Of Gold and God — R' Lizzi Sermon

Booo Mordechai! Wait, did I get that wrong? As Rabbi Lizzi taught in her sermon on Saturday, February 21st, on Purim, we are to get so mentally mixed up that we can’t remember the difference between “Blessed is Mordechi” and “Cursed is Haman.” Why? Find out at Mishkan’s Purim Party on March 2nd. Our spiel and full Megillah reading is always the best party in town, no exaggeration.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/adult-purim-2026/

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our service on February 21st, 2026. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai Podcast (are you subscribed?) or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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A lot of holidays converged last week: Lent, Ramadan, Lunar New Year, Rosh Hodesh. Another calendrical convergence we Jews get at this time of year is what we read in the Torah today (and will continue to read about for the next month — the construction of the Mishkan), and what we read in the Book of Esther, the official text of Purim, which we will be celebrating in just under two weeks. This morning I want to take just a few minutes to think what we can learn from this convergence between our Torah portion, Terumah, and the Megillah. 

We just read a handful of verses containing God’s instructions to the Israelites for how to build the Mishkan. People whose hearts moved them brought gold, silver, copper, blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, rare skins, acacia wood, gems of all manner, put together in intricate and precise designs. God — or, the "Character of God"in the Torah (not to be confused with a much more expansive universal force whose intentions would be quite hard to put into words) — God, in the Torah, invites these former slaves to take their creativity, their agency, their newly acquired wealth, and their effort to do something not for empire, but in the service of the sacred. It’s remarkably inclusive for a document this old, explicitly mentioning not just men but women, artisans, and people across the spectrum of Israelite society, to participate. God says, Make me a sanctuary, so that I can dwell within you. Yes, what you’ll build will be stunning and ornate, but that doesn’t matter: what matters is you will be infused with My love as you build it together, all of you, from big to small.

Reminds me a little of when I give my kids something to build that requires instructions. If I just hand them a piece of paper with the instructions they quickly tire of the project and go find something else to do. If I sit down next to them and we go together, step by step, we may or may not complete the task, but the time together was absolutely sacred. God’s saying, here’s a project for us: I want to spend time with you.

This is actually the inspiration for this community: a traveling sanctuary, where God's presence dwells, not because we are in any one particular location, or any particular building, but because of all of the love, generosity, gifts, and talents of so many people coming together all at once with the intention of creating space for the divine. It doesn't happen by accident, it happens because of this Davening Team, the folks in the back of the room there, the folks who schlepped boxes full of compostable plates and prayer books and tallises, and who will stay here to clean up long after most people have left. It happens because of the people who donate money even if they can’t show up to help Build, and in doing that, are crucially contributing to the project. The lesson of the Mishkan is that when people bring the best of themselves and the best of what we have, we can create something beautiful that opens up space inside of the room, and inside of each one of us for the presence of God.

By contrast, in the Megillah, we hear not a word about God. Not God and not the God Character. We do open up the book to discover an opulent and ornate palace where King Achashverosh is throwing a 180 day drinking rager whose purpose is to display the glorious riches of his kingdom. The first verses of the Book of Esther describe hangings of white cotton and blue wool, held by cords of fine linen and purple wool on silver rods and alabaster columns; couches of gold and silver on a pavement of marble, alabaster, mother-of-pearl, and mosaics. Royal wine flowed in abundance, in golden beakers of varied design, as befits a king.

We are introduced to a lecherous, debauched king, and part of his power is how he displays gold and many of the very same material described in the construction of the Mishkan. 

I know it’s hard to imagine a ruler so obsessed with power and wealth, and performing power and wealth, that he puts gold in every room in his residence and goes through wives like they’re trophies to collect and display and then trash when you get a shinier one. Our story portrays the king as a caricature of this kind of ruler: a buffoon who loves wealth, wine, and women. Turns out this is a type. And while it’s all kinds of fun for him and a small group of his friends and advisors, it doesn’t bode well for most other people in the kingdom.

And it certainly doesn’t go well for people who defy the will of the king or his cronies, who push back against this performance of power. His wife Vashti says no to showing up to the party, and she's banished from the palace (or killed we don't really know — all we know is it could set a bad precedent for other women to defy their husbands so she gotta go). One Jew named Mordechai refuses to bow to the Kings’s advisor, which results in a decree for his whole people's extermination. This is a cautionary tale about what happens when power is not accountable to anyone, when it worships itself, when it’s driven by grievance, and insecurity — of needing to prove one’s power, and that smallness takes up all the space and leaves no room for the opinions or needs of others. Democracy didn’t exist in ancient Shushan but if it did, it wouldn’t have lasted long in King Achashverosh’s kingdom.

The Megillah is telling something about how empire works. The Torah is telling us something about how God works. 

In Shushan, the gold, the wine, and the need for power and insecurity that underlies it, expresses itself in force, and are what exert compliance in everyone else. Shushan shows you gold and says: "This is what power looks like, now bow before it."

In the Mishkan, everyone from every station in society, works together to make something awe inspiring, which importantly is voluntary and based on the generosity inspired in a person’s heart. The Mishkan says: "People working together to build something beautiful that includes and uplifts everyone? That’s what power looks like." 

In Shushan, gold decorates force and domination. In the Mishkan, gold overlays the Ark of the Covenant — inside and out — because integrity must match appearance. There are two cherubim made of gold that sit at top of the Ark facing one another, and we learn that it is from the space between them that God's voice emanates. Not from the gold, but from the space between the faces, facing one another. God’s presence emerges from balance in relationship, not dominance.

In Shushan, power protects immorality. In the Mishkan, power is bounded by law, ritual, and accountability, including for the most powerful. Remember, even Moses is held accountable for his excesses of anger, and not allowed to enter the promised land with his people. 

In theory, in a democracy, our leaders live with the awareness of accountability, and behave with integrity whether in public appearances or the privacy of their email inbox. In theory, when corruption and abuse is exposed, board chairs resign, institutions reckon, those who do harm are held to account. Yet still, today, hard as it is to believe, the powerful shield themselves and get away with abuse, at the expense of their victims, the rule of law, and at the expense of all the people in the kingdom. This is how empire works.

Our Torah is not naïve about this. It knows what palaces and empires do. So it offers this corrective: build a Mishkan in the wilderness. A small, portable, intentional space where we practice a different way of being where offerings come from the heart, and volunteering is part of the fabric of our shared culture. Where we remember that the God we serve is known not by what we say — but by the kinds of structures we build to protect and care for one another. 

To quote James Talorico in his recent interview with Steven Colbert: 

Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat people, especially the most vulnerable — and I’ll tell you what you believe.

The Mishkan is a rehearsal space for divine consciousness in an upside-down world. It does not topple the empire. But it trains us not to become it. It gathers gold — and empties it of ego. It gathers people — and fills us with responsibility.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the holiday of Purim, which for kids is celebrated with carnival games, candy, costumes, and the telling of the story of Esther with its villains and its heroes. It’s a feel-good holiday for the whole family. But once the full moon rises on the 14th day of the month of Adar and the kids go to bed, the adults put on our costumes, our masks, we come to the adult Purim celebration, we read the Megillah, and we’re told to get so mentally confused that we can’t tell the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman. Think for a second about this. For one night: see what it feels like to live in Achashverosh’s Shushan. Where there are no checks on power, no social contact or constructs of who’s in charge and who gets to make jokes about them, no sense of self-control or method to the madness, almost as if living in the moments of tohu vavou, abject chaos, before God said Let There Be Light. This holiday sits right on the fine line between ridiculous fun and dangerous impunity. As fun as it is to break down social hierarchies and make fun of our leaders, the consequences of their being no rules is actually quite scary to consider. To imbibe and eat to excess, to get so morally confused that we don’t know right from wrong. This is the knife’s edge between joy and abject terror. It’s an existential look in the mirror for all of us. Given that kind of permission: who do we become?

And so of course we have the mitzvot, the commandments of the holiday, that remind us to give generously to the needy, to make and share food with our friends, and to tell the story of Shushan, which you now understand is cautionary tale lest we imagine that we might behave differently than King Achashverosh did were we in his shoes. Show me, our Tradition says. Show me that even in a world turned upside down, even in a story where God presence feels remote, you will remember how to treat people. You will remember how to build the Mishkan, wherever you are in the world. 

Shushan or Mishkan. I pray that we all carry ourselves as a portable Mishkan, creating space for others, allowing beauty to uplift and inspire awe, never to dominate or destroy, and volunteering ourselves for lives of service, care and support. May we, in this wilderness of moral confusion, become people inside whom God might dwell, and build the structures inside of which holiness and care might prevail.