Parashat Vayakhel–Pekudei

We need to pay attention to Torah with all of our senses

Growing up in Chicago, in the American Reform tradition, the Torah procession was not part of our Shabbat services. It wasn’t until my twenties, when I began waking up for a 7 a.m. morning minyan, that I first experienced the joy of reaching out to touch the Torah as it was carried past—the quiet sense of connection and rootedness that comes from that simple moment of reaching out and touching.

One of my favourite moments as a student rabbi is arriving at a quiet synagogue on a Shabbat morning and checking the scroll. It is the moment after all the preparation: sermon writing, train journeys, preparing, practicing, and practicing some more. Then I open the scroll. I look down, and the words are there—beautiful, familiar, ancient, holy.

This week’s double parashah, Vayakhel–Pekudei, reminds us that we are commanded to slow down for the Sabbath and that it is with all of our senses that we encounter the divine. What has been bothering me for days is the concern that reading these two parashot together leads us to rush through the building of the Mishkan, so that we may not be paying close enough attention to what we learn—not just from reading, but from experiencing the sensory explosion that is taking place in these parashot.

I want to write about women making beautiful things with their hands and bringing donations—not only of the colourful threads, but also of gold and silver.

Ve-khol ishah chokhmat lev be-yadeha tavu, va-yavi’u matveh et ha-tekelet ve-et ha-argaman et tolaʿat ha-shani ve-et ha-shesh (Exodus 35:25).

And every woman, wise of mind, with their hands they spun and brought their spinning—the blue-violet, the purple, the worm scarlet, and the byssus.

But I am distracted as I feel compelled to explain why this week’s parashah, Vayakhel–Pekudei, is not just one portion of the Torah but two.

Why are there double parashot? Briefly, with help from the Jewish Encyclopaedia: the Sephardic tradition that emerged from Babylonia divided the Torah into fifty-four weekly readings to be completed over the course of a year. By contrast, the Palestinian tradition divided the Torah into 153 parts, read over a three-year cycle. Although the triennial cycle persisted for a long time, by the medieval period the annual cycle of weekly Torah readings had become the prevailing custom in most Jewish communities.

As Maimonides explains in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Tefillah u’Birkat Kohanim 13:2–3, the calendar of readings was also shaped by liturgical considerations. Ezra instituted the practice of reading the “curses” in the Book of Leviticus before Shavuot and those in the Book of Deuteronomy before Rosh Hashanah. It also became customary to read Parashat Bemidbar before Shavuot, Parashat Va’etchanan after Tisha B’Av, Parashat Nitzavim before Rosh Hashanah, and Parashat Tzav before Passover in an ordinary year.

For this reason, there are Sabbaths on which two portions are read together so that the Torah can be completed within a single year and the readings occur at their appropriate points in the calendar.

But what is bothering me is that with this double portion we may not be paying enough attention to the remarkably inclusive language we find in Vayakhel–Pekudei. That we may be rushing through the building of the Mishkan, and in doing so we may miss moments of beauty and detail—moments that might help us make sense of our world.

According to The Torah:  A Women’s Commentary ‘This verse (Exodus 35:25) and the next one confirm the vital role of women in textile production in the ancient world, a fact confirmed by archaeological evidence’. It is not just here, a few verses earlier in verse 22 the women are explicitly included. The Torah: A Women’s Commentary explains the importance of this:

The plural Hebrew word for “women” (nashim) appears rarely in Exodus, only six times (…) More often, women are subsumed under collective “masculine” terminology that is employed inclusively (…) Nevertheless, female terms sometimes are essential, as is the case here because of the gender-specific ownership of the costly items to be donated. That is, women owned valuables and could make decisions, independently of their husbands or fathers, about using them as donations (see also at 25:2). The English translation “men and women” obscures the Hebrew (ha-anashim al ha-nashim), which seems to say that the men came “in addition to” the women, perhaps indicating primacy of women as donors.

In rushing through the lists of donations that the men and women make we could miss a key lesson that The Mishkan (and each and every mishkan) is both t’shuvah and tikkun for the Golden Calf.

the same Israelites who once sought to contain power and divinity within the idol of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) now create the Mishkan (Exodus 35–40), which, while made of the same materials and by some of the very same processes, emphatically does not attempt to contain God. Having been given an explicit opportunity to fall again into the trap of deifying something material, having been handed the opportunity to make a cage for God, the people instead create the Mishkan and regard it only as a space, not as a stand-in or a container for God (Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture)

In the lists of donations and the details therein we see how repentance, repair and forgiveness for the Golden Calf is found in collective action, all people together.  Vayakhel–Pekudei calls us to find new ways to pay attention to the collective action needed to repair all that has been broken. This is the Torah to which we bring all our senses and attention: the Torah that we see, the Torah that we hear, and the Torah that we touch. It is the Torah we feel when we slow down and listen, where we can rest and find comfort in difficult times. It is also a Torah that can be found in the tabernacles we build together.

Jennifer Verson, LBC rabbinical student