Parshah Commentary
After several parshiyot of extensive detail about the products and processes needed to assemble the Tabernacle, it is finally erected in our parshah, Pekudei. Upon its completion, the Torah states: “And when Moses saw [vayar] all the labor [melakha], and behold [vehinei] they had done it—as God had commanded, so they had done—Moses blessed [vayevarekh] them.” A rabbinic midrash picks up on the linguistic parallel between this verse and the completion of the world’s creation in Bereishit: “God saw [vayar] all that They had done and behold [vehinei], it was very good . . . God finished the work [melakha] that had been undertaken . . . and God blessed [vayevarekh] the seventh day.” The midrash argues that this shared word choice suggests that the creation of the Tabernacle is equivalent to the creation of the world: God built a world for us, and we built a home for God.
This cosmic framing of divine homecoming is particularly stark coming so soon after Parshat Ki Tissa, in which the Israelites turn to idolatry after losing faith that Moses will return from Mount Sinai. While Moses successfully pleaded with God not to destroy the people in their entirety, it’s not clear in the event’s immediate aftermath that the relationship between God and the Israelites has been restored. The first sign we have that reconciliation has been attained is the moment when God’s presence enters the Tabernacle that the people have built. But what is it about the Tabernacle that symbolizes, or even elicits, forgiveness for such a grave sin?
In a recent dvar Torah on Parshat Ki Tissa, Aron Wander argues that the Israelites created the Golden Calf as a substitute not for God, but for Moses. According to Freud, Wander notes, all social collectives supplant their individual egos with a central figure-image with which all members identify, thus helping each individual connect with fellow members of the group. For the Israelites, recent survivors of slavery who are in the midst of a harrowing trek through the desert, the intuitive central image was the human exemplar they had before them: Moses, savior and redeemer, in touch with the divine but ultimately, perceptibly human. When they fear that Moses may never return from the mountain, the people immediately replace him with the Golden Calf, declaring that it was the molten image “who brought [them] out of the land of Egypt”—the calf a visual and visceral stand-in for their central figure and savior.
After the people’s desperate attempts to center themselves around a figure with whom they can identify, one whose demands are clear because they constitute a certain worship of the self, their penance entails a reversal: to place at their center a Tabernacle filled with the God they cannot see and cannot know, whose demands are vast and often inscrutable. Tellingly, as part of this reversal, even Moses, the great prophet, is excluded from the Tabernacle when God enters: “Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of God filled the Tabernacle,” the Torah tells us. It’s only when God’s presence lifts from the Tabernacle that humans can enter, and even then, God speaks to Moses from the empty space between the two cherubim—the divine will issued from a void that even Moses cannot penetrate.
Instead of building an idol, this time, the Israelites have built a world. When the verse says that Moses “blessed” the Israelites, the midrash fills in the text of the blessing that he gave them: “May it be your will [yehi ratzon] that the Divine Presence rests upon the work of your hands.” While the phrase “yehi ratzon,” a common formula for beginning a blessing, usually means “may it be God’s will,” in this case, such a formula is more ambiguous—both because it’s not followed by “may it be your will, God,” as is more typical, and because this would be simply repeating God’s express purpose in ordering the Tabernacle’s construction. The Ktav Sofer, a 19th-century Hungarian rabbi, makes the radical suggestion that the will being referred to is in fact that of the Israelites. Moses blesses them that they should desire God’s presence to dwell amongst them. The Ktav Sofer notes that after such an intricate project of building, the Israelites could have turned to pride and vanity, transforming this structure into just another idol. Thus, like God blessed the seventh day as an open space through which to sustain and orient the rest of creation, Moses blesses the Israelites that they might be able to worship something beyond their own self-image, that they might center themselves around both presence and void, through the knowledge that we are bound to one another not merely by sameness but also by our inarticulable strangeness.
Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.
