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March 5, 1999/17 Adar 5759, Vol. 51, No. 23
Compromise and consolation
Torah Study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Ki Tisa/Exodus 30:11 - 34:35
Much of the book of Exodus is devoted to the construction of the tabernacle, God's mobile dwelling in the wilderness. Yet Moses' "Song at the Sea" (Exodus 15:1-18), recited daily in our morning prayers, implies that there was to be no dwelling place for God in the wilderness.
Exalted by the destruction of Pharaoh's pride, Moses envisions a rapid journey through the wilderness to Canaan, where God would personally erect a sanctuary from which to rule forever.
"You will ... plant them in your own mountain, the place you made to dwell in, O Lord, the sanctuary ... which your hands established" (Exodus 15:17-18).
The text does not prepare us for the Torah's absorption with the tabernacle, for the Torah's abrupt transition in Chapter 25 from Mishpatim to Terumah, from sacred law to sacred space. Nevertheless, most commentators take the sequence as natural and chronological. The tabernacle is a portable Sinai, intended to perpetuate God's presence wherever Israel may be. The experience of revelation is to be transformed into a daily, living experience: "And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them" (Exodus 25:8).
Rabbinic Hebrew would turn the verb "that I may dwell (ve-shakhanti)" into the proper noun Shekhinah, signifying God's close and caring presence. "Wherever Israel was exiled," the rabbis declared, "the Shekhinah went into exile with them."
Rashi took a different tack. In his commentary of Exodus 31:18, he asserts that the instructions to build the tabernacle were not given to Moses until after Israel's betrayal of God with the golden calf. Despite the fact that these instructions appear in the Torah several chapters before that episode, chronologically they occurred later, according to Rashi.
What prompted Rashi to reverse the order of events is an ingenious midrash that weaves a different context for the tabernacle. Later in Exodus, the tabernacle is called the "tabernacle of the pact" (Exodus 38:21), which prompts the midrash to treat it not as a link to Sinai but as a sign of God's forgiveness after the golden calf.
God brought Israel to Sinai and affectionately called "a kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6). Yet it took only 40 days for Israel to forget God's many favors and seek another deity. When Moses won God's forgiveness, he insisted on a visible sign of reconciliation to disabuse the nations that God might harbor anger against Israel. This is the context for the instructions to build the tabernacle, a public testimony that the King of Kings had taken Israel back.
The tabernacle also serves a psychological function, offering reassurance that human weakness and inconstancy failed to rupture the Israelites' relationship with God. By rearranging the sequence of events, the midrash imbued an inert blueprint with high drama. The cascade of detailed description bespoke an existential need for atonement felt in every generation.
Beyond that, the midrash (and Rashi) did justice to the lofty vision of monotheism enunciated in the climax of "The Song at the Sea." Israel could not long endure without a semblance of divine presence. The building of the tabernacle, with its two cherubim, was a concession to a people who had just begun the journey to monotheism. It would take time to learn that no human being catches more than the most fleeting glimpse of God's presence. In the words of Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the First Temple in Jerusalem, "The heavens to their uttermost reaches cannot contain (God), how much less this house that I have built" (I Kings 8:27).
God would dwell among the people and not in the tabernacle itself. Moreover, there was nothing to see. Smoke and clouds always concealed God's presence from the naked eye, even in the Holy of Holies. To a chosen people less than perfect, the tabernacle offered both compromise and consolation.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His commentaries appear on the Internet at www.jtsa.edu/pubs/schorsch/.
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