Rabbi Alon C Ferency

A reflection on Exodus 36:2 In the wilderness, those whose hearts were stirred brought gifts for the tabernacle — gold, thread, acacia wood, the weight of devotion made material. The Hebrew nassa libbo means "his heart lifted him up," yet to lift is also to carry. This meditation sits inside that tension: the heart lightened by purpose, and the heart burdened by what it bears. Drawing on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried — where soldiers named the literal and invisible weights they brought to war — we ask: what do you carry into sacred space? Through breath and stillness, you are invited to name your burdens — the grief, the obligation, the unfinished thing — and then, gently, to set them down. Not as abandonment, but as offering. The tabernacle was built by lifted hearts. This practice ends in that same lightness: hands open, shoulders released, the self arriving — unburdened — into the present moment.