Moving the Chairs for Better Holiness – A poem for Parsha Terumah

And you shall place the table on the outer side of the dividing curtain and the menorah opposite the table, on the southern side of the Mishkan, and you shall place the table on the northern side.
-Exodus 26:35

If you’re like me (and I have every reason
to believe you are not) you don’t walk into a room
without rearranging the chairs

especially if you’re in charge of what happens
in that room. It’s not a demonstration of power
but rather a hidden knowledge, or at least

gut feeling that whatever is about to happen
in that room would be better if the chairs
were closer together and maybe curved.

You (probably not, but for sure I) put just as much
thought into how much light you allow to
pour out of the sockets in that room.

Again, not a control thing, but an innate
sensibility that your rearrangements will
allow the room’s impending occupants

to feel so holy, they’ll be talking about
it all the way until they write the next Torah.
They’ll be basing the success of any future event

solely on what they experienced in your room
half of which is because of the intimacy allowed
by your precise chair placement!

People should be as close together as possible.
(Pandemic sensibility be damned.)
If your holy experience isn’t informed by

your neighbor’s breath on the back of your neck
why even bother? Everything in the tabernacle
had its exact place. Where the curtains were hung,

what the colors were they used to weave
the entrance screen together were holy.
So move the chairs if you must.

I know I must.
Your efforts make a difference.
We’re saving souls out here.

Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 26 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii” (Poems written in Hawaii – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2022) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.