As Jewish leaders, we are often called upon to respond to life and current events quickly, in real time. 

Here are some examples I have encountered as a student rabbi: Someone asks you to give an impromptu dvar Torah at Shabbat dinner. A congregant is in the emergency room at 2 a.m. and you get the phone call. A colleague asks about the recent campus updates at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, and you attempt to explain them. You see this week’s news about the ceasefire, and you send a newsletter about it. 

We serve as “first responders,” both to our community members and to the world, and this fast-paced work can be very challenging for the parts of us that need more time. Some of us need more time to process global events emotionally; others need more time to write, or to translate Hebrew, or to learn trup. The work compels us to move quickly — but inside, we each have rhythms that are slower. 

I think of this paradox as I imagine our ancestors bringing gifts to build the Mishkan in this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayakhel. 

 In Exodus 35:26, we read, “And all the women whose hearts inspired them with wisdom spun the goats[’ hair].” What exactly was the women’s special wisdom here? Rashi says it’s that they spun the goats’ hair into yarn right off of the goats’ backs. Rabbi Nechemiah explains this in a baraita: “[The women] washed [the hair] on the goats, and they spun it on the goats” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 74b). 

Now, I’ve interacted with goats throughout my whole life, and I can attest that they are extremely mischievous and frisky creatures. To be able to transform their hair into yarn right off their backs would have required very special skills — and quick reflexes. Spinning goats is what we’re doing today when we give the impromptu dvar at Shabbat dinner or answer the 2 a.m. phone call. It’s fast work, and we need to draw on our intuition and previous experience in order to respond effectively and efficiently. 

Yet the work of building the Mishkan wasn’t just fast. Zooming in on the act of spinning specifically, we see the verb “tavu” only twice in all of Tanakh: one time to refer to the fast spinning of goats, and another time to refer to a slower spinning process. This slower process is in Exodus 35:25: “And all the wise-hearted women tavu (spun) with their hands and brought what they had spun: blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and fine linen.”

Spinning wool is a “time-consuming task,” according to The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. Our ancestors would have needed to shear the wool off of the sheep and then hold their spindles with one hand while feeding the wool onto the spindles with the other hand. Then, to dye the wool, they would’ve needed to collect insect eggs and the secretions of a Mediterranean mollusk and let these ingredients sit with the wool in a big vat (Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, “Another View: Terumah”).

In our lives, spinning colorful wool is any process that requires time-consuming effort. This could be, for example, writing a sermon. We process the world around us and gather materials from our lives and the Jewish library, and we combine these materials to create meaningful messages. Or maybe our version of spinning wool is creating a new curriculum for Jewish middle schoolers. We get to know the students and set goals for their learning, and we design lesson plans that will engage and inspire everyone in the classroom. 

In building the Mishkan, there was also room for the slow, deliberate work of spinning wool. In fact, this slow work was necessary. The dwelling place of the Divine required curtains made of goat hair and curtains made of wool — a combination of fast and slow spinning.

When God first told Moses about the Mishkan, God said, “V’asu li Mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham” (Exodus 25:8). “Let [the people] make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” Among them, not in it. The Divine yearns to dwell among the people, among us. As we create our own sanctuaries for the Divine, we need to spin goats and to spin wool; we need to honor the parts of us that work quickly, and the parts that need more time. 

In our jobs as Jewish leaders, where it’s often easy to uplift the quick work, how do we make space for slower paces? 

Our ancestors demonstrate that we can do this by tapping into our community. When we need to spin wool, we can recognize the time and energy this will take and we can reach out to others to help shear the sheep, hold the spindles or create the dye. 

My internship supervisor, Josh Gold, shared this strategy in his work as the executive director of Judaism Your Way. “For the longest time,” he said, “I felt that I had to be the holder of all things for a program [or] organization… I have begun to realize that I need to trust those that are around me. I have begun asking for help and giving away some of the leadership responsibilities [where] I felt I was the only one who could handle them… When you have a strong leadership group, you are able to be more efficient and not alone in the challenges at hand.” 

We do not need to spin the wool alone; and what’s more, we do have some agency in establishing our unique paces of spinning. This is something my rabbinic mentor, Rabbi Lisa Edwards, highlighted when I asked her how she handled the fast pace of clergy life during her 25 years as the rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim. She said, “[I] recogniz[ed] that very little that I say or do is time critical. Even if people want to hear from us immediately, it can be a short message of condolence or acknowledgment with a more detailed response [later].” 

In other words, we can compress the fast work so that we have more space to do the slower work at a pace we can sustain. When we feel compelled to move quickly, we can be intentional and work with rather than against our slowness. 

Respecting our rhythms and working together in community — these are our tasks as we build dwelling places for the Divine today, following after our ancestors as they built the Mishkan.

In next week’s parsha, Moses will see the completed Mishkan and give the Israelites a blessing. According to a midrash from Rabbi Meir, Moses’s blessing is this: “Yehi ratson shetishreh Shekhinah b’maasei yedeichem.” “May it be God’s will that the Shekhinah will rest within the work of your hands” (Midrash Tanchuma, Pekudei 11). 

May this be so.

Lizzie Frankel is a meaning-seeker with a passion for cultivating healing in creative ways. She is pursuing rabbinic ordination at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion with a concurrent master’s in Jewish nonprofit management at the Zelikow School.