AND LET THEM MAKE ME A SANCTUARY THAT I

MAY DWELL AMONG THEM.

(Shemot

25: 8)

And it is written, and

grant you peace (Bamidbar 6: 26) –

The Shulamit – a nation in which dwells perpetual peace,

for it says, and let them make Me

a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.

The Shulamit – a nation into which, in the future, I will

grant peace, for it says, I will grant peace in the land (Vayikra 26:6).

The Shulamit – a nation unto which I will, in the future,

extend peace, as it is written, For

thus says the Lord: I will extend to her peace like a river (Isaiah

66:12).

(Bereishit

Rabbah 66:2)

It does not say

that I may dwell

in it, but rather among

them, in order to teach

that the Shekhinah [Divine Presence] does not

rest upon the Sanctuary because of the Sanctuary, but rather because of Israel

– for the Temple of the Lord are these [these good ways mentioned in the previous verse] (Jeremiah 7:4).

(Tzeidah

La-Derekh as quoted in Prof. Nechamah

Leibowitz's Iyyunim

be-Sefer Shemot, p.

353)

He commanded each person to

build a Temple of the chambers of his heart, that he should prepare himself to

be a tabernacle for God and a fortress for His mightiness to dwell in, and also

an alter on which to offer up all the parts of his soul, until he devotes his

soul to His glory at all times.

(Malbim

Shemot 25:8)

If you follow my laws (Vayikrah 26:3)…

I will establish My abode in your midst (26:

11). If we meditate upon these

verses, two things will become clear to us as absolute certainties:

1. The meaning of that I may

dwell among them goes way beyond the mere indwelling of the Shekhinah in the Tabernacle. In reality, it refers

to God's immanent closeness among us with the fulfillment of the covenant

between Him and Israel, which is revealed when His protection and blessing

influence the flowering of life for the individual and collective.

2. That being said, God does not

allow His Shekhinah, His protection, or His

blessing to rest upon us by the building of the Tabernacle and its pains-taking

maintenance, but rather, by the sanctification of every aspect of our private

and public lives for the sake of keeping His commandments. This was not

demonstrated only by the historical events of the destruction of the Sanctuary

at Shilo, and of the two Temples in Jerusalem;

Scripture itself speaks of it clearly and with explicit warnings…In any case,

Scripture proclaims that I may dwell among them will occur in the wake

of let them make Me a sanctuary. Therefore, the sanctuary

is but an expression of

the more general role whose fulfillment is the condition for the indwelling of

the Shekhinah in Israel to be assured.

(R. Samson Raphael Hirsch on

Shemot 25: 3-8)

And Let Them Make Me a Sanctuary That I May Dwell

Among Them

Chana Mann

Dedicated

to the memory of my mother and teacher, Batya

daughter of Yehezkeil and Chana

Cohen, may she rest in peace, who passed away on Rosh Hodesh

of Adar Aleph, 5763 – She oversees the activities of her household and never

eats the bread of idleness (Mishlei 31: 27)

And

let them make – great is

work, for even the Holy One Blessed Be He did not rest His Presence upon Israel

until they worked, for it says: And let them make me a sanctuary that I may

dwell among them. (Avot DeRabbi Natan 11:1)

The midrash from Avot

DeRabbi Natan teaches us

that the resting of God's Presence upon Israel in the wilderness was contingent

upon their active participation in construction work, each in accordance with

his strength and abilities.

Even

at the very outset of our journey through the world, the Torah teaches us the

great value of creative work: And God blessed the seventh day and declared

one. (Bereishit

2:3).

The NeTziV,

in the introduction to his commentary, Ha-Emek Davar, writes:

That

is, to explicate and make new inventions utilizing the nature of creation as

much as possible…And we already made clear that it is a positive command of

the Torah to observe and to perform all of the words of the Torah. To observe

and to perform means to explicate the Torah and create new interpretations of

it as much as is possible. For that is the commandment upon

man to act and bring forth the forces of nature from every thing, for that is

God's glory.

According

to the NaTziV of Vilozhin,

our function is to continue the work of creation begun by God.

The

value of work finds expression in our parasha in

connection with the question, why did the Torah have to go into such elaborate

detail in its description of the Sanctuary? Why could it not just say that the

children of Israel did everything that God had commanded Moses? The first time

that God commands Moses about building the Sanctuary appears in the beginning

of parashat Terumah: "And

furnishings – so you shall make it" (Shemot 25: 1- 9). The second time, in the beginning of parashat VaYakhel, Moses relays

the commands to the children of Israel in almost the same words and details: "Moses

whole community of Israelites left Moses' presence" (Shemot 35: 4-20). There is a disagreement regarding the date

on which the commands mentioned in our parasha were

given; Rashi applies the principle that the Torah

does not always relate incidents in chronological order, and believes that the

commands were given after the episode with the golden calf. However, it seems

that RaMBaN is closer to the plain meaning of the

text. He claims that the commands were given to Moses before the golden calf

incident took place, but he only relayed them to the Israelites after God

agreed to forgive the sin of the golden calf:

And

he told them the subject of the Tabernacle which he had been previously

commanded, before the breaking of the Tablets. For since the Holy One, Blessed

be He became reconciled with them and gave Moses the second Tablets, and also

made a new covenant that God would be in their midst, He thereby returned to

His previous relationship with them, and to the love of their "wedding"…

even as He said, And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among

them. Therefore Moses now commanded them all that

he had been told at first. (RaMBan Shemot 35:1, Chavel translation)

However,

the plain meaning of the text gives us reason to question RaMBaN's

comment that, "He became reconciled with them and… He thereby returned

to His previous relationship with them." It seems that the picture was

much more complicated, as Ibn Ezra wrote: "The

point of the whole section is that before the affair of the calf God said to

Moses, And let them make Me a sanctuary that

I may dwell among them. And when they made the calf, He said, I will not

go in your midst (Shemot 33:3), and when Moses

pleaded with God, He told him that the Shekhinah

would rest upon the tent, which was Moses' tent…" (Ibn Ezra Shemot 33: 14)

Moses'

tent, i.e., the Tent of Meeting, already existed outside of the encampment: Now

to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another (Shemot 33:7,11). Within

it were deposited the Tablets had brought down from Mount Sinai and placed in

the Ark (so explains RaMBaN

in his comments on Devarim 10:11).

When

comparing the opening section of parashat Terumah with that of parashat VaYakhel, we discover, along with the almost exact

parallelism between the lists of materials, a salient omission from Vayakhel, i.e. a key verse is missing: "And let

them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them".

It would be possible to explain this omission against the background of the

great rift arising from the sin of the golden calf, if it occurred between the

two events. It seems that the plain sense of the text follows Ibn Ezra's suggestion that Moses was not at all sure if the

commands regarding the Tabernacle would still be put into effect. On the one

hand, God already had a dwelling that contained the Tablets of the Covenant (the

Tent of Meeting=Moses' tent located outside the camp), which allowed Him to

dwell close to his only chosen one, Moses. On the other hand, there is no

record of the cancellation of the commands regarding the Tabernacle. Moses

decided to exploit the ambiguity, and acted as if nothing happened, commanding that

the Tabernacle be built. As the Sages said, "his opinion agreed with that

of God" – Moses built the Tabernacle on his own initiative, but also

wanted this to agree with God's opinion. (These

ideas were partially influenced by Gad Eldad's

article in Megadim, issue 32, 5760.)

One

of the fundamental principles taught by Sefer

Hahinukh is that, "a person is affected by

his own activities" (Mitzvah 16). Moses hopes that the physical work of

building the Tabernacle would open the hearts of the Israelites to their Father

in Heaven, and that they would become worthy of having the Shekhinah

dwell among them, but at this stage he was unsure and could not tell them with

certainty, "let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them",

as God had promised before the sin of the golden calf.

Thus

was completed all the work of the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting. The

Israelites did so; just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so they did… Just as

the Lord had commanded Moses, so the Israelites had done all the work. And when

Moses saw that they had performed al the tasks – as the Lord had commanded, so

they had done – Moses blessed them (Shemot 39:32, 42-3).

It is

mentioned three times that the Israelites did everything that God had

commanded, and there is no doubt that the Torah wanted to emphasize the matter

of the work's completion in accordance with God's commands. However, Moses

remains unsure of whether God would dwell among the Israelites after the

Tabernacle was built, and he blessed the people of his own initiative. Rashi explains:

They

said the words that conclude "The Prayer of Moses" (Tehillim 90: 17): May the beauty of the Lord our God be

upon us – i.e., "May it be God's will that the Shekhinah

may rest upon the work of your hands." They invoked this blessing and not

another formula because during the whole seven days of the installation when

Moses was setting up the Tabernacle and officiating therein and dismantling it

daily the Shekhinah had not rested upon it and

the Israelites felt ashamed, saying to Moses: "O, our teacher Moses! All

the trouble which we have taken was only that the Shekhinah

may dwell amongst us, so that we may know that the sin of the golden calf has

been atoned for on our behalf. He therefore said to them… (Rashi on VaYikrah 9: 23, Silberman

translation, which elaborates upon Rashi's comments

on Shemot 39: 43)

To Israel's

good fortune, God was placated by the Tabernacle's construction, as demonstrated

by the fact that the Holy One Blessed be He personally commanded its ritual

dedication: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: On the first day of

the first month you shall set up the tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting"

(Shemot 40:

1-2).

However,

it seems that, in contrast to RaMBaN's view, Israel's

relationship with God was only restored after the construction of the

Tabernacle was completed.

If we

return to the beginning of our parasha, we can now

see the connection between let them make Me a sanctuary and that I

may dwell among them as a conditional promise, or as describing the reward

for the fulfillment of a positive commandment, but it is also possible to

understand it as a deeper psychological-theological statement: A person who engage

in creative work and building is opened up to new worlds, to new experiences,

and to new channels within his soul. Through those experiences and channels he

can connect himself with God and open himself up to the divine, he can open a

door for the "spirit of God sweeping over the water" (Bereishit 1:2) to enter his soul.

The

making of the sanctuary was an act of making according to God's command, but in

addition to this it was also skilled, creative, work.

D. W.

Winnicott, an English psychoanalyst, emphasizes the

importance of creative work for living a meaningful life: Life is worth living

or not according to whether creativity is or is not a part of an individual

person's living experience… to be creative a person must exist and have a

feeling of existence… creativity indicates that he who is, is alive (Living

Creatively, pp. 39-40).

Rabbi

Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook ztz"l

emphasized the connection between human productive work, which originates in

the depths of the soul, and the experience of faith:

A

person can only acquire a virtuous characteristic from within himself, from his inner essential being, and not from

something outside himself, for contingent circumstances cannot bring true

happiness. But aren't the Torah and the commandments the essence of happiness –

and they come to a person from the outside? But when we consider it we discover

that each person can only get from the Torah and commandments that which is

already hidden deep inside him. But even ore than this – in a more general

sense, man encompasses all of existence, and the Torah and commandments, which

are the essence of the laws of existence, are also included in it. When he

attaches himself to them, he is connecting with his own essence, for all his

essence belongs to the source of his existence – to God, the source of all

being… (From Hadarav,

personal selections collected from the writings of Rabbi Kook)

Creative

human activity, which allows people to connect with their inner being, is a

condition for meaningful living and the construction of a sanctuary for

holiness within their souls.

Hannah Mann is a psychologist who lives

in Kiryat Shemonah.

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