We Children of Israel are forever building up our entire selves to become dwelling places for divinity. … We Israelites are called upon to build up the full form of shekhinah (= mishkan) by using our entire selves. … The verse [Exodus 25:8] does not say ‘within it’ but ‘whihin them’! … This is what we have taught: that each of us must build up our entire self to be a fit dwelling of divinity. Then God indeed dwells within us. This is what the holy Zohar meant when it taught that the form in which the world was created, the form of the mishkan, and the human form, are all the same.
— Malbim, Or ha-Me’ir quoted in Speaking Torah, Vol. 1
A common idea among modern liberal Jews is that Torah is an emergent phenomenon arising from the ongoing, centuries-long dialogue, debate, and struggle of Jews with the text and with each other about what this founding document might mean. Torah is both communal and accretive, in this view. But some parts of the text are easier than others to have this kind of dialogue, and this middle section of Sh’mot baffles me, not at the p’shat level—it’s anthropological origins in ancient middle eastern cultic practice are clear, fascinating, and interesting—but at the deeper levels.
As I wrap up the week of study, I keep coming back to the idea that the משכן (mishkan) stands for the immanence of the Divine, of holiness, both in that it is human constructed—that is, we create the holy space—and that it is “in our midst.”
The Text (Monday)
I seem to have picked an inauspicious (or perhaps immanently auspicious) parsha to start my Torah blogging with. Reading it on the morning train on my way to work, it was hard to keep my eyes from glazing over. The seemingly endless descriptions of curtains, poles, and slaughter-sites feels really disconnected from life of a modern Jew. I understand the symbolic and anthropological import to the mishkan, but knowing such doesn’t change the construction instructions into scintillating reading.
Fox’s commentary with his translation offered some interesting ways to frame the building instructions from the anthropological point of view, that the dwelling place of the divine is the earthly locus of the divine presence, the axis mundi, to borrow Eliade’s phrase. Fox argues that the litany of materials and measurements are the message of the mishkan passage, culminating in the injunctions about Shabbat (next week’s parsha). I like this idea of the measurements and materials being a human expression of perfect proportions and perfect matter, but it is difficult for me to make something meaningful out of that. [But i love the imagery of the winged-sphinxes (usually “cherubim”) protecting the holy witness of divine will.]
Commentaries (Thursday)
Reading the commentaries this week, I find myself thinking mostly about the relationship between human action and holiness, about how we are partners in the acts of creation and in the making of holiness in the world. I’m sure I’ve been quite influenced by the contemporary Judaism of which I’m a part, which takes the Lorianic Kabbalah and makes the key ideas of tikkun olam as central to Jewish worldview and life.
After Sinai, the moment of complete immersion in the presence of the Eternal, the people must wander away from the axis mundi, the center of the universe in Sinai [thinking Eliade here], but the mishkan allows them to take the presence with them. That they must construct it themselves emphasizes the humanness of making holiness and the human responsibility in kadeshing (if you’ll pardon a coinage) the world we live in. To extrapolate from Rosenzweig’s argument that these chapters of Exodus are actually the pinnacle of the Torah, this is the moment when a formerly enslaved people were able to turn their work, the labor of their bodies, to something higher, and to do so of their own free will. Questions about what we are working for and why come to the fore—am I building a mishkan, as it were, or a pyramid?
I also like the centrality of wandering to this line of thinking about the mishkan. This is a story of people in exile, used to living apart from the holy place, and it creates a bridge between the physical, historical land of revelation and the wandering people. The divine goes with you, if you build it. [I first encountered the idea that one of the Hebrews great innovations was that you could take your god with you, and did not become subject to new gods when you moved (or were forced) from one land to another in Karen Armstrong’s work when I was in college.]
Sod (Shabbat)
The early hasidic masters seem focus on the spiritual meaning of the mishkan and the meaning of making an offering, a t’murah (literally an ‘uplifting’). Reading the redactors’ commentary, it is no wonder that I found earlier this week the fact that this is a portable, moveable dwelling place so appealing, as it is both the divine presence for the diaspora and the interior experience of holiness from practice, which is what drew me to Judaism in the first place. In the No’am Elimelekh, we learn that the mitzvot can, depending on your intention, serve to open the heart to experience the divine in this world, again emphasizing the immanence of the divine and the connection of holiness to human acts.
Thinking about the Malbim’s command to build a dwelling place for the divine in your own heart, and Rabbi Green’s response to the idea, I keep thinking about the ineffability of Sinai, the overwhelming experience of oneness with YHWH and the experience of covenant, and the desire, maybe the drive, to put it into words or to somehow make it real, thingly, but the impossibility of doing so. It strikes me that the mishkan was empty; it was a physical shell, but there was no god within it. You cannot make an image of g-d because the physical cannot contain the expanse of olamim, the eternal Being itself; and what you can make, a dwelling, leaves us with awesome emptiness and silence.
Becoming Jewish 
Leave a Reply