(This week’s audio contains an extra story at the top, and a song at the end.)
I want to share a little bit of Torah tonight. If you’ve been tracking at all, you might know that the last month of Torah portions from the Book of Exodus have celebrated the delicate partnership of vision and skill. It started several weeks ago when Moshe began downloading the blueprints for the mishkan, the holy tent where the Shekhinah would settle in a cloud and commune with the people.
Torah then took us into a deep dive of design and materials. Involved in the project would be gold, silver, gems, precious linens, rare animal skins, thread colored with dyes laboriously coaxed from the shells or organs of mollusks and insects, in processes described just this week in the New York Times, in an article about an archaeological site in Haifa that turns out to have been a workshop for the manufacture of the blue dye thatTorah calls t’kheylet and the royal purple we call argaman.
I am always a sucker for this section of Torah. I thrill to imagine the fingers at work – the individual artisanry and the shared labor that so many of the projects would have required. I try to imagine every element of altar and apparatus that is described, and marvel over the skill it must have taken to bring these to completion, particularly in light of the limited resources of that supposed time and place.
But completed they were; at least that’s how the story goes. Over these Torah portions we see every element come into being until we reach this week’s portion – Pekudei – in which it is all done! We see the satisfaction in the faces of Betzalel and Oholiav who oversaw the work. We see it all brought to Moshe, who has to give the nod that it is identical to the vision God gave him on the Mountain. Then all of the items are moved into the holy tent. The screens are attached and the cloths spread; basins and bowls, lampstands and ladles, firepans and winged gold cherubim – all in place. Now we stand ready for the altar to be inaugurated.
This whole process was completed at lightning speed! Because all of the skilled people were right there ready to begin working the loom or the forge as soon as the instruction was given.
It’s a little different in this week’s haftarah portion from the Book of Kings. In many ways the haftarah sounds like the same text. King Solomon is completing the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. This has been a bigger project because instead of a tent, it is a monumental stone building that is involved. But the interior is based on the same blueprint as we saw in the Book of Exodus. All those same materials – the stones and threads and metals. All of it completed and brought to King Solomon for approval, and then moved into the Temple.
This story is an echo of the Torah story, taking place generations later. But there is a difference that caught my attention. In Torah, Moshe receives the vision and it is immediately carried out. In the haftarah, however, Solomon asserts that it was his father, King David, who had the vision and the intention to build the Temple. But God said to David, essentially, “Good idea, but your son Solomon will do it.”
King David was charismatic, creative, powerful and problematic. The vision had to wait for King Solomon to sit on the throne, a king better suited to gather the materials and artisans, and to command public opinion. Because there needed to be public will for this elaborate, enormous, and expensive vision to be – literally – set in stone. King David could not do that and he knew it. It took another generation for the Temple to be built.
In both cases the result was achieved – a holy place where heaven and earth meet, where the Divine and human speak and embrace. Where God would settle in a cloud and the priests would engage in holy service on behalf of the people.
In the case of the mishkan, it came about in a single burst of industry that carried us from prophecy to product. In the case of the Temple, it came about with vision followed by waiting, enduring, until there was the will and the way.
This small difference touched me today. Because we are living in a moment, carrying the burden of a moment, where we struggle to see any beautiful forward-looking vision that stands a chance of coming to fruition. There are people around with profound vision of what a shared future of Israel and Palestine could look like. There are people with a profound vision of what a revival of American democracy could look like. I know this. I’ve listened to them on podcasts. I’ve read their speeches; I have bought their books. But I have not yet observed in public life either the will or the skill to bring their visions about. And so my experience of their visions is a mixed one – excitement followed by a quick kick to the gut as I ask myself, “Well, how is that ever going to happen?”
But the relationship between the Torah portion and the haftarah portion gave me an idea. That sometimes the work can’t quite happen right when the vision is being received. Sometimes we have to wait for the players and the playing field to be lined up just right. We have to wait for the right artisans with the right skills to weave and forge a new future.
That doesn’t mean we sit back and do nothing in the meantime. But it does mean that we shouldn’t despair if the vision takes time.
There are days when I feel like we have been waiting my whole lives for a vision to become reality. What we wanted to see when we were young – well, we are no longer young and so many of those things we still haven’t seen. But we have seen some. Significant steps forward, even when they are followed by setbacks. Ah, how beautiful and biblical it would be if vision could be instantly put into effect. If all of us took to the loom and the forge instantly, and if all of us had just the right skills to meet the needs of the time.
But in the absence of that, I’m not giving up. I am banking on our ability to grow and learn. To amplify the visions that inspire us and to hone our skills. We don’t have to merely endure; we can grow and keep preparing in every way available to us. And with some luck and some divine blessing and enough time, we will make ourselves and the world skillful enough.
And so, instead of praying for the world we want to see to simply and magically appear, we might pray instead for both our endurance and the skillfulness of our hands. As it says in Psalm 90:
וִיהִ֤י נֹ֤עַם אֲדֹנָ֥י אֱלֹהֵ֗ינוּ עָ֫לֵ֥ינוּ
וּמַעֲשֵׂ֣ה יָ֭דֵינוּ כּוֹנְנָ֥ה עָלֵ֑ינוּ
וּֽמַעֲשֵׂ֥ה יָ֝דֵ֗ינוּ כּוֹנְנֵֽהוּ׃
Vihi noam Adonai Eloheynu aleynu
U-ma’aseh yadeynu kon’nah aleynu
U-ma’aseh yadeynu kon’nehu.
May Adonai Eloheynu’s favor be upon us.
And make the work of our hands productive;
Uplift the work of our hands.
(Psalm 90:17)