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Last night, just as soon as the last of the children got quiet, it was our turn to make a bit of noise. No, we didn’t start jumping on our beds (as we often tell our kids we do after they go to sleep), but we went into the kitchen to hang out and have our first quiet conversation of the day.
As we spoke, we prepared the children’s lunches for school the next day. Being the supermom that she is, my wife, Raizel, turned this they-should-all-get-a-peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich experience into a gourmet event, where each child got something in their lunch that they liked, and a sandwich that spoke to them.
After the lunch boxes were all neatly lined up and ready to go, we sat back, very proud of what we had done. No, we didn't bring world peace, and we hadn’t found a cure to any major, or even minor, disease, but we did conclude another successful day in the impossible journey of raising children and making a home.
I am not sure exactly when it happened, the exact moment we went from playing house to actually being adults raising children. And G‑d knows we get it wrong as often as we get it right, but we are giving it our best. From the bigger issues of character development and attempting to convey our values of Torah and being a mentsch, to the minor issues of helping with impossible math homework and science fair projects, we are doing our best at making a home for our children.
A home is more than a roof over your head and a place where you are protected from polar vortexes. It is a place where your essence is, where you can truly be yourself, where what you see about yourself is what you got—warts and all! That is why those little expressions of love (not just an apple in the lunch box, but a cut-up and peeled apple in the lunch box) mean so much. Because when you are building a house, your house, one where you are investing the sweat equity of your future, you pay attention to detail.
Someone recently asked me why the Torah portions of Terumah, Tetzaveh, Vayakhel and Pekudei go into such granular detail about all the items inside theTabernacle: the structure, the walls, the beams, etc. I answered that when you are building your own home, you pay attention to every little detail—not just the color of the house, but even the color of the grout between the tiles. Certainly, this is so when we are building G‑d’s home, where every aspect of it has a Divine purpose and significance!
When we are building our homes, we are also building our own little tabernacles. That attention to detail becomes all that really matters. That little peppering of love, kindness, care and consideration creates the details that make our homes a temple for G‑d.
So let’s learn a lesson from the building of the Tabernacle: not only that we should pay attention to details, but that we should infuse those details with love and passion.
My children may never know what went into making that perfect lunch, but I hope that they will one day look back and see that we made an effort to turn their home into a temple for G‑d.
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