Sir Jonathan Sacks

The Chief Rabbi

Meditation on the Tent as a symbol of meeting:

As we dedicate this beautiful tent to the sacred cause of reconciliation, we remember that in the wilderness, where the Israelites built their first house of worship, the holiest place was called ohel moed, the Tent of Meeting. It was here that heaven and earth touched: “Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle” (Ex. 40: 23). [To enter God’s presence we need not only to love God but also our fellow human beings, as we read in Psalm 15: “Lord, who may dwell in your tent? . . . One who walks uprightly and acts righteously, speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue, does his neighbor no wrong, and casts no slur on his fellow human being . . . One who does these things will never be shaken.”] And the tent is where strangers meet and become friends. God appeared to Abraham – father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – “near the oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. And he looked up and saw three men” (Genesis 18: 1-2). Abraham did not know that the passers-by were angels. They looked like human strangers. Yet Abraham treated them as angels because that is how he treated everyone, and so must we.

The biblical word for a sacred tent is mishkan, translated into English as “tabernacle”. In Hebrew, the word has two other meanings. Shekhinah means “the Divine Presence”, and shakhen means, simply, “a neighbour”. When love of the Divine presence leads us to love our neighbour, and when loving our neighbour brings us back to the Divine presence, that is where God lives. Where meeting the human other becomes a prelude to meeting the Divine Other, when we see the trace of God in the face of a stranger, that is where conversation becomes a form of prayer. Then we can say, in the great words of the non-Jewish prophet Balaam: “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob” (Numbers 24: 5).