Gold, silver and copper: the opening passage of Parashat Pekudei accounts for the vast material resources required for building of the Tabernacle, or Mishkan. While the building of the Mishkan required much material investment, it ultimately served a spiritual purpose.
What about the materialism in our day to day lives, and was the view of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidut, on this issue? Dr. Einat Ramon, Senior Lecturer in Jewish Thought and founder of the Marpeh pastoral care program, discusses the complicated relationship in Parashat Pekuidei between physical esthetics and spiritual sanctity.
Watch the video below to learn more:
Einat Ramon is a senior lecturer in Jewish thought and Jewish Women’s Studies at Schechter and one of the founders of professional spiritual care in Israel (she is the writer of Israeli spiritual caregivers’ standards and ethical code.) In 2012 she founded the Marpeh program – the only academic program for the training of spiritual caregivers in the context of pluralistic Jewish studies, where she teaches and supervises chaplaincy students and Israeli pastoral education supervisors-in-training. Dr. Ramon writes academic and popular books and articles about contemporary Hassidic spirituality, the philosophy and methods of spiritual care , Zionist and North American Jewish thought, and modern Jewish women’s theology and ethics— particularly concerning family and bioethics issues. She is a third generation native Jerusalemite, received her doctorate in Religious Studies from Stanford University, she is married to (Reform) Rabbi Arik Ascherman and is a mother of two.