Terumah: Sizzle or Steak?

Description

A manufacturing question: What do you create first – the package or the product?

In today’s commercial world it often appears that marketing matters more than the product, and wrappers are designed before the contents. But it is also true that if the exterior is not appealing and the packaging poorly conveys the message about what is inside, we won’t trust the product.

In our personal lives the same kind of question can be asked: What takes priority – the means or the ends? What drives us – the body or the soul? The sizzle or the steak?

Here’s where marketing structure, business administration and personal life all converge. For conventional wisdom of business administration dictates that a successful entity  requires two essential forces: a visionary and a builder.

We examine both in this two-part sermon:

Part I: The Visionary vs. the Builder

Part II: The Building Blocks of Existence

In Part I, we explore the symbiotic relationship between Moses the visionary, and Bezalel, the builder of the Sanctuary, and mine it for the vital lessons the Torah offers for our lives. And then, in Part II (which may work better as a class) we explore the psycho-spiritual Kabbalistic insights of that relationship. Surprisingly, we find that it mirrors the binary-digit computer language, and that the process of the cosmic order, the spiritual DNA of all existence, works like a series of 0’s and 1’s.