Exodus 25:1-27:19

Return to the Garden

This week’s reading contains God’s instructions for the building of the mishkan, the traveling tabernacle (that is, a big tent) in which the Israelites will offer sacrifices to God. Hardly a detail is left unmentioned. We learn about the different metals and precious stones to be used in its construction; the colored yarns and the different sorts of animal hides needed; things to made of wood, including the Ark of the Covenant; the rings, hooks, loops, poles, planks—and this is just the beginning. The details go on for all of this week’s reading and all of next week’s, plus the first part of the reading for the week after that.

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. 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 Talmud suggested that the building of the tabernacle at this point in history was no a stopgap measure designed for a week or two, but the culmination of a great circle that started way back in the Garden of Eden. Eden was, strictly speaking, a kind of 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 walking around right there.)

But after the pair ate from the forbidden tree, God put some distance between Himself and the human beings, hovering above the garden floor. Then came Cain, Adam and Eve’s evil 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 brought about the Great Flood in the time of Noah in order to cleanse the earth of its sinful inhabitants. By then, this midrash suggests, God was far, far away, watching 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 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 a famous 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 precisely when He spoke the words of this week’s reading, “Let them make Me a sanctuary so that I may dwell in their midst.”

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The rabbis associated this great return to earth with a particular verse in the Song of Songs: “I have come into My garden, O My sister, My bride.” The sister/bride, of course, represents the people of Israel, and the “garden” in question is no other than the tabernacle that the people started to build in this week’s Torah reading. But why was it referred to as a garden? The tabernacle (mishkan) was just a kind of 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.

In this sense, the building of the tabernacle was indeed a closing of the circle that began with the Garden of Eden. It was a return to what had once been in the time of Adam and Eve—but different, since this garden was being built by human beings. This is not an insignificant difference: what was at first divinely given was now dependent on human beings taking the initiative (as it is today).

In fact, it seems that the words of that verse from the Song of Songs, “I have come into My garden, O My sister, My bride,” might be understood slightly differently, not aḥoti kallah (“My sister, My bride”) but aḥoti killah (“which My sister”—the people of Israel—“has completed”). If so, this reading would further seem to stress (albeit with some grammatical leniency) that the second garden, unlike the first, was the product of human agency, fashioned by humans to make possible God’s dwelling in their midst—as it is today.

Shabbat shalom!