Exodus 25:1-27:19
By Human Hands
This week’s reading contains God’s instructions for the building of the mishkan, the traveling tabernacle (i.e., a big tent) in which the Israelites will offer sacrifices to God. An obvious question arises: Why bother? At the beginning of this week’s reading, God tells Moses to instruct the Israelites: “Make Me a sanctuary so that I may dwell in their midst” (Exod 25:8). Why couldn’t the Torah have just added, “And so they did” and skip the details?
In fact, considered from the standpoint of where we are in the Torah’s chronology, there was no apparent necessity for them to build an elaborate tabernacle (mishkan). At this stage of things (that is, before the ill-starred mission of the spies in Numbers 13), the Israelites were presumably going to be in the wilderness for a very short time before their entry into Canaan—a few weeks at most!—after which they could construct a proper temple. Why spend so much effort—and so many words in the Torah—to describe the making of this temporary sanctuary?
In considering this matter, the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud suggested that the building of the mishkan at this point in history was no stopgap measure designed for a week or two, but the culmination of a great circle that started way back in the Garden of Eden.
The Garden of Eden was, strictly speaking, an actual mikdash (sanctuary), that is, a place where God Himself is said to be present. (The Torah asserts that Adam and Eve heard “the sound of the Lord God walking about in the midst of the Garden” in Genesis 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; He backed away a bit, hovering above the garden floor. Then came Cain, Adam and Eve’s evil son. Cain murdered his brother Abel, and in response God further distanced himself from humanity and rose up still higher in the air. 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 from a great distance above the earth.
But just at that point, a new sort of human being appeared: Abraham, “the one who loved God” (Isa. 41:8) and who sought to obey Him in all things. 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 the midrash, God began to descend little by little. Finally, the greatest of prophets appeared—Moses, with whom God spoke “mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8). By now God was just above the earth’s surface again. That was when He spoke the words of this week’s reading, “Let them make Me a mishkan so that I may dwell in their midst.”
The rabbis associated this great return to earth with a particular verse in the Song of Songs: “I have come into My garden, My sister, My bride.” The sister/bride, of course, represented the people of Israel, and the “garden” in question was no other than the mishkan. But why call it a garden? The mishkan was a tent, fashioned by human hands. In view of the foregoing, however, this tent might also be thought of as the new Garden of Eden. It was a place where God might again dwell in the midst of humanity, just as He had started to do in the time of Adam and Eve.