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Vayakhel

Exodus 30:11-16, 35:1-38:20,

II Kings 12:1-17

As a young man, I got a job that amounted to a real stretch for me: director of a dormitory. In that role, I had to interact with a great number of college students, some of whom experienced all sorts of problems. I needed to have sensitivity to counseling issues, yet I had no experience with counseling.

Fortunately, a social worker on our team came to my aid. Shellee would help us think through counseling issues for at least one hour each week, and I would also call her after those encounters that left me feeling "in over my head."

She provided me with a crash course in counseling techniques.

Week after week, I would describe to her the situations that had come up and she would gently suggest techniques for dealing with them if they came up in the future. She would review each decision I had made, with suggestions for how to improve my work. Finally there came the week when I presented a situation, and she said, "You handled that excellently."

The praise felt good, but I also felt surprised. "I didn't know what I was doing," I said. "I didn't feel in control. I didn't feel like a master or an expert, manipulating the techniques you taught me. I felt deep concern for the troubled young lady and a sense that I was totally present, using every bit of my personality to try to figure out what I could do that might help."

"Right," Shellee said. "That's what good counseling feels like."

At another point in my life, when I had small children, I used to read a lot of books by experts in child-rearing. These books differed from each other in many ways and offered contradictory advice. One thing they had in common: The authors seemed perfectly certain of their advice. "Do this," they said, or "Never do that," or "Always do the other thing."

Eventually, I started to wonder how anyone became an expert in raising children. Had these very smart, very confident writers successfully raised their own children? The book jackets always recorded the authors' academic degrees but not often much about the authors' own children.

Once I thought of that question, I had less interest in the advice of the published experts. I have a friend who, together with her husband, does qualify as an expert, measured by her success with her own adult children. These delightful young people seem independent, intelligent, reliable; I think their parents respect them and they respect their parents. Meanwhile my friend and her husband still face raising their younger children.

You see, they have 11.

I discover, when I talk with her about child-raising, that my friend does not sound at all like the experts. She talks about "wondering": wondering what method might help a child through a problem, or what idea might give a boost to a downcast child or what sort of attention a child needs at this moment. She usually seems ready to rethink her decisions as she focuses on one particular child.

A verse in this week's reading reminds me of this tentative, present, unexpected kind of expertise. The Jews in the desert made an elaborate structure, the Mishkan.

Who, in this multitude of runaway slaves, had the expertise to do this work?

"Everyone whose heart lifted him up, and everyone whose spirit moved him, came and brought the offering of God for the construction of the Tent of Meeting, and for all its work, and for the Holy garments" (Exodus 35:21).

The 12th-century Spanish theologian Ramban (Moses Ben Nachman) understands this literally: Everyone who felt the deep desire to take part in the project found that he or she could do the construction work. "For there was no one among them who had learned this from a teacher, or had been an apprentice with someone to train his hands. Rather, they found within themselves that they knew how to do it, and their hearts lifted them up in the path of God to come before Moses and say, `I will do whatever my Lord says.'"

Ramban refers us to another verse, where the skillful craftsperson appears as the one whom God "will fill with the spirit of the Lord, with wisdom and understanding, with knowledge and with all crafts" (Exodus 31:3).

Some of our most important tasks come upon us before we are ready. We do not get to master the skills in advance. If our hearts lift us up, if we undertake our tasks with courage, perhaps we can also hope to become filled with the spirit of wisdom.