Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei: On Shabbat and the Tabernacle

When my sister was little, she saw a house being built and said: “God created everything in the world except that house.”

She was noticing something important. We talk about God’s creation of the world, but we humans are also little creators, mimicking God’s creation through our manipulation of His raw materials, making houses out of trees, shoes out of leather, plastic out of petroleum, blogs out of Torah.

The work of the mishkan (tabernacle) involved just such fine human manipulation of raw materials, the cutting and shaping of wood, the melding of metals and the weaving of fabrics. In many ways, the description of this human work parallels the story of God’s creation of the world, as classical and contemporary commentators have pointed out. In both accounts the word asah, “to make,” plays an important role; in both there is a similar statement regarding the completion of the work; and in both there is the creation of lights and curtain-firmaments to separate spaces. God created the world for humans, and it is as if humans are then commanded to build a little mini-world for God to dwell in.

What a tremendous honor is here given to human talents and creativity! The Torah spends only a scant portion of a parsha on God’s creation of the world, but over four parshiyyot on the human construction of the mishkan!

And yet, there is a difference between divine creativity and human creativity, and the Torah, even in its celebration of human potential, also puts on some brakes. In last week’s parsha, after God finishes giving Moshe the instructions concerning the Tabernacle, He says to him: Akh et Shabtotai tishmoru. “But you should still keep My Sabbaths.” And here, again, in parashat Vayakhel, just before Moshe begins to tell the people about the mishkan, he reminds them first about Shabbat. Even in the midst of the holiest of human creative enterprises, the building of the mishkan, the Israelites must stop their work to observe Shabbat and remember who the Creator of the world is.

The work which is prohibited on Shabbat is in fact defined by the work done in the construction of the mishkan. The same word is used for both, melakhah. Whatever type of melakhah (39 in all) was required for the erection of the mishkan and its appurtenances, that is the work which is prohibited on the Sabbath.

Melakhah involves human manipulation of the environment created by God. This week’s version of the Sabbath commandment ends with a prohibition against burning fire. Why? Yeshayahu Leibowitz suggests that fire represents the beginning of human civilization; through fire, people learned to manipulate nature’s materials to create the secondary products they desired. By not burning fire on Shabbat, we pause to acknowledge the limits to our own creative powers, to acknowledge that the world exists without our intervention, and was created without our help.

But Shabbat does not teach only about itself. The commandment concerning Shabbat includes both the prohibition against work on the seventh day as well as a positive commandment to work on the six days preceding it. Rest on Shabbat, and during the week, work in a way that remembers that rest, that remembers its lesson of God’s sovereignty. What kind of work is that? Work like the construction of the mishkan, work that is done leshem shamayim, for the sake of heaven, work that takes the best of human talent and energy and plows them into the creation of a world that, like the mishkan, is a place in which God can dwell. In a way, then, Shabbat is not just a counterpoint to the work of the mishkan but also a partner to it; Shabbat and the mishkan deliver opposing messages, but also integrated, overlapping ones. When you rest and when you work, remember your Creator.