Vayakhel: The Tabernacle Beyond Space

We are in Parashat Vayakhel, in the wake of Moshe’s long intercession on behalf of the people of Israel, who, forty days after G-d’s revelation on Mount Sinai, committed the sin of the golden calf. We have not yet explained this sin at length and in depth. But in the end, there was a moment when the people clung to the personality of Moshe rather than to the One who inspired him, the One who had sent him. And so, in the sin of the golden calf, they looked to Moshe himself: “for this Moshe, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” It was Moshe who had brought us up out of Egypt. Now, make us a deity who can bring us up from here — and they made a calf.

“This is your deity, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” So there is a substitute for Moshe, which in a sense takes over the people’s source of inspiration. And this holds true in every age, whenever spiritual leaders begin to substitute their own word for the word of G-d and seek to impose their authority in every direction, without any real cooperation or consultation among all these leaders, all this spiritual direction of the Jewish people. And indeed, in this individualization of the various currents of belief — because each has his own philosophy, even in religion, unfortunately — with no margin of openness left, we find ourselves in the very closure of the golden calf. We cannot altogether avoid these failings; they happen. But we have the day for it: the day of this gathering, of this renewal of breath for the Jewish people, when we renounce our individualities. And this gathering in itself, as we explained last time, is the remedy for every downfall of the Jewish people.

And that is why, on the day after Yom Kippur, vayakhel Moshe et kol adat benei Yisrael — “Moshe gathered the whole community of the children of Israel.” He gathers all the children of Israel; and the children of Israel are called here adat benei Yisrael, from the word ed: the witnesses, the people of Israel as witnesses. We can be nothing more than witnesses to His presence, to His revelation. We must not go beyond that; we must not have pretensions. We bear witness to His word, and that brings us back to entirely relative proportions. But where, in the end, we bring about a real encounter with the Divine is in the Shabbat — the Shabbat, that time beyond time, the time that even preceded creation and became the very goal of that creation.

We become true partners of the Holy One, blessed be He, only in the time of the Shabbat. This time of Shabbat must first be analyzed, in order to understand why the observance of the Shabbat is placed here, as a preamble, a foreword, to the building of the sanctuary. For until now we have spoken only of the design of the sanctuary; now we pass to the phase of its construction. But before anything else, Moshe is intent on recalling that the people’s first encounter with Hashem is, first of all, through the Shabbat. And this encounter — in which we try to act, to conduct ourselves as G-d did in His creation, namely by suspending all activity on the day of Shabbat as the L-rd did — is, let us say, the first institution of G-d within His own creation.

It is the opening He left to man so that, through his contribution, through his very presence, he might take part in the work of creation. For let us not forget that the sanctuary is the signature on the work of creation. What does it mean, that it signs the work of creation? Through the sanctuary we have reproduced, let us say, the scale model of the universe created by G-d. Because that is what G-d sought: after a time of meeting with man, a place of meeting with man — is that not so? This space-time is represented on the one hand by the Shabbat and on the other by the Mishkan (the Tabernacle). But can the Mishkan replace the Shabbat, take its place?

No. The building of the Mishkan does not override the Shabbat. That is to say, one may not suspend or set aside the Shabbat in order to build the Mishkan. One may indeed perform the avodot, the acts of service — these may be done on Shabbat in the sanctuary — but one may not perform melakhot: one may perform an avodah, not a melakhah. What is the difference between melakhah and avodah? Melakhah is transforming something and giving it a form, a reality of its own. Avodah is simply the transfer of objects within a space. How does this translate into life? Quite simply, we can picture that on Shabbat, in our home, we do not light a fire.

On Shabbat we may not carry anything outside, we may not write a word or two, a letter or two, we may not tie or bind things together. On the other hand, we may move objects around inside the house; even if it is somewhat tiring, it is permitted. That is called avodah. But the first category is the one that calls upon the lamed-tet melakhot, the thirty-nine labors that founded the world and that took part in the making of the sanctuary, and the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation) enumerates them in this way. There are ten utterances of creation, but there are the twenty-two letters of realization — because in speech there is the content, the plan and the sound, and the letters are the tools for bringing this universal edifice into being. So there are twenty-two letters. But within these twenty-two letters there are what are called the dagesh letters, the letters accented by a dot and thereby doubled. These are the letters bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, peh, resh, tav, which brings us to twenty-nine letters; and twenty-nine letters plus the ten utterances of creation make up the whole of the labors. These labors are also distributed under five headings — four plus one, let us put it that way — since there are four elements of the universe.

In today’s language these are gas, liquid, solid and energy. In the language of our Sages, there is afar, earth, matter, and in this domain, at this level, there are boneh and soter: the one who builds and the one who demolishes. At the level of esh, fire, there are mavir and mekhabeh: the one who kindles and the one who extinguishes. At the level of mayim, water, there is the one who writes and the one who erases. At the level of air, there is the one who ties a knot and the one who unties it, the one who binds something together and the one who takes it apart. And finally there is a fifth, which in a sense stands apart from the ordinary: makkeh ba-patish, “striking the final blow with the hammer.” Makkeh ba-patish is giving form to matter.

This matter exists; to give it a form, to make it into some instrument or other — this is forbidden on Shabbat, because it echoes the first way, the first element, of the building of the universe out of being. For there is a being — a being, which is G-d — who conceded an infinitesimal part of His light, of His being, for the creation of this world, and who afterwards transformed it into ayin, into nothingness; and then He created our world, which is yesh me-ayin, something out of nothing. So there is a first yesh, which is wholly spiritual; there is an ayin, which is in a sense the clearing away of that first yesh; and then the birth of the second yesh, which is that of our material world. That is what is called makkeh ba-patish: giving form to something that was formless. It is among the labors forbidden on Shabbat, because it too was a way of taking part in the creation of the world. Now, when Hashem ceased on the day of Shabbat to intervene in His creation, He suspended all His interventions; and therefore, when we wish to make this world a sanctuary for G-d — a sanctuary that inspires us little by little and that we cannot achieve in a single stroke — it is forbidden to us to do so all at once; we always need six days. “Six days shall you labor” — for even for the revelation of G-d, Moshe had to wait six days of preparation. Nothing is handed to man for free.

He must invest himself in order to discover this spirituality, in order to bring about this encounter with the Divine. And sometimes it comes at the very edge: a fraction of a second, a minute, a moment of elevation in prayer. Well, it is these moments that we add up and concentrate in the Shabbat, since it is their purpose. When we celebrate the Shabbat, we celebrate it with the holiness of the action we have carried out, day after day. And it is these sparks of holiness, these words, these sounds, these projects that make up our sanctuary. For we have said that this sanctuary which G-d desired within man has, in a sense, its counterpart in reality through the Mishkan that we build, and through the Shabbat. And within these labors our Sages, of course, introduced a certain order. Take, for example, the making of bread: it requires eleven. They counted the stages needed to arrive at the making of bread, starting from choresh, from ploughing, and found that there were eleven stages. Eleven stages for bread, eleven stages for beged, for clothing, and seven stages for the working of or, of leather. So you see that the twenty-two have been reconstituted, together with the seven doubled letters — twenty-nine. And among the labors I announced and enumerated a moment ago, there is one I did not list: moving a thing from a private domain to a public domain, or carrying things within the public domain. Of course, one may ask: in the end, carrying a handkerchief outside in one’s pocket — what does it matter?

It is nothing at all, one would think. Yet it is precisely this transfer of objects from one domain to another that evokes the first transfer, the first passage from nothingness to being. This transfer, this passage from one state to another, from one level to another, this bringing to light of a reality within a domain — that is why the labor of hotza’ah, carrying objects from a private domain into a public domain or within a public domain, is forbidden on Shabbat. All this, quite simply, to tell you that this parashah — which, together with Pekudei, concludes the making of the sanctuary — is modeled on the labors of Shabbat. Now, how does this Shabbat appear? There are, in reality, four Shabbatot. Yet when one looks at the Torah, when one analyzes the texts of the Torah, there are not four; there are five.

I will explain why I went from four to five, but there are five passages in the Torah in which the Shabbat is developed and given a motive of one kind or another, a justification; but there is one passage in which the Shabbat is not justified. The first Shabbat, then, is the Shabbat of Bereshit, of Genesis, in which G-d indeed stopped of His own accord. It is a Shabbat of G-d, not a Shabbat of man, and that one is given no motive. We do not know why the Holy One, blessed be He, decided on the seventh day to suspend His universe and to leave a part of it to be done with man, to be worked out together with man. It is interesting, moreover, to note that the name Elokim, G-d, appears nine times in the creation of the universe — since Bereshit is the tenth utterance, but there we do not have vayomer Elokim, “and G-d said,” as on the other occasions: “and G-d said,” “and G-d said.” And how many times, in the sanctuary, do we find ka’asher tzivah Hashem et Moshe, “as the L-rd commanded Moshe”? Eighteen times. Nine times in creation, eighteen times in the building of the sanctuary.

That is to say, in the building of the sanctuary there is truly an effective partnership between G-d and man in raising this universe to the level of a sanctuary, in which man and G-d bring about their meeting. Three times a year man presents himself on the occasion of the festivals: he sees G-d, and he shows himself, he reveals himself to Him. So it is truly of this sanctuary that we dream when we build our little home and mark its doorway with the mezuzah: affixing the mezuzah is a manifest will to make this home a small sanctuary. And these small sanctuaries, added together, bring about the great sanctuary. Indeed, there is a place in it for all of humanity, because the first Shabbat — mark this — the first Shabbat is a universal Shabbat, not a Shabbat particular to the Jewish people. It is the one in which the L-rd suspends His creation: He stopped, He sanctified, He blessed His world, and He invited all humanity to follow His example. When King Shlomo built the Temple, he too left a place for the ben nekhar, for any foreigner who would wish to bring an offering to G-d and who would wish to attest, to bear witness to, the sovereignty of G-d in the world. For that is the essential point, the essential reason, of the Shabbat: first of all to affirm G-d as the Creator of this world. And for that reason we are bound to a Shabbat of Bereshit, to the Shabbat of the beginning.

And this Shabbat of the beginning is a universal Shabbat — it is even the Shabbat of the manna. For even before the Shabbat was given to us, we were forewarned that on the seventh day there would be no manna. The Holy One, blessed be He, provides the manna, provides man’s provisions, provides man’s needs on every weekday except Shabbat: on Shabbat there is no manna. So it is exactly the same as at the creation, when the L-rd created man and brought him into the Shabbat. He said: see, I have given you all the greenery to eat, all the vegetation to eat. So the first Shabbatot we know of are those whose institution is linked to the Shabbat of Genesis and to the Shabbat of this Providence that supplies every need.

For the moment, we are not yet at the Shabbat of the Exodus from Egypt. The Shabbat of the Exodus, clearly and unmistakably, will appear only in the second Decalogue, on the second Tablets of the Law, where the Shabbat will be linked to a will to free man from all slavery, from all conditioning. And the Shabbat will take on a communal and social character — yet one that acknowledges that beyond any mastery we may have over the world, and beyond any management we may exercise in this world, there is a Manager who stands above us and who governs everything. […]

So we understand why the Shabbat makes its appearance throughout the book of Shemot. First by being tied to the phenomenon of creation. But there is a Shabbat that is tied neither to creation, nor to food, nor to the provisioning of the world, nor to the Mishkan. So you see: creation, the provisioning of the world, the Mishkan; the fourth is the holiness of the people of Israel. In the parashah we read this past week there was indeed: akh et shabbetotai tishmoru, “only My Shabbatot shall you keep,” ki ot hi beini u-veineikhem — for it is a sign between Me and you — le-doroteikhem, for all your generations. Why?

La-da’at ki ani Hashem mekadishkhem — “that you may know that I am the L-rd who sanctifies you.” In other words, here the holiness of the Shabbat is the one that sanctifies the people of Israel. Here the Shabbat is tied to nothing. We are not told “because the L-rd brought us out of Egypt,” or “because the L-rd created the world for us.” Rather: “that you may know that I am the L-rd who sanctifies you.” If you truly wish to be initiated into holiness, you must pass through the Shabbat. But since this would be, let us say, somewhat abstract for us, I link this manifestation to that of the Mishkan; I make it mamashi, real, tangible, through the sanctuary. So the sanctuary is, in a sense, a way of turning man’s thought toward the reality of a world that we would wish to see imbued with the spirit of the Shabbat, and that could indeed secure man’s freedom.

And precisely, speaking of this liberation: in Parashat Mishpatim, that is where the Shabbat is mentioned, but with nothing further. “Six days you shall do your work” — you shall accomplish all your work — “and on the seventh day you shall cease.” Why do I command you to cease? Here it is so that there may be rest: “so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your handmaid and the stranger may be refreshed” — so that your servant too may renew himself, and the stranger, the convert. But broadly, the reason that is given is this: you knew these servitudes in Egypt; you want to leave these servitudes behind; there is no other escape for you than the Shabbat. And the Shabbat — it is indeed in the Mishkan that you will be able to touch it, to make it real.

That, in fact, is why the prophet makes this Shabbat livable. You shall delight in this Shabbat. You shall choose the finest dishes, the finest fruits for your Shabbat. You shall enjoy the Shabbat in gladness. It is not a day of recollection like that of a Nazirite, of asceticism; it is a Shabbat in which you truly live from within that joy, that closeness — a Shabbat in which you truly live, from within, divine closeness. There is only one question, however, that we have not yet answered. Everywhere, in fact, in the five major passages on the Shabbat in the Torah, it is clearly stated that all work is forbidden.

Beyond what we have said — there shall be no work at all, and we have defined what melakhah is, as opposed to avodah — we still have to account for the fact that here, as an introduction to the building of the sanctuary, the text says: sheshet yamim te’aseh melakhah u-vayom ha-shevi’i yihyeh lakhem kodesh, Shabbat Shabbaton la-Hashem — “six days shall work be done, and the seventh day shall be holy to you, a Shabbat of complete rest to the L-rd.” Six days you shall work, and the seventh day shall be holy — because it is through the holiness of the Shabbat that you sanctify your own lives, that you yourselves are holy. And for that reason: lo teva’aru esh be-khol moshvoteikhem be-yom ha-Shabbat — “you shall not kindle fire in any of your dwellings on the day of Shabbat.” Do not kindle fire. But not kindling fire is already included among all the other labors of Shabbat. Why single out the kindling of any fire on the day of Shabbat, here, now, before passing on to the building of the Mishkan? The answer is simple: every revelation of G-d to man took place through a fire.

The first time this fire appears is in the Covenant between the Pieces, made with Avraham: ve-hinneh tannur ashan ve-lappid esh asher avar bein ha-gezarim ha-eleh — “and behold, a smoking furnace and a torch of fire that passed between these pieces.” Behold, a torch of fire passes between these carcasses, or these cut pieces, as you prefer. Then, when the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals Himself to Moshe, Moshe sees a bush on fire, and the bush is not consumed. When the L-rd reveals Himself on Mount Sinai, there is a fire at the summit of the mountain. When the L-rd reveals Himself within the Mishkan, within the sanctuary, there comes likewise this pillar of fire, this divine fire that settles in the sanctuary. So what, in fact, is the danger? It is to substitute a human fire for this divine fire.

That is what Nadav and Avihu did. Nadav and Avihu did not wait for the L-rd to reveal Himself in the sanctuary at its inauguration. They brought their own fire — by which we should understand a personal way of conceiving the divine service. That is what was done when the golden calf was made: the gold was thrown into the fire, and out of this fire came the calf. So the Torah said: take care — I give you a Shabbat, I give you a sanctuary, as a meeting point of the human and the Divine; and all of these are marked by a holiness in which [man’s own initiative] does not intervene. You know, I will not have time to develop this, but there are passages in the Torah in which the letter samekh does not appear. You know, when you consider, when you analyze all the names given to the protagonists of history since the beginning, you do not see a samekh in the names of the people — except in Yosef. Why? Because the samekh is a vicious circle. I have already told you, have I not, that the most fearsome letters — that which represents a drug, the sam, the sam ha-mavet, the deadly poison — are samekh and mem. Today samim means drugs, sam is the singular; and samekh and final mem are dangerous letters because they are closed; one must secure their opening. For the mem, a remedy was found: le-marbeh ha-misrah u-le-shalom — in the function of the Messiah described by the prophet Yeshayahu you will find a final mem placed in the middle of the word; it has, in a sense, been converted. And the samekh was converted by Yosef.

Yosef — his life, in sum, we know: rejected by his brothers, persecuted, sold as a slave, condemned through the wife of Potiphar. He is in the beit ha-asurim, the prison — he was in prison. But after passing through all these trials he earned the title of Yosef the Righteous. And thereby the segulah of the Jewish people — the samekh of segulah […] — is to bear all these wanderings, all this tragedy of history, and in spite of everything to make its presence felt, to be able to affirm its triumph over all the trials it has had to undergo. Now, in the parashah of the sanctuary, as in the parashah of the menorah, which speaks of pure light, you will not find a samekh. And that is a way of saying that in order truly to be able to renew oneself — for there is no garment one does not soil, there is no food one does not spoil, there is no spiritual life one does not neglect — one must have free zones, pure zones, a light that does not settle us into this repetitive circle of the samekh […].

There are all the verbs in which the samekh appears, which show how far man can be thrown off balance and lose his bearings even while making his willing way in the life of the spirit. One can be overtaken by wear and tear; but one must be able to immerse oneself again in the Shabbat, to be renewed in this Mishkan, to find again that original fire through which G-d manifests Himself to man. I had said that of all four elements of this universe, only fire has this movement from below upward, and that it indeed expresses this will of revelation to tear the world away from its heaviness and give it wings — wings, six wings, says the prophet Yeshayahu. When man becomes a messenger, he is endowed with six wings — six wings that answer to the six days of creation, because he carries with him each day of creation, each day of the week in which he has achieved something of the Shabbat in his life; he has prepared the Shabbat of his life. We know very well that the Shabbat is the olam ha-ba, the World to Come, whereas the olam ha-zeh, the sample in which that World to Come is woven, is here below. And that is why Parashat Vayakhel requires the gathering of all our forces on the day after Yom Kippur, when we have all made ourselves new, when we have achieved our unity.