{"id":2637,"date":"2005-02-08T14:55:50","date_gmt":"2005-02-08T19:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/08\/2637.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:06","slug":"parshah-terumah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/08\/parshah-terumah\/","title":{"rendered":"Parshah Terumah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Parshah Terumah is Exodus 25:1<\/a>-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!\n

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.\n

Just to give you an example, the summary<\/a> at Chabad makes no mention of humans at all, other than Moses receiving instructions. The so-called summary<\/a> 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.\n

Anyway, here I am, with no question for Saturday. I would appreciate any help y’all have to offer.\n

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<\/I>, 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...\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Parshah Terumah is Exodus 25:1-27:19, and it\u2019s 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,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17302,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions\/17302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}