Cherubim are poetic imagery – T’rumah
Hammered out of the pure gold that covered the Ark, they rose out of the two ends of the Ark cover, and their wings spread over the Ark as its visible protectors.
What did they look like?
No-one can be certain, except the high priest who saw them in the Holy of Holies each year on Yom Kippur.
Theories abound as to their appearance. One view says they looked like birds. Others say they had human form – a male and female in embrace, or a male and female child.
The marital-embrace theory sees the cherubim as symbolising the loving union between Israel and God. The two-children theory, according to Abravanel, teaches the lesson that every Jew from childhood on must spend his or her days and nights poring over the Torah.
Both theories are full of poetic beauty. Both stress that marriage and the family, dedicated to God, religion and teaching children Torah, are crucial to Jewish identity and continuity.
Both are more difficult than ever to uphold. The challenges to traditional marriage and the family are everywhere. The educational options that crowd out the old-time absorption in Torah are alluring and insistent. We have a problem!
So shall we sit and weep at the loss of the dream? We have to be dynamic and determined
We need to make more marriages work, and make them more Jewish.
No longer can Jewish couples say that what goes on in their marriage is their own business. The fact is that Jewish marriages are the front-line troops in the struggle to preserve Judaism and the Jewish people.
Nor can a couple blithely claim that it is no-one else’s concern how many children they have. The fact is that unless more couples have more Jewish children, our people and faith will dwindle and die.
We need, too, to raise the sights and deepen the content of Jewish education. We cannot, nor do we wish, to fight against children acquiring a broad education. But we have to make better use of even the smattering of time that children are in our schools and part-time classes.
That means better teachers, better methods, better educational resources. Unless children have a lifelong love affair with Judaism, our heritage is lost.
The only real protection there ever will be for the Ark and all it stands for is the Jewish family with the generations united in devotion to the word of God.
