Parshah Commentary

In his 1935 poem, “Questions From a Worker Who Reads,” Bertolt Brecht asks, “Who built Thebes with its seven gates? / In the books stand the names of kings. / Did kings haul the rock?” The historians, of course, mislead us, erecting textual monuments to monarchs while effacing the workers. Brecht cannily begins with an architectural feature that survives only in ancient texts, in which the seven portals commemorate the mythical defeat of the city’s seven Greek assailants. The magical number seven signals the legendary qualities of official history. (Like leftists reading the weekly parshah, Brecht is concerned with political critique, not with these texts’ historicity: As his worker remarks later, “Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, / The drowning still cried out for their slaves”; these are imaginary cities, with real slaves in them.)

I imagine Brecht’s worker reading Terumah, this week’s parshah, in which God gives instructions for building the Tabernacle, and asking, “Who built the menorah with its seven lamps?” But while God delivers the directive to Moses, the menorah is actually fabricated, at the end of Shemot, not by Moses but by Betzalel, the Tabernacle’s divinely selected and inspired craftsman. In a midrash responding to this contradiction, Rabbi Levi imagines Moses puzzled by God’s instructions for the menorah’s construction—as readers both ancient and modern have consistently been by this notoriously sketchy and confusing passage. God first elaborates orally to Moses, then shows him a fiery hologram of the menorah, and finally gives up and refers him to Betzalel, who builds it “immediately” and apparently without trouble. By playfully expanding God’s order that the menorah be “hammered work” (“miqshah”) into a scene of Moses’s repeated perplexity (“nitqasheh”), Rabbi Levi suggests that the menorah-texts are hard to visualize and contradictory so as to underscore the limits of the lawgiver’s words and the necessity of the artisan. The laborer, who imposes mental form onto the material world, works miracles the prophet can barely comprehend.

We are, unfortunately, liable to misunderstand the miracle, wondering not at the labor process but at the finished product. In an alternate midrashic tradition, God addresses Moses’s perplexity by having him hurl a talent of gold into a fire, in which the menorah “is made by itself.” Here, God’s instructions in Shemot (for instance, “six branches shall issue from its sides”) describe not its spatial form but its wondrous auto-assembly. This midrash is canonized by Rashi, because it explains a textual anomaly: While the text of Shemot 25:31 reads, in numerous manuscripts and ancient versions, “you shall make [ta’aseh] the menorah,” our Masoretic text instead has “the menorah shall be made [te’aseh].” Both Betzalel and Moses disappear before the self-fashioning art-object. In this story of what Marx calls “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor,” the finished article’s shiny surface obscures the contradictory social processes from which it emerged.

What Marx calls commodity fetishism, Jewish tradition terms “idolatry.” Strikingly, Rashi reports a close parallel in the case of the Golden Calf. When Moses indignantly interrogates his brother about his role in that debacle, Aaron evasively replies that the people gave him gold; “I hurled it into the fire and out came this calf”—and Rashi imagines him saying, “I did not know that this calf would come out, but it did.” (The narrator earlier described Aaron crafting the calf, so we know he is lying.) Ironically, he ducks responsibility for fashioning an idol by repeating his error, assigning animated agency to inert metal. Disconcertingly, the parallel suggests that the same danger attends the menorah.

Perhaps this is because the menorah is a paradox: a solid basis for flickering, transient flames. As the Bible scholar Jon Levenson argues, the menorah imitates the burning bush, which Moses sees in the wilderness, alight but inexplicably unincinerated. Thus, Levenson writes, the menorah “is actually a stylized tree, complete with ‘branches,’ ‘almond-shaped cups,’ ‘calyces,” and ‘petals,’” and it burns “continually.” The menorah responds to a yearning for a stable representation of God, who is in truth “a devouring fire”—a chemical reaction rather than a substance, pure combustion and ceaseless change, incandescent with transfiguration. Necessarily frustrated in its realization and thus liable to lead us astray, the desire to bring such a deity into the world might itself still return us to Moses’s momentary encounter with a violent light and heat that promises liberation to a beleaguered group of slaves. In her 1977 oral history The Romance of American Communism, the critic Vivian Gornick wrote that the workers she knew as a child found in Marxism “abstractions with the power to transform” and so “experienced a kind of inner radiance: some intensity of illumination that tore at the soul.” Which is to say the menorah would point us, in Brecht’s poem, not to seven-gated Thebes, but to the worker’s reading itself—a restless consciousness coming to see itself in, and striving to remake, history.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.