In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read the instructions God gives to Moshe for the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. What is the function of the Mishkan? According to Nachmanides, it is a moveable Sinai. God was revealed to us at Mount Sinai and we can preserve that intimacy in the Mishkan, a place of meeting between the Divine and the human.
But if you examine the process, the feeling of the building of the Mishkan as it’s described, it is very different from that of Sinai. The experience of revelation at Sinai was passive on our part; we stood there and God was revealed to us. In fact, the rabbis highlight this passivity in the Talmud (Shabbat 88a): “And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the low part of the mount” (Exodus 19:17). Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: “the Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, overturned the mountain above the Jews like a barrel and said to them: ‘If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial place.’”
In contrast to the passivity of Sinai, the building of the Mishkan in our parsha begins with activity on the part of the Jewish people: “Speak to the Children of Israel and they shall take Terumah for me from every person…” The Jewish people are told to give their gold and silver for the Tabernacle, but the language used is not ‘give’ but ‘take,’ emphasizing the more active element of taking rather than the passive act of giving. There is force here, a proactive initiative. Giving requires a receiver, but taking is forceful and can be unilateral. This all seems like the opposite of Sinai.
According to the Midrash, there is another vision of the Mishkan. Not as a moveable Mount Sinai as Nachmanides said, but as an atonement for the sin of the golden calf. What was the etiology of the sin of the golden calf? Passivity. “And the people saw that Moses was delayed and the people gathered against Aaron and said, ‘Get up and make a God for us who can lead us, for this man Moses who took us out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’”
The golden calf was not an attempt to make an idol for worship, but a way of finding a leader. The people felt like abandoned children, lost, with no power to move forward on their own. “Help us,” they say to Aaron, take us forward to where we are supposed to go, care for us. The Jewish people, at this moment, are petrified and don’t know how to move forward on their own; they are stymied. This passivity, this sense of victimhood and lack of empowerment and proactivity, which result in a golden calf, required a proactive Mishkan for atonement.
The Mishkan stands in contrast to Sinai and to the golden calf precisely because of its proactivity. God does not just descend on the Mishkan like at Sinai—we have to bring him, we have to become builders, we must provide the stuff. As the Torah says, “And the Jewish people gave so much that Moses had to tell them to stop, that they have given enough” (Exodus 36:5).
A spiritual life requires proactivity. We must make the effort to give, to participate and to cultivate our personal relationship with God, our community and the Jewish people.