Terumah
Exodus 25:1-27:19
I Kings 5:26-6:13
Today’s reading, from beginning to end, describes the Mishkan. This portable tabernacle was located physically at the center of the Hebrew encampment in the desert, and religiously at the focus of our ancestors’ ritual practice.
Linen curtains, suspended from metal posts, marked off the oblong courtyard of the tabernacle, in which the sacrificial altar stood. The Mishkan itself, an ornate oblong structure, had walls of gold-coated wooden planks. Its inner cover of brocade curtains rested beneath an outer cover woven of goat hair; above that, the roofing consisted of other animal skins. Brocade curtains divided the building from the courtyard, and the inner room from the outer.
The outer room had distinctive furnishings: a lamp stand, a table and small incense-burning altar. The inner room had a remarkable item, a box containing the tablets of the law, covered with a gold lid on which stood two golden cherubs, facing each other, with outstretched wings.
Why the Mishkan had to contain these furnishings, and only these furnishings, remains a puzzling question. The whole institution apparently represents, or symbolizes, or effects, the nexus between humans and God: In this edifice, wherever the Kohanim set it up, the Kohen, representing the entire people, meets with the omnipresent One.
The word Mishkan shares a root with words meaning neighbor, dwelling, presence. The rabbis loved to use a word from this root for the Divine presence, Shekhinah. Clearly, then, the Mishkan has the general purpose of reminding us to encounter “God as our neighbor.” But the text does not make clear how each specific item fits into that symbolism.
Narrowing our focus to the furnishings of the outer room, we can see that this seems like a rough analog of the dining room of an ordinary house. It has a table set with bread, a lamp stand and an incense burner, items which appear in typical ancient dining rooms. When guests appear, a proper host would certainly show them into the dining room, and offer them the archetypal food, bread. At the close of the meal, hosts who could afford it would burn some incense, to end the meal with a lovely aroma.
The outer room, though, as a dining room, appears in an uncanny, strange guise. The table, for example, features an array of trays, to hold the 12 loaves of the Bread of Presence in two vertical rows of six each. Each of the breads shares a distinctive shape, as described in the Mishnah (Menahot 11:5). Each one looked like a sort of oversize shoebox (about 18 inches long and 15 inches wide, with sides about 6 inches tall), with the end panels removed, and no cover (Menahot 96b). Each Shabbat, a team of Kohanim arranged the new breads, and removed the old ones. The Kohanim then divided and ate the old breads, which, by some miracle, had not become stale.
I wonder if, when braided bread came into fashion, Jews did not especially choose to have two loaves of challah for Shabbat, each made of six braided strands, to parallel the 12 loaves of the bread of the presence. And thus, as the outer room of the Mishkan resembles an uncanny dining room, the dining room of the ordinary Jew now serves as a replica of the Mishkan. Thus the impulse, then, to combine the social act of welcoming guests with the religious act of encountering the Divine.
As Rabbi Yehudah said in the name of Rav, “Greater is one who welcomes visitors than one who welcomes the Divine presence” (Shabbat 127a).
“And you shall place on the table the bread of the presence before me always” (Exodus 25:30). According to one Mishnaic source, in order to keep the bread present “always,” one Kohen slid the new bread on the table as the other slid the old bread off the table (Menahot 11:7). Thus, not even for an instant did the table lack its breads.
In this room, where the Kohen meets the Divine presence, we have the dining room permanently set for company: But who here plays the role of host, and who the guest?