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Talk Up The Mishkan
A couple busily prepares for their marriage. For their wedding, they list guests and make wedding menus. They visit a furniture store, ordering a table, chairs and a bedroom set.
Which is more meaningful; wedding preparations or preparing their home?
Preparing their home wins. The kallah comes home from the furniture store and details to her mother the exact shade of the bed-boards and their style. She bores everyone to death with the fine points.
Why is this bed so special? She is building her own home! She thinks about relaxing in this bed under the covers, sipping some coffee while she tells her husband about her day. It’s not a bed; it’s life.
When ordering the table she imagines the many guests, all the entertaining they will do. It also ought not be too big; that will destroy the coziness between her and her husband. Every detail affects her future life, all are important.
When the Torah talks about the home we share with Hashem, the Mishkan, it spares no words or details. This is the most meaningful thing in the world to Hashem.
You think it ought to be important to us too?
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Holy Relics
The Torah tells us ‘put in the Aron the ‘Edus’ [Hashem] will give you’. The Aron was made to hold the Edus.
What’s ‘Edus’? Rashi explains that Edus is the Torah. The Ramban comments that Rashi understood the purpose of the Aron was not to hold the Luchos, as we would suppose, but to hold the Sefer Torah also in the Aron.
Why the Torah, not the Luchos?
Luchos are holy relics: they were not used – actually read from, – rather they were a tangible link to Sinai.
We are not big on relics, even one commemorating Matan Torah. More hallowed to us are words telling us how to live our lives. Contrarily, the Luchos’ value is that they authenticate our Torah scroll.
The Torah scroll that we use practically is our real treasure. Not a relic, even one made by the direct hand of G-d!
P.s. Judaism does have a relic concept, but its a minor one.
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Location, Location, Location
The Shulchan is placed ‘outside the Peroches’. The Menorah’s place is ‘opposite the Shulchan’. Almost as an afterthought the Torah tells us that the Shulchan is on the right and the Menorah on the left.
Yet they were both in the Kodesh, facing each other. One was on the right, the other on the left. Why aren’t their places described similarly – either both ‘opposite the Peroches’ or opposite each other? Why does the Torah express their positions so differently?
A curtain, a divider, has two functions: A) its obvious function is to divide, to set things apart. B) Sometimes it serves to bring things together; a divider allows two things to come into proximity safely. Two people share an office, and they get in each other’s way. But put up a curtain and they can co-exist. A fire and steak benefit each other, but only if a divider – a skillet – allows the fire to affect the steak without burning it. (I once heard this concept from Rabbi Pincus z”l)
Containing the Luchos, the Aron was the resting-place of the Sh’china. Indeed, Hashem told Moshe that he would talk to him from between the Keruvim. The Aron radiated great holiness to the rest of the Mishkan. The Shulchan was not placed in the Kodesh because it needed the Kodesh itself. Rather it was placed ‘opposite the Aron’, and needed a Peroches to filter and channel the kedushah it received from the Aron. The Menorah, however, was not put there because of the Aron at all, rather it stood opposite the Shulchan.
The Torah describes the CONCEPTUAL setup: the interplay between these parts, not the physical locations!
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As Heavy As They Get
The Aron was heavy. Very heavy. I saw a recent analysis that the Aron, Luchos and Kappores together weighed over three tons. It seems obvious that neither the rings attached to it nor its shittim-wood poles would carry it. So we fall back upon Chazal, that the Aron carried itself, even carrying it’s helpers.
It was set out to be so; it was created a practical impossibility.
This is the paradigm of the Torah itself: it ought to have phased out years ago, yet the Torah world is burgeoning and expanding. People scratch their heads trying to figure out how al-pi-derech-hateva the equation has worked and will work in the future. Yet it will.
The Aron means the ‘Sh’china’. Sh’china is not an object. We are affected by the Sh’china, and receive from it, but we don’t carry the Shchina around. Perhaps that’s why the Aron was designed to be impossible to carry. No Kohen could ever tell his wife ‘Sarah, we really lugged the Sh’china around a lot today’. They merely made a show of carrying it, and the rest happened of its own; the Aron began to carry itself, plus its ‘handlers’.
The moral is that we cannot really do anything for the Sh’china. We can, and must, try to advance Hashem’s interests in this world. But in the final analysis it is we who benefit by this, not the Sh’china. Like the Aron, it may need that people bend down and prepare to try and lift it, but the actual labor happens by itself.
Our part is merely to bend down and try.
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Portables
The Torah tells us that when we make the Aron we should put in its Badim, its staves. In contrast, when talking of the Shulchan, the table, it says to prepare the badim used for carrying it. It does not say to put the badim in.
Surprisingly, when talking about the Mizbeach, the Altar, it also instructs us to actually insert the badim. Indeed, if one looks in Parshas Vayakhel the Torah details that Betzalel put the badim into the Aron and the Mizbeach, but mentions none else.
Perhaps the badim were part and parcel of the Aron and Shulchan itself, and not just an expedient to carry them. They needed to be inserted to complete the vessels themselves.
RSH”R Hirsch explains that the Aron needed the Badim there constantly (it was forbidden to remove them) to represent how the Torah is portable, depending on no specific land: even when dispersed to the corners of the earth, Torah is binding upon us.
Perhaps similarly, of all the vessels in the Mishkan, only the Mizbeach was used outside of the Mishkan: at times people sacrificed on Mizbeachs all over Israel. So the Mizbeach was also portable, able to be used everywhere. The badim symbolized that universality.
In sum, Torah and Avodah (the Mizbeach) are truly international!
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The Name And Nature Of The Mishkan
I have some orange juice. I would love to share it with my neighbors living in the adjoining apartment. How will it pass through a solid wall? Simple: we’ll make a hole in the wall to allow the juice through. But will the juice stay clean, or get dirtied passing through the wall? How can I ensure it all gets though, not half spilling out on the way? Get a hose, and pour the orange juice safely nextdoors.
That hose is the Mishkan. Hashem has lots of orange juice to send down to us, but our earthy world is so far removed from his spiritual one that we need a connection, a rubber hose of sorts.
The Mishkan facilitates the passage of energy from spiritual worlds into ours. We have a table in the mishkan, but no chair. A candelabra, but no bed. These were not furniture; they were connectors that brought the orange juice, the tubes through which goodies traveled down to us. Mishkan is where Heaven met Earth.
(The Aron was the vehicle for Torah, the Menorah was for wisdom, and the Shulchan brought parnassah or wealth).
Nowadays we have no Beis Hamikdash. Orange juice spills to all sides, getting dirty on the way. We need to know that we loose much orange juice.
For we have forfeited our little rubber hose.
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The Curious Case Of The Kappores
The Torah says in Terumah: ‘place the Kappores upon the Aron in the Kodesh HaKadashim’. However in Pkudei the Torah says that Moshe put the Edus into the Aron, then put the Kappores upon the Aron, and then brought it into the Kodesh HaKadashim. What gives?
The Torah tells us twice that the Kappores was to be put onto the Aron. Rashi suggests that I’d think the Kappores was put on BEFORE the Luchos, so the Torah explains that the Luchos go first. But how can the Luchos be put in while the Kappores is atop the Aron, blocking the entrance?!?
Rashi tells us that the Aron was open at the top, and the Kappores covered it. Was the kappores an Aron cover? Perhaps not. The Kappores was a distinct and separate kli, a tool with a function of its own, not part of the Aron whatsoever. However it functioned WITH the Aron: it needed to be atop the Aron.
These pesukim address the functionality of the Kappores: it needed to be on top of the Aron in the Kodesh HaKaddashim. Never mind where it was actually put on. It needed to sit atop the Aron and Luchos. Were the Luchos necessarily there first? Yes, says the pasuk. They had to be there first, not only for practical reasons, but for the Kappores to work.
The Mishkan was truly a world of sacred mystery!
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Doing It Right
The Mishkan served: 1. that the Sh’china should dwell amongst us 2. that He would speak to Moshe all that He wished to convey to us from above the Aron.
Why did He need the Aron and Kappores? After all, He had been speaking to us all along. Why was this necessary?
Rashi explains that although Hashem did speak without the trappings of the Mishkan, SCHEDULED talks needed the Mishkan. Thus the Torah says; ‘and I will meet with you there for a scheduled talk’ – v’noadity l’cha shamah.
Although certain things might be acceptable, they cannot be regular, scheduled events. In the shul I daaven, there are three floors. The biggest and most prestigious area is on the third floor. When it was built the question was should it should be used for the biggest minyan, which also is the latest one, or for the one daavening at the most proper time? Rabbi Elyashiv zt”l felt that the place ought to be used for the one that daavened in the way accepted by all the poskim, not by the largest minyan. A shul is public, and the tzibbur needs to act above board, allocating the best place for the people daavening right.
Public action needs to be done only the optimal way.
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Is Your Sefer Torah Kosher? or Do We Really Know What We Think We Do?
Rashi asks why the pasuk says ‘??? ?? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??? ?????’ and not ‘?? ?? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??? ?????’ with no ‘vav’? He explains that indeed this ‘vav’ is extra, as we find in other cases, and should be disregarded.
Our sifrei Torah DO NOT HAVE the ‘vav’ at all. Rashi obviously did have it, and so did the Ibn Ezra and others.
A sefer Torah missing a letter or with an extra letter is invalid. If our sefarim are correct, Rashi never read from the Torah his entire life. If his are, then we have not.
The lesson we take from this is that it is entirely proper to be sure of ones self, but we must also know that there is a possibility that we are TOTALLY wrong!
Very important!