The haftorah for this week’s parsha describes the efforts of the great King Shlomo in the construction of the First Temple. King Shlomo himself is a great and tragic figure. The attitude of the Talmud towards him is an ambivalent one.

In this week's Torah reading we learn of the ingredients and mixture that created the incense offering in the Holy Temple. The list of ingredients and its formula are transmitted to us through the words of the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud. The ingredients and measurements were to be exact and any deviation from the established formula rendered the offering unacceptable.

The Torah ordains that the olive oil used to light the eternal menorah - candelabra - must be of the purest and best available. There is obvious logic to this requirement. Impure oil will cause the flames to stutter and flicker. Impure oil also may exude an unpleasant odor and make the task of the daily cleaning of the oil lamps difficult and inefficient. Yet I feel that the basic underlying reason for this requirement of purity of the oil lies in the value that the Torah advances in the performance of all positive things in life - the necessity to do things correctly, enthusiastically and with exactitude.

The parsha of Terumah follows those of Mishpatim and Yitro. In parshat Yitro we experienced the moment of the revelation at Mount Sinai and the granting of the Torah to the Jewish people. In parshat Mishpatim the Torah began to fill in the details of Jewish law and life, especially as they relate to human and societal behavior and the standards of such behavior that the Torah wishes us to uphold.

A viable legal system is of necessity composed of two parts. One is the law itself, the rules that govern society and are enforced by the proper designated legal authorities. The other part of the legal system is the moral, transcendental value system that governs human and societal behavior generally. If the legalities and rules are the body - the corpus of the legal system, then the value system and moral imperatives that accompany those rules are the soul and spirit of that legal system.

At the revelation at Sinai the Lord set the goal for the Jewish people – “to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” These noble goals, like all great ideas and lofty ideals, require definition. What is meant by a kingdom of priests? In Jewish life the priests, the descendants of Aharon, were people who were freed from the daily mundane chores of life and were supported by the masses of Israel who sustained them physically and financially.

The miracle of the manna that fell from heaven and nurtured millions of people for forty years is one of the focal points of this week’s parsha. The obvious reason for the miracle’s occurrence is that the Jewish people had to have daily nourishment simply to survive. However, the rabbis of the Talmud injected another factor into the miracle of the falling manna. They stated that “the Torah could only have been granted to those that ate manna daily.” Thus, the necessity for the manna was directly associated with the granting of the Torah to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai. No manna, no Torah. Why is this so?

The great moment of freedom and redemption has finally arrived. The faith of the people of Israel in Moshe and Aharon has been vindicated. The Lord’s plagues have finally brought down the arrogance and stubbornness of Pharaoh. If this was an old-fashioned movie script, we would write “and then they lived happily after.”

The Lord, so to speak, apparently is disturbed by Moshe’s complaint against the treatment and continued oppression of Israel by the Egyptians. Moshe’s complaint, voiced at the conclusion of last week’s parsha, that no salvation has come to Israel as of yet does not receive a sympathetic hearing in the Heavenly court.

The Torah emphasizes the names of the family of Yaakov in this week’s parsha as it did in even greater detail in last week’s parsha of Vayechi. There may be various reasons for this concentration of interest in the names of the tribes of Israel, but whatever the reasons are, the Torah obviously feels it to be of great importance. In fact, throughout the Torah the names of the tribes are repeated many times. After all, we might ask, what is in a name? But the names of our ancestors are drummed into us by the Torah to provide us with a sense of continuity and tradition.