by Avi Feldblum

The earliest weekly Dvar Torah series on the internet began in February 1985, when Avi Feldblum — posting from AT&T's UUCP network via a relay site because his own system could not post directly — committed to putting a Torah commentary online every week. This is the third in that series, on the double parsha Vayak’hel-Pekudei. The question Feldblum takes up is deceptively simple: why does Moshe, before announcing the great project of building the Mishkan (Tabernacle), first interrupt to repeat the law of Shabbat? The answer he develops — drawing on Abravanel and the Midrash — is a profound theology of three kinds of holiness: holiness in time, holiness in persons, and holiness in space or things. The Shabbat is first; it came before Israel, before the Mishkan, before all constructed sanctuaries. The Mishkan, holy as it is, came third.

Feldblum was posting from {allegra,ihnp4}!pruxa!ayf, relayed by Ephrayim Naiman at AT&T Information Systems Laboratories in Lincroft, NJ. By this point he had already recruited five other contributors to the weekly project. The series would run for years, becoming one of the formative institutions of Jewish life on the early internet.

This week’s parsha, Vayak’hel-Pekudei, begins with Moshe assembling all of Bnei Yisrael, to command them about the work of the Mishkan — Tabernacle. However, instead of starting right with the instructions for the Mishkan, Moshe first says:

These are the words which the Lord has commanded you to do. Six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord.

Only in verse 4 does Moshe return to the main theme of these two parsheot, the building of the Mishkan. Before beginning the work on the Mishkan, Moshe reminds Bnei Yisrael to observe the Shabbos. This is the second time the Shabbos is connected to the building of the Mishkan. The first was in last week’s parsha, Ki Tissa (31:12–17). In both cases the commentaries explain that the building of the Mishkan does not override the observance of the Shabbos. To understand why this had to be emphasized, we need to look at the concepts of Shabbos and Mishkan.

The Mishkan and all that went with it symbolized man’s communion with God, and God’s resting of His Presence on the nation of Israel. Shabbos symbolizes that God created the world and that His presence exists among us (the connection between Shabbos and leaving Egypt). The Abravanel explains that man always considers action to be more perfect than inaction. What we have here then, is a choice between a sacred and sublime performance of building the Mishkan as a witness of faith versus the cessation from work of observing the Shabbos as a witness of faith. Which is the more powerful? It would be easy to argue that the positive active choice should be performed. Thus Moshe had to repeat twice, that the building of the Mishkan does not override the commandment of observing the Shabbos.

While we now understand why we would have thought that it does override the Shabbos, why now are we wrong? Why is the Shabbos the winner over the Mishkan? The answer lies in the perspective of Kadosh — holy. Man tends to attach importance to things. This thing is bigger than that thing, this thing is more important than that thing, leading to: this thing is holy, sacred. This is the path of all the early idol-worshipping religions — these things, these idols, are holy. If, however, we look in the Torah for the first mention of the word Kadosh — holy — we find it at the end of the creation story:

And God blessed the seventh day and he made it holy. (Gen. 2:3)

God has just established the heaven and earth. He does not then create a holy place. He defines a holiness in time — the Shabbos, the seventh day. Much later in history, a second holiness is established, a holiness in man, as it is written:

Thou shalt be unto me a holy people.

The third holiness, that of space or thing, comes with the Mishkan. According to the Midrash, it was at the insistence of the Bnei Yisrael, following the sin of the Golden Calf, for a place to worship Hashem with objects designated for that purpose, that God commands the building of the Mishkan. We can see this difference in the way the term Kadosh — holy — is applied to each. For Shabbos, we read above (Gen 2:3) that God himself made it holy, but by the Mishkan we read:

And it came to pass that on the day when Moshe finished erecting the Tabernacle, that he anointed it and made it holy. (Num. 7:2)

Thus we understand why Shabbos, the holiness proclaimed by God from the beginning of creation, takes precedence over the building of the Mishkan, a holiness brought about only through the frailty of man.

Colophon

Written by Avi Feldblum (uucp: {allegra,ihnp4}!pruxa!ayf). Posted on his behalf by Ephrayim J. Naiman ([email protected], AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Lincroft NJ), 13 March 1985. Message-ID: [email protected].

The third weekly Dvar Torah in the series Feldblum began on net.religion.jewish in February 1985 — the earliest sustained weekly Torah commentary series on the internet. The project had by this point grown to six contributors. Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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