This week’s Torah portion, Terumah, begins: “God spoke to Moses, saying: Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved. And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair; tanned ram skins, tachash skins, and acacia wood…”
The Talmud is perplexed by the term “tachash skins” since there is not an animal we know of in the Torah called the “tachash”. The Talmud comments (Shabbat 28): “Rav Yosef said: If the reason that we translate the word tacḥash as sasgona (in Aramaic, is because it is multicolored and the word can be read as two words, “sas-gona”), which means that it rejoices (sas) in many colors (gevanim)…Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said that Rabbi Meir used to say: The tacḥash that existed in the days of Moses was a unicorn…and this tacḥash happened to come to Moses for the moment while the Tabernacle was being built, and he made the covering for the Tabernacle from it. And from then on, the tacḥash was hidden and is no longer found.”
The tachash could have been interpreted as a more common animal or type of skin. In fact, there are other Midrashic places in which the word just means colored leather. So why assume it is a ‘rainbow colored unicorn’? It seems like, all of a sudden, the Talmud has gone Harry Potter on us.
The Talmud continues on and says that there was one other place in history where the unicorn made an appearance: “The ox that Adam, the first man, sacrificed as a thanksgiving-offering for his life being spared was a unicorn.” But why a unicorn? And why is it associated only with the Temple and the Garden of Eden?
The notion of the unicorn exists in many cultures and is often viewed as quasi-spiritual. It is of this world but also mysterious. When I was a student at Yeshiva University, I periodically visited the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. One of the main exhibitions there is the Unicorn Tapestries. Nothing is known of their early history or provenance or what exactly they were meant to allegorize, but we know they were woven in the Netherlands in about 1495 and are a series of seven tapestries which depict the hunt of a unicorn.
In the series of tapestries, the hunters find the unicorn and proceed to attack it. The unicorn rebels and kills a dog. It is then tamed or seduced by a maiden, only to be stabbed and seemingly killed by the hunters. Strangely, in the last tapestry it sits in a fenced garden, healthy and at ease, in captivity. The overall process seems to be innocence, human violence, and resurrection.
One possibility of course is that the unicorn in these tapestries represents the Christian story of crucifixion and resurrection, but it could also, I think, represent the process of teshuvah, return which consists of peace, then descent into sin, ultimately followed by redemption. Like the unicorn and its resurrection, teshuvah too is illogical, for how can one undo the wrongs which have been done? This I think is why the Talmud associates the unicorn with both the Mishkan and Eden, for, it is a symbol of teshuvah, almost miraculous change. Eden and the Mishcan are a place of forgiveness and redemption.
But why the metaphor of the unicorn and not, for instance, the metamorphosis of the butterfly?
The Talmud refers to the unicorn, literally, as the “ox with one horn on its forehead.” The ox is the means of production in the ancient world. Sheepherding, in contrast, is calm and meditative and not that risky a financial endeavor, but with that lack of risk also comes limited financial gain. In contrast, agriculture was a more risky venture: if there was no rain, the farmer went broke; but if it did rain, he could make a killing. It was agriculture which enabled ancient civilizations to grow and thrive. The horn represents power. The horns create danger and stand between the person and full exploitation of the ox, the means of production. The ox with one horn reminds us, at the moment of our success, that power is not ours to freely harness and exploit, there is one horn, one source of true spiritual power—God.
This power is manifested on Moshe’s face when he comes down the mountain from God’s presence, his face shown with Divine light. Curiously though, the way the Torah phrases it is, “ki koran ohr panav,” “the skin of his face was horned”. We assume the word horn here refers to a beam of light, but the plain meaning of the text is that he had a real horn, which of course is why Michelangelo depicted Moses as such. The word used for horn here is in the singular, Moses thus would have looked a bit like the rare spiritual animal, the unicorn, which represents the world changing physical power of the ox, but is a more spiritual version with only one horn.
We actually have a mitzvah of dressing up as a unicorn, like Moses coming down the mountain with one horn of skin protruding. We call this Tefillin. The tefillin must be placed on the spot of where an animal horn would be, if it is too low or high it is not kosher.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov says it this way in his book, Likuteh Moharan 38:6. “This is the explanation of the Talmud’s statement, “The ox that the First Man sacrificed had a single horn on its forehead.” For by means of the sacrifice, by repenting, Adam merited the aspect of tefillin —which corresponds to the keirun (the shining/horning) of the skin of the face.
What is written in this single horn of cow skin we wear? The unity of God. So perhaps this is what the Rabbis are trying to teach us in the Medrash of the unicorn skin. That the function of the Tabernacle is not just to provide a home for God, but to remember the unicorn whose skin we see when looking at the Tabernacle. And by it to remember that though we live in a physical world that often seems so ungodly, we as Jews are here to unify. To find the one God in all we do. To bring our Jewish values, which we cultivate through prayer, torah and mitzvot to the larger world. Not to keep our religious life safely tucked away in shul but to wear it on our foreheads and bring it into the world.