Parshah Terumah is Exodus 25:1-27:19, and it’s all about the Mishkan, the sanctuary the Israelites carry through the desert, and the fabled Ark of the Covenant, and the sacred vessels, and the garments of the priests. Whoo hoo! Next episode, the Patriarch and the Pope remodel each other’s sanctuaries with a budget of only two billion dollars!
Um. Sorry. A little edgy, here. And if the parshah doesn’t seem to have much to do with Vern and Gen, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the Israelites and the Lord, either. My job is to identify Moments of Decision, and there aren’t any here at all. Well, there’s the implied decision to carry out the specs given, but that’s not actually particularly interesting, and besides, it’s the same decision that’ll be implied in the whole rest of the book. And even expanding the idea to include Decisions by the Lord, which tends, I think, to lead to bad discussions, the only remotely interesting decision is to give us detailed specs in the first place. I mean, we could argue about what difference it might have made to have forty loops and clasps, or sixty, rather than fifty, but then we’re into HGTV territory again.
Just to give you an example, the summary at Chabad makes no mention of humans at all, other than Moses receiving instructions. The so-called summary at MyJewishLearning.com (content-rich! trans-denominational!) includes a moving note that the gifts from the Jews “can be of any kind from any person whose heart moves them in a giving way.” True, where “of any kind” means gold, silver, brass, blue purple or scarlet linen, goat’s hair cloth, certain pelts, acacia wood, oil, incense, onyx or certain precious stones. Gifts of, oh, say, iron, bronze, pigskin, jade, flax, glass or ivory are right out. Sorry, but summaries that change the meaning get right up Your Humble Blogger’s nose. Feh.
Anyway, here I am, with no question for Saturday. I would appreciate any help y’all have to offer.
I should say that there’s plenty to talk about, once freed from the what-if restriction. I’m fascinated by the whole concept of the mishkan, what the details are doing in Scripture, what it means that they were argued about a thousand years later, what it means that the Israelites created this magnificent (but useless, in practical terms) thing in the middle of the desert, the way in which sacred space is created and then moved around, the whole way in which the Lord sweats the small stuff even to the point of created heavenly maquettes, and the implication that comes along later that the Israelites actually manage to build the thing to spec. And by the way, talk about intelligent design...
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
I am curious – what is the purpose of the interior decoration detail, if you look at the Bible as a book by and for people instead of a document of whatever-the-heck God arbitrarily put in there? (Although I suppose that question could also be, why does God care so much about these details, will the exact design really have that much effect on the virtue of the people, which I might have thought he’d care about more?) Do archaeologists think the Temple actually existed, in these precise details, and someone was trying to make a record of it (maybe later?) so the details would never be lost, or was someone trying to give the Jews a really magnificent image to believe in (also later?) while in exile, or have people just always been fascinated by decorating mags, or what? The “inspirational stories and moral lessons” bits of a Holy Book seem a lot more clearly purposeful to me.
Before I respond, I should point out that the Mishkan is not the Temple; the Temple is built once the Israelites have political control over Jerusalem, but the Mishkan is a temporary structure, carried through the desert and set up when stopped. That confuses the issue of what the text would mean when; it’s plausible, in a sense, that the Temple will be rebuilt in a way consistent with the Scripture, but not that the Mishkan will be rebuilt, for it was specifically for the Exodus, and not either the Kingdoms or the Diaspora.
Musing about it, I’ve become interested in the idea that the Israelites, just off of their escape from slavery, are able to build the thing as required. Particularly since during this stretch while the Lord is setting down the details, what the Israelites are actually doing is making a Golden Calf, which (in Exodus 32) is described in no detail whatsoever. You get the impression of a clumsy thing, “fashioned with an engraving tool”, hard to imagine in any detail. For the Mishkan, on the other hand, we get details coming out our nostrils. That’s got to be a deliberate part of the story-telling, right?
Thanks,
-V.
So, being unhelpful, but: is the Ark the most blueprinted structure on Earth, if we go by “number of copies of description in circulation”? It must be easily in the top ten, right? So, when the aliens take over our deserted planet, they’re pretty likely to try to build one. I wonder how that’s going to go for them.
But, one has to assume that the description is there because this object is a There Can Be Only One type thing, and so we need to be able to recognize it when we see it, years or millennia down the road.