PEKUDEI 5784
Pekudei is the last parsha of Exodus (Chapter 38:21 through Chapter 40). Pekudei means accounting, and the parsha recounts exactly how many talents and shekels of gold, silver and copper are used in the construction of the mishkan. The mishkan is actually built in this parsha (before we were just given the blueprints, as it were) by Bezalel and Oholiab, and then set up by Moses on the first day of the first month of the second year in the wilderness. (40:17). Chapter 38 provides the accounts of the metals used, Chapter 39 describes the making of the service vestments for the priests. All this work is completed in Chapter 39 and all of it brought to Moses. Chapter 40 is Moses arranging all the pieces of the mishkan and consecrating all of the pieces of the mishkan and Aaron and his sons. The mishkan is now fit for YHVH and “the presence of YHVH filled the Tabernacle.” (40:34) in the form of a cloud. YHVH has his home. The book of Exodus comes to an end.
There’s a funny thing to note about the sequence of events in these last few parshiot. Logically, the events of Chapter 40 actually predate the events of Chapter 29 where the consecration of the priests is described in much detail. That’s not obvious from the text.
I want to discuss the following themes.
Can divine communication be so detailed?
Is obedience a possible response to the divine voice?
The contrast between the emptyhandedness of human protagonists in encountering the divine compared to the fullness of shlepping the mishkan around.
The breastplate of the high priest.
The last part of Exodus and the upcoming book of Leviticus have highly detailed prescriptions about both behavior and objects to be built. These detailed communications are presented as the word of YHVH directly to Moses. Can the divine actually communicate like this?
Most of Genesis is simpler. Take a look at Chapter 12. It’s easy for me to imagine Abraham receiving a communication from the divine saying something like “Go from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation.” (Genesis 12:1-2). Take the angel with whom Jacob wrestled. The angel asks Jacob his name, and then says “your name won’t be Jacob anymore but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with people and were able (Genesis 32:29).
I am suggesting that communication with the divine takes a simpler form and that the elaboration we find in this text or in Mahayana Buddhist texts or Vedic rituals is a human elaboration. The second half of Exodus and then Leviticus and the first part of Numbers feels more like conversations with an accountant, lawyer, or architect than it does with the divine. I believe that when you see anything as remotely complicated as the instructions for building the mishkan, you know ipso facto that you have a human elaboration. It might have started with some kind of divine inspiration, but I can imagine the divine saying build it with silver; I can’t imagine the divine saying how much silver to use.
This is important because what might be divine surely carries more weight than what is clearly human. Further, presenting what is clearly human as if it were divine is a recipe skepticism and disenchantment. Certainly that has been my experience.
What’s your sense about how the divine communicates? Does the very elaborateness of our text or of other religious expression give rise to any skepticism in you?
The divine as both lawgiver and architect demands obedience, far more than God-wrestling. Here’s a typical response in our parsha. “And when Moses saw that they had performed all the tasks—as YHVH had commanded, so they had done—Moses blessed them.” (39:43). We obviously have a tremendous tradition of interpretation, because our texts, all texts, are ambiguous over time. But these priestly texts of the back half of Exodus (and Leviticus and the start of Numbers), are all about obedience and following directions precisely.
Think back to Jacob’s wrestling the angel at the ford of the Jabbok river. Jacob overcomes the angel who pleads that he must leave. Jacob says not unless you bless me, and the angel blesses him not with architectural plans or pages of law, but with the name Israel, God-Wrestler (Genesis 32:27-29). Great, probably thinks Jacob, my name is God wrestler. Now what? What does it mean that I struggled with other people and I was able? Rather than faithful execution of a spelled out plan, Jacob has to figure it out (and there’s no indication that he does)
Jacob’s task seems to me to be of a radically different sort than doing exactly what is laid out to be done. Jacob can’t just retreat to not thinking or acting for himself, because that would be the opposite of God wrestling. Joseph, when he is given the name of the creator of all life, has to figure out how to implement that. And even when he comes up with the plan to preserve grain against the coming drought, the divine doesn’t tell him how to build the graneries or what percentage of the future harvests to charge for the crown. He has to develop his delivery system. But if you are a priest, when it comes to sacrifice, you are being told pretty much exactly how many of what kinds of animals to slaughter, what to do with the blood, who gets to eat the sacrificed animal and your job is to color inside the lines.
Just as with my skepticism about these highly detailed prescriptions being divine, so I am reluctant to accept that simple obedience can be divine. I’m inclined to believe that the demand for strict obedience is a human elaboration or maybe a humanly motivated power grab. It’s also certainly true that ambiguous messages leave we humans lots and lots and lots of room to go astray.
Let me be a little bit clearer. Humans are designed to wander in the period between childhood and adulthood. That may take the form of literal wandering or rebellion against established ways of doing things or trying on different identities—we can wander in a myriad of ways. Some people wander, get nowhere and retreat to the safe and predictable, and it is as if they never wandered. Not all wandering turns out to be productive, as we look at it in retrospect. But some of it, even wandering that seems aimless at the time turns out to be productive.
Can being obedient and following exactly the path laid out for you be a sacred act? What wandering in your life has felt productive and what has not?
The protagonists who have had visions of the divine, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, (sorry, all males) have been strikingly emptyhanded. Abraham lived a semi nomadic life, Jacob encountered the divine twice, once when fleeing his home after fleecing (pun intended) Esau of his birthright and having nothing, and once when he was alone at the ford of the river Jabbok. Joseph does his dream interpretations when he is a prisoner and Moses in his encounter at the burning bush does not even have sandals after the divine tells him to take them off. Moses also encounters the divine during a vision fast where he didn’t even have food or water. The same is true for Elijah, Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov if we look at the vision fast material I presented a few weeks ago in Ki Tissa. They all are empty handed.
The people are no longer empty handed once they have the mishkan. They have the mishkan itself, and all the sacrifices therein require significant material contributions. No one ever went up to the Temple in Jerusalem and proclaimed, as Jacob did, that YHVH was in this place and I did not know. (Genesis 28:16). In the mishkan, as in the temple, not only is YHVH in the house, it is his house. This fact is trumpeted by the Levites who sing Psalms as the people enter the Temple. We have here a different kind of relationship with the divine.
When we are full, it is surely hard to hear the divine. This isn’t to justify poverty which is the imposition of emptiness on others so some people can have hands that are too full. We live in a world that is noisy and busy, in which most of us strive to have our hands be too full. This is to observe that the spirituality of the mishkan, the temple, the sacrifices is a very, very different kind of spirituality than the solo encounter with the divine with nothing much more than the clothes on your back and a water flask.
There is a difference between the empty handed spirituality of the wilderness and the settled spirituality of the village, at least it seems to me. It’s really tough to live on the mountain top or the cave; most of us return to our village and then what?
How do you think of the difference between empty handed spirituality and the spirituality of a settled people whose hands are full enough? How do you integrate these two manifestations of spirituality? To what extent does the mishkan feel like an integration that works?
The breastplate of the high priest and the priests make a return in this parsha. (39:2-31) This happens in the context of the clothing combining the different colored yarns and fine linens, along with gold and stones. The breastplate has twelve stones, 4 rows of 3, representing the 12 tribes. Each tribe has a specific stone. Do the specific stones convey some kind of particular meaning or energy connected to the tribe with which they are associated? Our text is silent on this.
Silent because it is obvious? Silent because it is a hidden teaching? Silent because the stones are arbitrary? No way to know. I doubt the stones are arbitrary because that would be out of character for this text and for traditional people in general. For the high priest, this breastplate is a connection to the divine.
Sociologists and anthropologists would undoubtedly argue that the breastplate served to signify the unity of twelve tribes in the person of the high priest. The tribes were, they would rightfully argue, originally separate with some measure of different customs and beliefs, and the need to reinforce the unity of the tribes is obvious in our history where all twelve tribes only pulled in the same direction of a brief time under Saul, David and Solomon. And yet, what do we learn from this that can make a difference in our lives?
Perhaps we might say that there is a path to the divine that goes through the unification of the twelve tribes or metaphorically a beloved community that honors diversity? If so, what kind of diversity might lead to the divine is also an open question.
How would you start to interpret the breastplate of the high priest and the twelve stones? Do you have any particular connection to the energy of the stones that are in the breastplate? Any thoughts about the diversity manifested in the breastplate?
QUESTIONS
What’s your sense about how the divine communicates? Does the very elaborateness of our text or of other religious expression give rise to any skepticism in you?
Can being obedient and following exactly the path laid out for you be a sacred act? What wandering in your life has felt productive and what has not?
How do you think of the difference between empty handed spirituality and the spirituality of a settled people whose hands are full enough? How do you integrate these two manifestations of spirituality? To what extent does the mishkan feel like an integration that works?
How would you start to interpret the breastplate of the high priest and the twelve stones? Do you have any particular connection to the energy of the stones that are in the breastplate? Any thoughts about the diversity manifested in the breastplate?
