19 Terumah: Day 7 (Saturday)

Shabbat. 4 Adar 5786.

Today's image is a copper cross-shaped stake hammered into the desert ground, with a crown of thorns at the top.

Today's reading is Exodus 27:9 to 27:19.

This is the link to Daily Chumash with Rashi at Chabad.

The Daily Wisdom from the Lubavitcher Rebbe is titled "Infusing Divinity."

On 21 February 2026 at 7:00 AM EST, Jonathan writes: 

Shabbat Shalom, for those of you who are reading me on Shabbat.

I am not sure yet if this is a long-term transformation of my character, but I have been reading the Chumash with Rashi and the Daily Wisdom from the Lubavitcher Rebbe every day since my 54th birthday on 25 January 2026, which was also the last Sunday of the MJTI PEP class titled "What's Bothering Rashi's Community?" 

Every day from Sunday to Saturday I am in the chair at my computer workstation, which is my digital tabernacle, and I am engrossed in Torah study from 6 AM to 8 AM.

This is unusually structured for me, and it seems to have brought a profound sense of structure to the rest of my day (see The Twelve Gates). I am inclined to call it a minor MJTI healing miracle.

Israel, as I understand it on a secular plane, is a fragile tabernacle in the North African desert. There are good reasons - from militant anti-Zionism and internal division to runaway climate change and nuclear holocaust - to think it won't survive the 21st century of the Common Era. But for those of us who live on a plane of faith in Hashem, there are even better reasons to think that Israel will endure, if not as a completely sovereign state, then at least as a semi-sovereign state within a world federation, at least until the Messianic Era of 6000 Anno Mundi begins.

Some of us reading here in the year 2026 CE/5786 AM, depending on our faith in reincarnation, resurrection, AI and transhumanism, may well live to see that day. Indeed, some of us may already be living within that day and not fully or even dimly realize it.