Exodus 25:1 – 27:19
Uplifted
At first glance, there must have seemed no reason for God to instruct the Israelites about building the mishkan, Israel’s sanctuary-in-the-desert. At this stage of things (before the sin of the spies in Numbers 13), the Israelites were presumably going to be in the wilderness for only a short while—a few weeks at most—before their entry into Canaan. During that time, God could have continued to dwell on Mount Sinai and then moved to Mount Zion without any need of a mishkan along the way. Or else He could have followed the wandering Israelites from within a cloud or some other feature of the natural (or supernatural) world, accepting their offerings from within such a structure. There is thus some significance in the fact that the Torah bothers to detail the constructing of the mishkan at all, and to stress that it was to be built by human hands, “Let them make a sanctuary for Me so that I may dwell in their midst.”
In considering the matter, the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud concluded that the building of the mishkan was actually the last step in a kind of great circle. They pointed out that when God created the first human beings, He put them in the Garden of Eden, where He Himself dwelled. (As the rabbis pointed out, Adam and Eve are said to have heard “the sound of the Lord God walking about in the midst of the Garden” in Gen. 3:8, so He must have been right there.)
But after the pair ate from the forbidden tree, God put some distance between Himself and the human beings and stayed slightly above ground level in the Garden of Eden. Then came Cain, Adam and Eve’s son; after he murdered his brother Abel, God further distanced himself from humanity and went up still higher. The generations that followed were hardly better, until finally, after ten generations, God had to bring the Great Flood in the time of Noah in order to cleanse the earth of its sinful inhabitants. By then, He was far, far away, watching things from a great distance above the earth.
Just at that point, however, a new sort of human being appeared: Abraham, “the one who loved God” (Isa. 41:8) and who was prepared to follow Him at all costs. Abraham was followed by his son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob, both likewise devoted to God. Jacob’s son Joseph was a model of virtue, “Joseph the righteous.” As these figures appeared one after another, according to a famous midrash, God began to descend little by little, until He was once again just above the earth’s surface. It was then that He said to the Israelites, “Let them make Me a mishkan so that I may dwell in their midst.”
The rabbis associated this great return with a particular verse in the Song of Songs: “I have come into My garden, My sister, My bride.” The bride, of course, represents the people of Israel, and the “garden” in question is no other than the mishkan. But why call it a garden? The mishkan was really just a tent, fashioned from ordinary materials and shaped by human hands. In view of the foregoing, however, it was indeed like the Garden of Eden; it was a place where God might again dwell in the midst of humanity, just as He had done in the time of Adam and Eve. In this sense, the building of the mishkan was indeed a kind of return to what had once been—but different, since this garden was made by humans.