The Pshat Heard 'Round the World

Here we go! Five weeks in a balloon of intensive involvement with the construction of the Mishkan, starting now with Parashat Terumah. A balloon, it seems, since we’ve just been at Sinai and receive an entire corpus of civil and criminal law with which to found a society in Eretz Yisrael, and we’re told we’ll be accompanied by Hashem’s angel on the way, so you’d think the next stage would be to set off. Not so fast! The Mishkan and all it entails and implies for the life of the people of Israel will be our subject clear through until the third parashah in B’midbar (!), when we finally do get going. This Mishkan, the most elaborate construction project undertaken by humanity to date as recorded by the Torah (the Tower of Babel was aborted, and the Egyptian store-houses merely required a huge supply of adobe bricks), allows us to fulfill our promise as created in the image of Hashem. Hashem creates a world, and we, imitating Him, create a symbolic world. But ...

How do you get from “Don’t seethe a kid in it’s mother’s milk” to two sets of dishes? I mean, three, if you include pareve? Oh, make that six, for Pesach? Plus add in the the treif set from the olden days, for the non-Jewish servant, and we’ve got our magic number – seven sets of dishes!! Behind the multiplication of the plates is a serious question, however. This week’s parashah, Mishpatim, is much more than a jumbled collection of laws regulating capitol and civil offenses. Not only is it not jumbled at all (hint: compare the progression of themes in the various sets of laws in Mishpatim with those of the storyline in parashat Shemot!), it contains some of the most powerful “one-liners” in Jewish tradition. “Na’aseh v’nishmah”, for example, is uttered by the people in THIS parashah (and not in Yitro, as some people mistaken think). The definitive reference to the unity of the written and oral Torah also appears herein. But probably the verse which is mos...

Is Mt. Sinai under construction in this week’s parashah? One could be forgiven for thinking so, since Hashem’s intructions to Moshe regarding preparation for His revelation to Am Yisrael include the erection of a fence around the mountain! You say you don’t remember any fence? Take a look at the verses leading up to the the Ten Commandments: “Hashem said to Moshe, ‘Go down, give testimony before/warn the people, lest they destructively break through to Hashem to see, and many fall (i.e., die) from amongst them. Even the priests, who draw close to Hashem, must sanctify themselves, lest Hashem break out amongst them.” Moshe said to Hashem, the people are not able to ascend the mountain, for You warned us saying, ‘Set up a boundary around the mountain and sanctify it .” Hmm, the people aren’t able to ascend, something is preventing them – there’s a boundary there, set up precisely to avoid rash, impulsive spiritual overload. Clearly, this boundary can’t be...

--> Shabbat Shirah, it’s time to sing. Standing on the edge of a Red Sea that has returned to its roiling nature, drowning the fleeing, terrified Egyptian charioteers, Am Yisrael is ecstatic and, with Moshe, breaks into song. They sang in unison a song that welled up from a prophetic vision of redemption that, our sages tell us, outstripped even the visions of Yechezk’el and Isaiah, both of whom “saw” Hashem enthroned on high. The song so permeated the very fabric of being that it is introduced with the imperfect mood of the verb – Az Yashir Moshe… “Then Moshe will sing”, as though the song is every ringing in the background of our Jewishness. So what did they sing? Pure poetry, and therefore, as difficult to feel confident in parsing as it must be even to attempt to imagine what they were feeling at that moment. And yet, we reprise it every day in our morning prayers, as part of Pesukei D’Zimra. Every verse of this song is fit for deep reflection; I’ve chosen...