There is a question buried in this week's parasha, Terumah, that has haunted Jewish thought for centuries and feels, this week, startlingly contemporary.
God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites to bring gifts, each one according to what his heart moves him to give, and from those gifts to build a Mishkan, a sanctuary. The instruction that follows is precise in a way we might easily miss: "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them." Not in it. Among them. The Mishkan matters because of what its construction represents: a people choosing, freely and together, to build something that transcends any one of them.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spent much of his life thinking about what that distinction means for politics. He believed, deeply and consistently, that the great question of our age is whether we have the moral architecture to sustain what we build. Power is relatively easy to assemble. Covenant is harder. And without a covenant, without the willing participation of the people who will actually live inside whatever you construct, even the most generously funded structure eventually collapses.
This is why he watched Barack Obama so intently. Obama, Sacks felt, had understood something that most Western politicians had forgotten: that to lead is to tell a story of hope. That the covenant model, binding people together around shared obligation rather than competing interests, was the most sophisticated political technology ever devised. When Obama stood before two million people in Washington in January 2009 and spoke of promises handed from generation to generation, of eyes fixed on the horizon, of a gift of freedom carried forward to children's children, Sacks heard the cadences of Deuteronomy. He heard Moses.
He also heard something else. A warning, implicit in every covenant story: that the structure only holds if the people build it themselves. A sanctuary designed without the participation of those who will dwell in it is an imposition.
Which brings us to Washington this week, and to the Board of Peace.
The numbers are serious. Seventeen billion dollars pledged. Thirty-two thousand troops committed. Rafah named as the first test case. By the standards of international diplomacy, this is not nothing. The United Nations spent eighteen months producing working groups and envoys and institutional hand-wringing while Gaza burned. The BOP at least has a sequencing logic: disarmament first, reconstruction next, stabilization alongside it. It has donors and soldiers in the same room, connected by a single political condition.
What would Rabbi Sacks have said?
Sacks would have acknowledged all of this. He was clear-eyed about power, and clear-eyed about the United Nations. He knew that winning a war is easy and winning a peace is hard, and that peace requires structures, money, and sometimes the credible presence of force.
But he would have asked the question that the pledge numbers leave unanswered. Where is the covenant? Who sat in that room as someone who will actually live in whatever gets built? The Palestinian people, two million of them, were absent from the table. The Mishkan was built from the Israelites' own willing contributions, each person giving what their heart moved them to give. A sanctuary designed elsewhere and delivered as a finished product belongs to a different tradition entirely.
Sacks understood that legitimacy grows from within. From the sense that this is ours, that we built this, that we have a stake in its survival. A structure raised without that conviction requires permanent maintenance by outside forces, which is a different kind of project, and a far more costly one.
He would also have noticed the deeper irony. The covenant idea, the belief that a society coheres through shared moral obligation rather than concentrated power, is a Jewish idea that traveled through the Hebrew Bible into the political imagination of America and became the foundation of its democratic experiment. It is an idea that, as Sacks observed with a mixture of pride and sadness, is more alive in Washington than in Jerusalem.
And yet here is Washington, assembling a framework for Gaza's future, with all the resources and moral ambition the covenant tradition eventually made possible, and still searching for the covenant itself. For the thing that made it work.
Terumah teaches that the sanctuary lives in the giving. In the moment when people who have every reason to hold back choose instead to contribute, freely, to something they believe in. That is when God dwells among them. Among them, the text insists. The gold and the acacia wood and the linen curtains matter only because of the hands that offered them willingly.
The Board of Peace has measured the curtains carefully. The harder question, the one Moses would have asked, the one Sacks would have asked, is whether anyone has thought about the giving.