A few things I want to clarify before I begin:

1) I love this forum. It has been a source of illumination, cognitive resistance, and learning for the few precious years I've been a part of it.

2) Per LfE's suggestion, I went out and got a copy of Artscroll's Rashi. This is my first time reading Classic commentary. It's blowing my mind - at the very least the detail is incredible.



and lastly, I asked my Rabbi friend why so much time was spent on the details of building the tabernacle and she replied "Biblical Jews really believed that Gd lived there. They really believed Gd was there. Of course it makes sense to spell it out and to source the finest materials."








other views would be appreciated.

I'm so excited that you're learning Rashi's commentary! Rashi is amazingly simple and at the same time amazingly deep. There are layers and layers of meaning in his concise statements intended for a five year old. He basically puts the text of the Torah in the context of our Oral tradition for those who are learning the text for the first time and are not yet able to access gemara and midrashim.

Speaking of context. Just a bit of a background on the tabernacle. The Jews were slaves in Egypt. Then they witness awesome miracles, leave Egypt, cross the sea on dry land, go into the desert, and experience an unbelievable revelation from G-d. The level of spirituality during the revelation is so high that their souls leave their bodies, and they have to be revived twice (Oral tradition). It seems natural that a soul that is thirsting for closeness to G-d would rather exist in the spiritual realms, outside of the physical body. But that's not what G-d wants. He wants us to live in this world. And He wants us to build a holy place where He can dwell (Shemos 25:8). G-d wants us to take the physical world that He created and to transform it into a holy place fitting for His presence. That's the task that was given to the Jewish people.

Ultimately, the whole physical world will be made holy and will be fit for G-d's presence. That will happen in the times of the mashiach. But back then, in the desert, they had to start small. They had to start with something very specific and clearly definable. They had to get precise instructions on how to use simple physical objects for a holy purpose.

There is an opinion that the commandment to build a Tabernacle was a response to the sin of the golden calf. Perhaps if the Jews were ready to deal with more abstract manifestations of holiness they would have been ready to transform the whole world into a dwelling place for G-d right then. But by building the golden calf they showed that they needed a very specific and a very physical way to connect to G-d, and the Tabernacle was fulfilling that need.

On a deeper level, the Tabernacle is a microcosm of the whole world. Each and every detail of its construction contains deep wisdom about the nature of the world and its potential for holiness. The structure of the Tabernacle also parallels the human body, and each part of it performs a certain function parallel to the part of the body that it represents.

This is on one foot. Sorry I don't have the time right now to look up the sources and give you more details. I'm sure LfE can add a lot more. I just couldn't leave this unanswered and wait till LfE is awake in Israel -- this is about the honor of the Torah here. I do find it very sad when people project their own baseless opinions instead of looking at the whole picture, seeing each and every detail of the Torah in context, and recognizing how deep and multifaceted our timeless tradition is.

Oh, :shrug on so many levels ...

1. Biblical Jews were neither stupid, nor primitive. It's our ancestors we're talking about here, and when you see how they reacted to their situations and how we react to ours, the Jewish People haven't changed very much. (I imagine Korach giving her kind of condescending answer ;) )

2. Ultimately, G-d's Presence did manifest itself in an almost visible manner as "inhabiting" that space, as it were.

You know how we feel at the Kotel, that the Shechina is there, that G-d is there in a way that is not the case in other parts of the world? Imagine that magnified by several orders of magnitude. Not something to sneer at.

3. Logically, since the manifestation did not take place until after it was completed (See the last verses in Exodus), why does it still make sense to spell out the construction? At that point, who cares how it was made and why? Moreover, it said earlier in Exodus, "Make me an altar of plain earth" - it doesn't at all follow that G-d wants the finest materials. Maybe He wants the simplest, plainest, unadorned place of worship possible? And "acacia trees", if you recall from your travels down in the Negev, are nowhere near the finest materials, just the most available. If they wanted finest, they should have waited until they got to the North and used cedar trees.

4. and most importantly - yours is a REALLY good question.

Everybody asks this question, every generation, that's how good it is.

To make it an even stronger question - as you may know, we learn the laws of Shabbat from the fact that when Moshe tells them to build the Tabernacle, first, he warns them to keep Shabbat (Exodus 35), implying that whatever is needed to build it, is forbidden on Shabbat, and from that we get the 39 Categories of "work".

So something as important as the laws of Shabbat, which are in the 10 Commandments, the cornerstone of Torah law, wouldn't it make more sense to have made that a little bit more explicit? Or better yet, a lot more explicit? But no, it spends 4 parshiyot telling us not only how to make the Tabernacle, but also how it was actually made, while Shabbat, we have to figure out for ourselves?!

Is that a question, or what?

In truth, we can never really know why G-d chose to give the Torah in the way that He did. We can only learn from His choices. For instance -

Take a look at the end, when it's all made (40:33) - it says, "Moshe completed all the work", just like in Genesis - "G-d completed all the work".

Somehow - Shabbat is inherently bound up with the Tabernacle. It is not a coincidence. Why and how? That requires a great deal of research. But now we have a direction.

Meanwhile- I have a practical answer to your question. Things that will live on in the Oral Law, like Shabbat, that we all keep, every generation, those didn't need to be written down. Things that do not last, that we could never imagine without specific detailed descriptions, those did need to be written down.

(PS: Yehudis, excellent post! Given that you said what you said, I could take a different angle.

PPS: FG - you think Rashi is detailed, you should see what he left out! And, if you think he's straightforward and clear, you should see all the commentaries that analyze every word he said! They say, Rashi doesn't just stand for "Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki", it stands for "Rabban Shel Yisrael" - the teacher of all of Israel! )

PPPS: dh and I are going to India tonight, for 8 days, and I may or may not have internet access. So have fun w/o me!

Yes, this.
To say I found her answer both insulting and lacking would be an understatement.



Yehudis, I've never heard that we (the Jewish people) left our bodies twice during the revelation. Interesting. And the reasons for the tabernacle regarding the instance of the golden calf, also interesting.

LfE, have a good trip! We'll miss you (in more ways than one :)).

FG, I'll try to find the sources when I get to it.

Another thing to notice is that G-d says that He will dwell 'b'socham' -- literally, "in them" as opposed to "in it." The Oral tradition teaches that G-d is telling us that as a result of building the Mishkan, His presence will dwell in all of us.

Here's something I learned today in our class on "siblings in the Torah" - the words used for joining the various parts of the Mishkan (Tabernacle), normally translated as "one to the other", literally say "a woman to her sister". This phrase, which is not found in other contexts, is repeated many times.

The objects happen to be grammatically female. But none of the grammatically male objects are joined "a man to his brother".

Something to wonder about, no?