The give & take of life & love | Rabbi Stewart Weiss | Beit Midrash

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Beit Midrash

קטגוריה משנית

"Ve'yikchu Li Teruma, they shall take for Me a donation."

Why does G-d tell Moshe to instruct the people to
"take" donations for the building of the Mishkan?
Would "give" not have been a more appropriate verb?

There is a common misconception that one feels
love for someone from whom he receives & derives
benefit. But in truth, love is generated through
giving; counter-intuitively, a person loves most
someone to whom he has given abundantly. The love
that husband & wife feel for one another grows
over the course of their marriage in direct
proportion to their giving to each other more &
more. (Thus the root of "ahava – love" is "hav" – to give).

Sports fans feel an intense attachment to their
favorite team because of the time, money &
emotional energy they invest into that team.
Indeed, the average price paid for a ticket to
this week’s sold-out Super Bowl was $8600! As the
Gemara teaches, a person is happier with the $100
that he earned by his own efforts than with
$1,000 that came to him effortlessly.

The more that one invests into a given person or
item, the stronger an emotional attachment he
will feel towards that person or item. G-d
therefore specifically tells Moshe that Bnei
Yisrael should "take for Me a donation."

Towards the end of Parshat Mishpatim, Bnei
Yisrael declare their blind acceptance of the
Torah without any knowledge of what this
entails. But Hashem wanted to ensure that they
would proceed to carry out this great commitment
with love & excitement, rather than with a sense
of burden or resentment. He therefore commanded
that they give generously to G-d & donate
expensive materials towards the Mishkan, thereby
engendering a strong feeling of attraction to & affection for the Almighty.

In this sense, then, their "giving" was indeed an
act of "taking." By donating to the Mishkan, the
people walked away with a feeling of both love &
personal connection to the religion they have now
accepted upon themselves. This ensured that they
would observe the Torah not as a forced
obligation, but rather willingly, with genuine fervor.

Many of us, for most of the time, tend to
"sleep-walk" through the Mitzvot, adopting a
daily, almost mindless routine of conducting
ourselves according to the dictates of the Torah
& Halacha. But Judaism should never be "routine;"
it should be observed with an ongoing, ever-new excitement & wonder.

If you want to soar like Eagles, heed their
advice: "Any kind of love without passion is no kind of loving at all."