Friends of Itamar

Leah’s Blog – Parashat Teruma 2025

Terumah February 26, 2025

I felt the silence so loud. Years and years of silence.

Walking baby Benayah in his stroller through newer and newest neighborhoods here in Itamar, the sound of music wafts up to us from the construction site below the Fogel house. The melody is shattered by the loud took took took of the excavator chopping into rock. The building going on here is staggering. Baby and I continue walking in the winter sun past older neighborhoods. The Shabo house, closer to mine, if a house can feel- is viewing and understanding what the soil diggers are preparing. That house, once ridden with bullet holes, the scene of a bloody carnage, now has pink cyclamens growing out of old cut out jerry cans. The sun shines on them.

Living here almost forty years has been a roller coaster taking an incredible amount of emotional and mental stamina. Our collective history, going way back to the beginning has had tribulation and successes. We have had and prayed for hope. The idea that our nation has made it this point as perfidy itself tries to swallow Hashem’s promise, that the silence of liberal Jews deafened my soul until this point has me loving the sound now. BUILD BABY BUILD. And we need to do it faster and better as we secure this Land – right here from the pupil of Hashem’s eye, from the middle axis. The sound of silence is far better suited as a song for these last forty years than The Graduate, a movie we all watched as kids, seeded with all bad things that sprouted into the moral bankruptcy of woke.

Somehow I got plucked out and was sent on this mission.

Our Parsha, Terumah, talks about the offerings to where people are commanded to contribute to the building we worship in. But before we go into the beautiful accessories that adorn the Mishkan and Temple, the template of foundation is consisted of bare logs of wood. The Haftarah, if not for being Rosh Chodesh, would have been relating to the fact that not only were the people of Israel engaged in the construction of the Temple, but members of other nations participated as well. The masons of Hiram and the Givilim to mention a few. Where was Gebal and why was it significant in material and craftsmanship in this mission? Located between Beirut and Tripoli in a forested area of Lebanon (Joshua 13:5) (Ezekiel 27:2), logs and logs of the finest cedar wood floated on rafts to Jaffa and were then transported to Jerusalem. Through that same road, Mark Twain came and called it a “dreary hopeless broken land” in 1867. But then something happened. Nations in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, San Remo, and ultimately the UN all lead up to the declaration of our State. The catalysis of nations and peoples has had Israel revealed only partially through modern history.

Now, President Donald Trump and his administration is the climax to our story. Like Hiram and the Gvilim who supported and assisted in the building of our Temple, all nations and people of the world can choose as GOOD and EVIL are clearly in your face, as the SOUND of SILENCE has been broken. DID YOU HEAR THE EARTH SHAKE JUST NOW? If you too want to remedy the ache you feel in your heart today, live Terumah. Live giving. This is enabling us here on the ground to build redemption and reach the complete victory. BUILD BABY BUILD!

Shabbat Shalom to my besties xoxoxoxo, Leah