Shalom: Parshat Vayakhel Exodus 35:1-38:20

By Shlomo Riskin

Efrat, Israel - “Six days shall creative activity be done, but on the seventh day there shall be for you a holy Sabbath of Sabbath for the Lord” (Exodus 35:2).

When approaching the five biblical portions which conclude the book of Exodus, the greatest puzzle seems to be the seemingly convoluted order of their subject matter. The over-arching theme is obviously the Sanctuary: its various accoutrements and precise dimensions. The third Torah portion in the middle seems to veer away from the Sanctuary and repeat the commandment of the Sabbath: “But My Sabbath shall you observe … six days shall your creative physical activity be done and on the seventh day a Sabbath of Sabbaths shall be sacred to the Lord … because in six days did the Lord make the heavens and the earth and on the seventh He ceased from work and He became refreshed” (Exodus 31:12-17). What immediately follows is the idolatrous worship of the golden calf, Moses’ breaking of the tablets, and G-d’s ultimate forgiveness of the Israelites for their transgression. The fourth Torah portion, our portion of Vayakhel, then opens with the Sabbath once again (as cited above), after which the text continues with its accounting of the execution of the construction of the Sanctuary until the conclusion of the Book of Exodus. The order then becomes:

Sanctuary - Sanctuary - Sabbath - Golden Calf - Sabbath - Sanctuary - Sanctuary

Especially if we take the position of the majority of Midrashim and of the most classical of commentaries Rashi, that the command to build the Sanctuary did not come until after the sin of the golden calf - and was actually a form of atonement for that very sin of idolatry - then the order of these five Torah portions seems absolutely incomprehensible.

In order to further complicate the issue - but at the same time to begin to discover the solution to our problem - it is important to analyze the very special relationship between the Sanctuary and the Sabbath commandment. The Midrash utilizes the verse which appears after the initial command of the Sanctuary and its accoutrements, “And you shall speak to the children of Israel saying ‘but My Sabbath shall you observe,’” (ibid. 12,13) as teaching the thirty nine forbidden acts of physical creativity; the Sages of the Talmud insist that it was precisely those activities necessary in the construction of the Sanctuary which we are forbidden to do on the Sabbath day. The construction of the Sanctuary defines the forbidden activities (melakhot) on the Sabbath.

This connection expresses a most profound link between the Sanctuary and the Sabbath. Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel takes note of this by referring to the Sabbath as “a Sanctuary in time”. I would submit, however that the connection is far deeper. The Almighty created a world for us to dwell in; He expects us to return the compliment by our creating a Sanctuary in which He may dwell. But the Almighty created an incomplete world, whose built- in freedom of will provides the possibility of evil as well as good, chaos as well as order, darkness as well as light. “The creator of light and the maker of darkness, the maker of peace and the creator of evil, I the Lord have done all of these.” (Isaiah 45:7) What G-d expects of us is that we utilize the Torah which He has given us, choose good and reject the evil, in order to complete His incomplete world, in order to perfect His imperfect world. The Sanctuary is the ideal of the perfected world, the place where G-d himself may feel comfortable, the more perfect world in which His divine goodness will be felt throughout, so that He will not be forced to hide His face and to be concealed behind a cloud, to be glimpsed only “through a glass darkly.”

In this model, the six days of labor and seventh day of rest take on a major symbol. “Six days shall your physical creativity be done”; and it was during the primordial six days that G-d’s world, an incomplete, imperfect world, was made. As an old Jewish story reminds us, when a disgruntled customer complained to the tailor who was late in delivering his suit, “It took the Almighty only six days to create an entire universe and you’ve kept me waiting 3 months for a jacket and trousers?”, the tailor responded, “But do you want me to deliver the same problematic product that G-d delivered?!” Indeed, it is our task to work during the six days of the week to attempt to make this imperfect world into a perfect Sanctuary, to assume our roles as agent-partners with G-d in completing His world.

The Sabbath day itself, the day on which G-d rests, symbolizes a world of peace and harmony, the ultimate world of messianism and redemption. The Sabbath is the goal, the end-game, towards which we all aim and for which we all yearn. The Sabbath expresses the time when we will have overcome our imperfect nature and our imperfect society. Whatever it took by the sweat of our brow for us to remake the world that we were given, is not to be done on the Sabbath day. The Sabbath is the ultimate promise and the ultimate vision. It is a foretaste of the world-to-come. The Sanctuary is our Sabbath-in-place, the world which is wholly Sabbath!

Now the order of our Torah portions is clear. The purpose of G-d’s having given us the Torah at Sinai is for us to create a Sanctuary, a more perfect world. Hence, after the command to build the Sanctuary, comes the commandment of the Sabbath: our “work” as partners with G-d to perfect the world during the six days and our taste of the more perfect world to come on the Sabbath itself. The cost of failure at that effort is our dancing at the feet of the golden calf, explained by our Sages as embodying the idolatry of false values, the immorality and licentiousness of materialism, and even the murder which comes from lawlessness. But when we fall, we must raise ourselves up by means of the standard and the vision of the Sabbath. Then and only then will Sabbath and Sanctuary merge into one as “the world is filled with the knowledge (and presence) of G-d as the waters cover the seas.” And so the order: Sanctuary, Sabbath, Idolatrous Calf, Sabbath, Sanctuary.

Shabbat Shalom.