Neither Early Nor Late
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The giving of the law at Mount Sinai, followed by the instructions on how to build the mishkan, followed by the idolatry of the golden calf, followed by the actual building of the mishkan. I have skipped a few elements but this is basically how the final fifteen chapters of Exodus unfold. For Ramban, the sequencing of the story makes perfect sense. The children of Israel have just received the law. They have experienced the glory of God’s presence at Mount Sinai. Now it is time to move forward from the base of the mountain and continue on their journey. It makes all the sense in the world that the first commandment they receive upon moving forward from the mountain is to build the mishkan, the mobile sanctuary that will house not only God’s presence, but the very tablets they have just received at Mount Sinai. One cannot stay at Sinai forever; we need a sacred mobile structure to accompany us on our journey. And for Israel, that structure, that “Winnebago of spirit,” was the mishkan.
Rashi sees it differently and invokes his beloved principle of ein mukdam u-m’uhar ba-torah, there is no chronological order in the Torah. Rashi offers a variety of reasons – textual, calendrical, and otherwise – why a reconsideration of the sequencing is appropriate. At the core of his argument is his contention that the building of the mishkan must have been in response to the sin of the golden calf. Sinful as it was for Israel to build the false god, their sin was prompted by the Children of Israel’s very human need for a visible and physical focus for their spiritual energies. The Israelites were, after all, a newly emancipated people, and maybe, just maybe, as the divine wrath subsided, God realized that while you can take an Israelite out of the land of idol worship, it is much more difficult to take the idol worship out of the Israelite. By this telling, the mishkan was an accommodation by God to humanity, a bit like keeping kosher is God’s way of saying: “In a perfect world you would all be vegetarians. By following kashrut, you can eat meat, but only with certain limitations.” The instruction to build the mishkan was sort of a divinely sanctioned “meet you where you are” moment, an acknowledgement that this ragtag desert tribe had a psychological need for a communal, ritual, and theological structure to organize themselves. The fact that the dedication of the mishkan would demand a sin offering as a communal atonement (Exodus 29:1) makes the implicit purpose of the mishkan all but explicit. Rashi insists that the building of the mishkan must follow the sin of the golden calf because its very purpose is a response to the golden calf.
The argument between Rashi and Ramban is interesting, and there are more points to be made for each side. At stake is not just the difference between two literary approaches, but the difference between two takes on the narrative arc of the Israelites’ journey and, by extension, the journeys of our own lives. Rashi and Ramban agreed that the Israelites needed a place in which God’s presence could dwell. For Ramban, this need reflected a sentiment that we all understand from our own lives, namely, that Sinai moments are not sustainable. Nobody stays at the mountaintop forever. The goal of a religious life is to live spiritually attuned to God’s ongoing and steady presence, in all the peaks and valleys, at every step of life’s journey. Rashi’s focus is our need to feel God’s presence at the moments, if not especially at the moments, when we stumble, fall, and fail. We need a tabernacle – we need God’s sheltering presence – at those times when we are least deserving, when we sense the divine spark within us to be most elusive. No house of worship – not the biblical one and not the one in which we are sitting today – is intended only for saints. If nothing else, a sanctuary must be a spiritual refuge, a halfway house for the spiritually broken, for those seeking tikkun, those seeking to be made whole again. We in this room know our shortcomings better than anyone. We come here to be reminded of the person whom we seek to be, to be inspired to aspire toward that higher rung, and to get the boost to bring it within reach.
Ultimately, I am not sure where I fall in the debate. Rashi and Rambam each have a point – about both the text and the human condition – which I guess is why we are still quoting them hundreds of years later. What struck me is that the most interesting aspect of these entire chapters may not be the question of whether the instructions to build the mishkan arrived after Mount Sinai or after the golden calf. The most remarkable part of this whole story is that the Israelites built the Tabernacle at all. It is one thing for a community or a person to receive a set of instructions – be it the commandments at Mount Sinai or the design specs of the mishkan. It is certainly no small thing for a person or a people to be liberated by the mighty hand of God and to find the courage to dream dreams and imagine unseen futures. But to follow those instructions, to take those freedoms and dreams and then to build something concrete and see it to completion – that is really something! To do so after having been through the grind of servitude and having been laid low as Israel was, and to muster the spiritual resilience to dust oneself off, pick oneself up, find one’s stride, and build a structure capable of housing God’s presence – well, that is downright heroic. Ramban calls the book of Exodus the “Book of Redemption,” a title I believe refers not just to God’s redemption of Israel at the sea. Exodus is a book of redemption because it tells the story of a people who, against the odds, having experienced the dark night of the soul, emerged from that night, that crucible, without self-pity and found the spiritual wherewithal to build. May the story of Exodus inspire our generation anew. May our stories follow the same redemptive arc. And may each of us prove capable of building those structures worthy of housing God’s presence.