love to also apply to the relationship between human beings and G!d. Much of this week’s parashah, entitled T’rumah, describes the building of the mishkan, the tabernacle, by our Israelite ancestors after they contributed to its building. Rahav Meir asks:
Why does G!d need all of these human actions? Didn’t G!d split the Reed Sea and give us the Torah at Mount Sinai? So, nu, what’s the reason for all of our small actions? Correct, G!d doesn’t “need” from us silver and gold, but G!d wants cooperation, involvement, commitment. A giving that leads to love.[4]
God understood that by contributing to the building of the tabernacle–that is, by beginning our covenantal life as givers–the Israelites would be able to begin nurturing a relationship with G!d that was based upon commitment, involvement, and love; that by being givers and not takers, they would be able in some way to see themselves in the holy work that they were doing.
May we, their heirs, continue on their path, the path of giving over taking, the path of commitment and involvement, that path of love and holiness. Amen.
Shabbat shalom.
[1] Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892-1953), was born in Gomel, Belarus and died in Vilnius, Lithuania.
[2] I use the English translation in discussing this work. It is available as: Dessler, Rabbi Eliyahu. Strive for Truth, trans. Aryeh Carmell, Feldheim Publishers, 2016. Second edition.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Rahav Meir, Sivan. #Parasha: Weekly Insights from a Leading Israeli Journalist. Menorah Books: 2017.