The story of the Tabernacle has a special meaning for me – perhaps because I spent years trying to build a synagogue, perhaps because of its theology, but most likely because of one friendship – the closest friendship I ever had.

The story of the Tabernacle is simple. God tells Moses, “Tell the people to bring gifts from all those whose hearts are willing – gold and silver and copper.” And then, after a long list of materials, God tells Moses the reason for the gifts. “They shall build me a holy place that I may dwell within them.”

For millennia, commentators have wondered about the pronoun. Shouldn’t the Torah have said, “I will dwell within it?” And their answer was profound: we build community, and God comes to dwell in us. We build places where the suffering can find healing, where the sick can find comfort, and God comes to dwell within our communities.

As Rabbi Sacks put it, the lesson of the Tabernacle is that we build communities, and the Holy One comes to dwell – not in the building but in the builders.

And so, almost thirty years ago, I moved to California, and I joined a tiny little congregation. I got involved, and I joined the board, hoping that I could make a difference, that I could help build community.

My first board meeting was a shock. Sitting next to me was an older man – a man as old as my father. As soon as the meeting began, he started screaming. “We’re running out of time!” he said. “We own land,” he said, “and we have a building permit. We’ve got to start building before the permit runs out.”

Never had I met such an angry man. And never had I imagined that our tiny little congregation could build a building. But the man was adamant. And that was how I met Bernie Lieberman, a man who would someday become my closest friend.

Bernie was an angry, profane man who had survived incredible pain – an abusive father, childhood anti-Semitism, and being on the beach for the first day of Normandy. When I met him, he had just lost a son to AIDS.

Bernie took all of his anger and all of his grief and channeled it into the decision that, somehow, he was going to get our tiny congregation to build a building. Only this enormous project, this outpouring of communal vision and communal support, could help him find meaning in his son’s death. He hounded us for years – urging, cajoling, complaining, and insisting that “If you will it, it is no dream” (a quote by Theodor Herzl, founder of the State of Israel). And when the building was completed, he insisted that we could not put his name on the cornerstone. “All it should say”, he told us, “is l’dor v’dor, a gift from one generation to another.”

The kids in the congregation loved him. He respected them enough to tell them the truth, to be honest about the brokenness in the world, and to insist that they had the power to repair it.

Bernie was a regular in our Torah study group until a month before his death, and we had lots of discussions about what it means to be holy. But we all knew the answer: to be holy is to be a person who helps God, who does a tiny fraction of what Bernie did for our community. The anger, the cursing, the crustiness – all of those things were merely ways of hiding from the pain inside him.

Netivot Shalom, one of the last of the Chassidic masters, loved to teach about the Tabernacle. For Bernie – and for Netivot Shalom – all of Judaism was summed up in a single verse from the story of the Tabernacle: and they shall build me a holy place that I may dwell within them. In his commentary on the verse, Netivot Shalom wrote:

Holiness is not about wearing flowing robes and living alone on a mountain. Holiness is about living in the muck and the mire of the world, about taking our pain and using it to create a better world. And holiness is about giving a gift to the next generation.

In all those years, Bernie never acknowledged being holy, but look what he gave us – and more importantly, look at what he gave to our children. May Bernie Lieberman’s memory be for a blessing.