This week's section begins by detailing the materials needed to construct the Mishkan, the portable Temple that the Jewish people used during their journey through the desert. The Torah then explains, one by one, the different objects that were in the Mishkan, such as the Ark for the Tablets of the Covenant, the seven-branched candelabrum, and others.
Throughout the story, which seems like a design and architecture class (materials, measurements, weights and assembly instructions) our wise men find lessons that we can apply to everyday life, in every place and time.
The very name of the parashah contains a profound teaching. The parashah is called Terumah, which means donation. The context, as mentioned, is to detail the materials that the people were to collect to build the Mishkan.
There are many ways to interpret and extract ideas from the Torah. For example, Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, 1194-1270) says in the introduction to his commentary on the Torah that the Torah is all "names of God." By rearranging the verses, words, and letters, the unique and repetitive content of the Torah reveals how to reach God. Just as a person's name is an interface between that person and others, since it is through their name that they are called, in the same way, the Torah, which is all divine names, is the "tool," so to speak, for calling upon God.
This idea, of interpretation through the order of the letters, is also found in the name of the parashah. The word terumah is written taf, reish, vav, mem, hei. If we take these letters and rearrange them as follows: taf, vav, reish, hei, and then mem, we obtain Torah and the letter mem, that is, the Torah that was given after forty days at Mount Sinai.
With this rearrangement in mind, when we read the second verse of our section, a new meaning emerges. The verse reads (Exodus 25:2): "Speak to the Children of Israel and [let them] take offerings for Me." With the new order, we read, "Speak to the Children of Israel and [let them] take Me, Torah mem." Strange... isn't it?
The idea is this: God is teaching us to connect with Him, to receive Him, so to speak. But how can we receive God? He Himself provides the tool: Torah. The Talmud tells us that at the time of the Giving of the Torah, God inserted Himself into the Torah and gave Himself, so to speak, to the Jewish people. In this way, the beginning of the Terumah section tells us that the way to bring God into our lives, the way to receive God, is through the study of Torah.