Parshat Vayakhel: The Spirit of Industry

 James Tissot: Building the Ark 

[Yes Noah's.]

Parashat Vayakhel: The Spirit of Industry

Rabbi Yehuda Hausman

Has it just vanished in smoke: l’esprit du temps? Several thousand years is a vast patch of history, perhaps in the interim, the novelty of a desert Sanctuary has simply seeped away. All its glory and wondrous color faded and stonewashed like an old beach-towel; its imminence lost on us, far more, in fact, than last week’s paper left to yellow in the sun. The Sanctuary’s time is not our time or our great-grandparents’ time. What chance is there that this Sanctuary can stir our hearts as in days of old?  

Admittedly, the descriptions are pleasant enough:  A portable gilded ark, crowned with cherubs; embroidered winged-sphinxes sewn into expensive curtains made of fine goat hair, perhaps a variety of Mohair or Cashmere, if we think on it. There are silver loops and clasps connecting this and that; an indoor altar and an outdoor altar; a golden candelabrum, and a great deal more.

But no amount of familiarity with the text seems to alter its foreignness. Imagine having to describe a spirited summer in Paris to someone who has never sat in a Café, or seen the inside of an art gallery, or fallen in love. The Louvre is nothing but a U-shaped palace, the Seine just another river; the scope of l’Arc de triomphe never quite translates if one has never spent ten minutes walking around its wide roundabout. Thankfully, the Torah has a way of easing us into the unfamiliar, even when most paths are shut; there is always another point of entrée.

One of the stranger aspects of the Tabernacle is that transmission of its many details is twice juxtaposed with the law of Shabbat. The initial five and-a-half chapters of Tabernacle blueprints culminate in a reminder to ‘guard the Sabbath by refraining from prohibited labor—malacha’ (Ex. 25.1—31.12-17).   

Additionally, when the time comes for actual construction, this later section is introduced with yet another mention of Shabbat: ‘For six days shall labor be done, but on the seventh day, there shall be for you holiness, a Sabbath of solemn-rest to the Lord […] You shall kindle no fire throughout all your habitations on the Sabbath Day’ (Ex. 35.2-3).

               Our Sages find in the strange proximity of these two subjects a stern warning. ‘Despite God’s command, construction of the Sanctuary was to cease on the Sabbath.’ (Rashi, Sforno) Why, some might ask? Is it not all for God? Later in the Torah Portion, we read that the people have made and donated far more material than was necessary for the building of the Sanctuary. So much so that Moses announces: “‘Let neither man nor woman make any more work for the sanctuary.’ So the people were restrained from giving” (Ex. 36.6). The exuberance of ancient Israel captures humanity’s boundless desire to fashion and make. Creation never quite ends on its own, for things can always be made better…grander…different. Then there is the danger that mindful work evolves into mindless productivity. The philosopher Raoul Vaneigem had this to say, “In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”  

Without Moses cry of ‘enough,’ what compels to pause from projects great and small alike, if not mandatory Sabbath? Strikingly, what is odd about the Sanctuary and the Sabbath is that they are both holy, yet they do no quite mix. Like two great magnets of the same polarity, holiness of rest and holiness of work, though infused with a sacred charge, nevertheless push one another away. The Sabbath prevents the Sanctuary from being refurbished each month, from being ever remodeled and expanded each year.

The old awe of the Sanctuary may not be felt as it ought to be, especially when the average home is a great deal bigger than the Tent of Meeting. But we know the satisfaction of successful human labor, whether it’s a simple well-made soup or seeing a skyscraper rise up and kiss the clouds. We can also appreciate the dangers of overwork, one-mindedness, Napoleonic obsession, where no palace is large enough, no monument tall enough.

It is something of interest that of the many labors needed to create the Tabernacle, only the making fire is explicitly mentioned in the beginning of Parashat Vayekhel: ‘You shall kindle no fire…on the Sabbath Day.’ Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno suggests that fire is so basic to human industry, that a great many other labors could not be performed without it. But I prefer to end with a line by the poet Theodore Roethke:

What lives again? Only a man of straw—

Yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.

Fire can forge temples and cities or usher in the Sabbath with its light, but if man’s industry is left to burn unchecked, it can turn a Tabernacle into a spectacle, the Sabbath into just another day of work, and even melt the stone Tablets that reside in the Ark of the Covenant.

Parashat Ki Tisa: The Covenant of the Calf

William de Brailes: The Israelites Worship the Golden Calf and Moses Breaks the Tablets (C. 1250)

The Covenant of the Calf

Parashat Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35)

By Rabbi Yehuda Hausman

If the word of God, in stone engraved, can crumble as easily as bread; if God’s voice, chiseled in rock, can shatter like a pitched dinner plate; if the children of Israel can cast off their heavenly covenant with a casualness not unlike the unclasping of an earring or a necklace; if it is all so easily dismissed, what chance is there for loyalty and faith, when weighed against the allure of a pot of gold, or the lustrous aura of a gilded calf?

The narrative of the molten calf is unique on account of its plethora of vivid images. Moses and God, high upon the mountain, are engaged in august discourse, while far below, the restless people, dance their way from anxiety to frivolity, from fear to wretched faithlessness. Somehow, Aaron becomes a harassed sort-of baby-sitter, longing for the sound of an engine in the driveway, his ear tilted in the hope of the sound of jingling keys outside the door, all while the children run amuck.  

First they want gods to lead them. Perhaps, Aaron wonders, they will settle for a single graven calf. The people desire sacrifices; perhaps the ‘construction of an altar’ will provide some delay.  They wish for merriment, so Aaron declares a night vigil, a final interlude for the people to reconsider or Moses to return and intercede: ‘Tomorrow, a feast to the Lord,” he says (Exodus 32:1-6).  We know what ensues.

However there is no image more vivid than Moses’ reaction as he spies his people making sport of all that he holds dear: “And it was when he neared the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned, he threw the tablets from his hands and smashed them beneath the mountain” (Exodus 32:19).

We have journeyed with Moses, our teacher, as he led Israel from slavery to freedom, from the dry-bed of the Red Sea to the sloping mount of Revelation. His defeat now is palpable. There is wrath in his eyes, rage on his face. It is as if he has found some stranger in bed with his spouse. What use are words when the pain is physical? The covenant has already been smashed to pieces.

But quite possibly, wittingly or otherwise, Moses conveyed in rage what could not be conveyed in thunder and lightening, in the great columns of smoke and flame that accompanied the giving of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps what was missing in the fireworks was an essential lesson about the meaning of loyalty. In the moment when Moses’ anger mirrored God’s anger, the children of Israel began to see the thunder anew. Partnerships, covenants, trust … they flow both ways. The voice of God could only be engraved on stone, but it is the image of Moses’ burning rage that gets chiseled in Israel’s heart.  

The verse that follows compounds the lesson: Moses took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to fine-powder, scattered it over the water and made the Israelites drink it (Exodus 32:20).

Moses appears to want Israel to “taste” what it has done. His people must ingest the concoction and savor its distastefulness. In this way, they may come to appreciate the foulness of the whole affair. Many commentators wonder: From what source was this water drawn? Some, including Torah translator and interpreter Robert Alter, suggest this was the water that Moses “miraculously provided for the people, which would be a compounding of irony.”

In a different vein, the 12th Century rabbi, Abraham ibn Ezra, points to Deuteronomy 9:21 where Moses states that he took the grounded dust of the calf and flung it into “the stream that came down from the mountain.” This was hardly any old wadi, it was the very stream that swept down from Sinai and sustained the camp.

Faithfulness has little meaning without some awareness of the repercussions of faithlessness. How disloyalty dissolves the bond of trust, how it pollutes the waters of love — human and divine. Faith is no paltry thing, because the memory of broken faith endures forever. Stone tablets shatter, and God’s voice is lost in the wind; perhaps more than anything else, it was the Golden Calf that sealed the covenant.

Rabbi Yehuda Hausman is the spiritual leader of the The Shul on Duxbury, an independent Orthodox minyan. He is a teacher at the Academy for Jewish Religion, CA, and a lecturer at American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies. He writes about the weekly parasha on his blog, rabbihausman.com.