In a bunker in Jerusalem, I learned something about love.
Ladder – Oil pastel on handmade paper.
Not every ladder is sacred.
The Architecture of Protection
The ladder to safety was one I could not climb.
What looked like escape to everyone else looked different to me.
Dedicated
To Addison, my son, one of the great loves of my life, who sat beside me in the dark and never knew I was preparing to tell him to leave me if he had to.
To those who are building while still shaking.
To every body the shelter was not built for.
To those whose hearts have been broken and are shaping themselves into vessels anyway.
To the love that survives annihilation.
Where We Have Been
We have lived through rupture.
Tablets shattered. Trust fractured. Gold melted into something that could not mirror us.
Ki Tisa taught us that smashing is easier than carving. That fury is faster than fidelity. That erasure tempts when intimacy feels unbearable.
Moses bound himself to a people who had failed, and new tablets were carved not by miracle alone, but by human hands willing to participate in repair.
And some years Torah is not metaphorical.
Last year I was in Israel during the war.
I spent nights in and out of bunkers. The sirens were seconds, not symbols. I use a wheelchair, and reaching shelter before the window closed was often impossible. I also live with hearing loss, which meant I was never entirely certain I would hear the warning in time.
And yet I heard them.
The sound lives in my body.
We were in a bunker in Jerusalem when I saw it: a metal ladder bolted from floor to ceiling, running through the building like a spine.
If the structure took a direct hit, everyone else had an exit.
I did not.
I understood, in the cold clarity of survival, that if the building collapsed I would tell my nineteen year old son to go.
Leave me. Survive.
Not because I was unafraid of dying.
But because the thought of losing him was unbearable.
In Torah, Jacob dreams of a ladder bridging earth and heaven, angels ascending and descending, a promise that the Divine moves between worlds.
That ladder was revelation.
This one was forged in steel.
It appeared to connect levels, to offer passage.
But it did not hold me.
Not every ladder is sacred.
Some reveal who was imagined in the design, and who was not.
I have spent my whole life measuring doorways before I enter them. Calculating whether I will fit, whether I can open them, whether someone will let me through.
But this was different.
This was not inconvenience.
This was the calculus of annihilation, and my body was not in the equation.
When you live that close to danger, structure stops being abstract.
Walls matter.
Timing matters.
Infrastructure matters.
Access matters.
Safety is not a feeling.
It is architecture.
In the in-between, when the sirens stopped and the silence returned, I closed my eyes.
Hebrew letters began to fall through the dark.
What the nervous system reaches for when everything falls away is revelation.
I was organized around love.
Where We Are Now
Vayakhel means: And He Gathered.
After rupture. After the wilderness. After shame and threat and broken tablets. Moses gathers the entire community. Not to relitigate the failure. Not to drown in remorse. To build.
The language shifts.
Wise-hearted.
Willing-hearted.
Lifted-hearted.
Every person whose heart lifted them came. No coercion. No extraction. What they had in their hands became enough. Gold once used for idolatry is melted again, this time contained. Blue and purple and crimson thread are spun. Blue is woven again into the structure, the thread that once taught us regulation now binding heaven to earth.
Oil is brought.
Wood is shaped.
Time is offered.
Skill is offered.
Presence.
Each person bringing what they have.
The Mishkan is not poetry alone. It is measured, detailed, architectural. It is a dwelling place built so the Divine can live among them, not above them.
The text lingers over measurements, weights, inventories. Holiness is audited.
After terror, the measure of spiritual maturity is not eloquence. It is construction.
Sacred Psychology
Chacham lev. Wise-hearted.
In Torah, wisdom lives in the heart, not as sentiment but as integration. A wise heart regulates. It remembers rupture without dissolving into it. It refuses denial without surrendering to cynicism.
Living in a disabled body has trained me in this discernment. When something breaks in my environment, I cannot romanticize intention. I ask whether it functions. I ask whether it holds. I ask whether it protects what is vulnerable.
A bunker with a ladder I cannot climb is not shelter. It is a message.
Wise-heartedness means I do not internalize that message as truth about my worth. I read it as information about design. And then I find another way out.
We left through Jordan. Through Qatar. Through the steady kindness of an Arab friend, Hatem, who was willing to drive us when options narrowed.
Interdependence is not theory. It is survival.
Going through customs in Jordan was harrowing. In a moment of scrutiny and real risk, someone I loved redirected danger toward me. I understood then, in my body, what it means to be unprotected.
Because of my deep love and attachment, I did not leave the relationship immediately. Attachment does not dissolve in a single breach. But many months later, when a similar breach occurred in a moment where I felt terrified, the pattern clarified.
When danger is no longer accidental but patterned, something in the body begins to understand.
Self-protection is not betrayal.
It is clarity.
Safety is not a feeling. It is behavior. And when protection fails more than once, the architecture is unsound.
Attachment and Covenant
Nediv lev. Willing-hearted.
No one in Vayakhel is forced to give. Secure covenant is not extracted through fear. It rises.
I can forgive internally without pretending someone else is willing. I can release bitterness without collapsing my standards. I can begin again without erasing what happened.
Willingness cannot be negotiated into existence. It either lifts, or it does not.
Trauma and Repair
After rupture, pain is molten.
Uncontained, it becomes an idol. Contained, it becomes structure. The gold is the same. The difference is whether it is shaped into something that holds Presence.
On the couch upstairs, this looks less mythic.
After overwhelming experience, people arrive unable to settle. The nervous system oscillates between hyper arousal and numbness. Beneath every story is the same question: am I safe?
Safety cannot be argued into the body. It has to be built there, slowly, through steady presence.
Not explanation first. Structure first. A room that holds. A relationship that does not collapse when fear surges.
Moses does not offer theology in Vayakhel. He offers gathering. Bring what you have. We will build something together. That is the oldest form of healing.
What Survived
For days it felt as if we were moving from one narrowing corridor to another, always one breath ahead of danger and never quite beyond it. When we crossed into Jordan we believed we had finally reached safety, and then the bombs began falling there. When we reached Qatar we exhaled again, only to learn that the airspace would close less than an hour after our plane lifted. Safety kept receding just as we reached for it. We were not escaping danger so much as threading our way through it.
When the plane finally lifted toward San Francisco, something in me released. Not triumph. Not even relief. Just the knowledge that I had gotten my son out. That the love I carried through sirens and silence and the ladder I could not climb had done its work.
The worst thing had not happened.
When everything else was stripped away, what remained was not grievance. Not disappointment. Not the unrepaired structures of my daily life.
Just this: these are the people I love. These are the people I am not willing to leave.
That is the Mishkan.
Not only gold and acacia wood and blue thread, though it is those things too. It is the place inside you where love is undivided. Where what you carry and what you are become the same.
And there is something else I need to name.
I am here. In the United States.
I get to celebrate Purim in community. I get to keep working. I can show up at an open mic or sit in a theater while people I know and care about are still listening for sirens.
There is an uneasiness in that.
A dislocation.
Safety does not erase solidarity. It complicates it. Privilege becomes a question, not a comfort. I am building here while others are bracing there. The distance does not dissolve the bond. It sharpens it.
Covenant does not end at the border. It asks: how will you carry what you witnessed into the life you are allowed to live?
Turning of the Mirror
You may not have sat in a bunker.
But you know the ladder you cannot climb.
You know the shelter that was not built with your body in mind.
You know the in between, the silence between sirens, where something essential reveals itself.
So I ask you gently, with the questions that only danger asks clearly:
When everything is stripped away, what remains?
What does your inner world reach for in the dark?
Are you measuring love by words, or by what is built?
What have you left undone?
How much love have you given?
How have you made other people feel?
And what are you carrying that is ready to be brought to the gathering?
You do not need to have it together. Nobody in Vayakhel did.
You need only a willing heart.
And whatever is already in your hands.
Behavioral Vow
This week I will measure repair by construction.
I will not spiritualize neglect.
I will not chase unwilling hearts.
I will build with those whose hearts lift.
I will bring what I have, even if my hands are still shaking.
I will shape my own heart into a vessel strong enough to hold grief and still build.
Blessings
May our hearts grow wise without growing hard.
May our generosity rise without coercion.
May the structures we build protect what is vulnerable.
May the ladders that exclude reveal design that must change.
May blue be woven into our architecture.
May the dwelling we build be wide enough for every body and every story.
I see you. I bless you.
Shabbat Shalom!
Love, Jenny.