Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

Our Torah reading begins this week with God commanding Moses to solicit voluntary contributions from the Israelites to build the “Mishkan”, or tabernacle, the portable worship space for the Israelites. The description of the materials and the construction of the Mishkan is given verbally by God to Moses. It is a long and complex description, and therefore difficult for us to follow and envision. I found these short films on YouTube that closely track the Biblical description and put a thousand words into a picture.

Why did we need a Mishkan, anyway? Consider this Chassidic story of a young girl who would disappear for several hours into the woods near her home each day. Her father began to get worried about her and asked her where she was going. “I go into the woods to pray to God,” was her reply. “But,” said her father, “There is no need to go into the woods to pray to God. God is the same everywhere.” To which his daughter replied, “I know. But I’m not”.

Rashi tells us that the building of the Mishkan was God’s response to the sin of the Golden Calf. In Moses’ absence, the people had erected a physical manifestation of God toward which they could direct their prayers. According to this view, God only now understood that the Jewish people would need a delineated space and particular ritual objects through which they could mediate their worship of God. The Mishkan would also attest to the fact that God had forgiven the Israelites for their sin of the Golden Calf and that God was indeed residing with them.

Ramban disagrees with Rashi. He notes that the instructions to build the Mishkan are given a full two and a half chapters before the story of the sin of the Golden Calf. How then, he asks, could the Mishkan possibly be in response to the sin of the Golden Calf? No, says Ramban, God had always intended to give the Mishkan to the People of Israel as a gift of love. It had nothing to do with the shortcomings of the Israelites. It was a sign that, after the drama of the Golden Calf and the broken tablets, God was ready to return to his previous relationship with the Jewish People, as described by the prophet Jeremiah (2:2) “’I [God] remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown.”

The Mishkan is a gift from God that helps the Jewish people come close to Him. Like the little girl in the story, we are not the same everywhere. The Mishkan was given to us to help us to cultivate a sense of reverence, through which we could more easily experience God’s presence. It is not so much a “home for God” as a way of bringing God “home to us”.

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