A Time to Repair
On Bringing God Back to Earth
These are the accounts of the Tabernacle (Exodus 38:1). It is written elsewhere: Now these are the names of the children of Israel (Gen. 46:8). Observe how very precious the Tabernacle was to the Holy One, blessed be God, that God left the upper sphere to dwell in the Tabernacle. Rabbi Simeon held that He dwelt in the lower sphere (at first), as is said: And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden (ibid. 3:8), but that after Adam sinned He ascended from earth to heaven. When Cain arose and killed his brother, God ascended from the first firmament to the second; when the generation of Enoch angered God, God ascended from the second to the third; when the generation of the flood perverted God’s teaching, God ascended from the third to the fourth; when the generation of the separation (i.e., the Tower of Babel) became arrogant, God went from the fourth to the fifth sphere; when the Sodomites behaved immorally, God went from the fifth to the sixth; and when Amraphel and his companions appeared, God ascended from the sixth to the seventh. However, after Abraham came and performed good deeds, the Divine Presence descended from the seventh to the sixth firmament; after Isaac God went from the sixth to the fifth; after Jacob from the fifth to the fourth; after Levi, his son, from the fourth to the third; after Kohath the son of Levi, from the third to the second; after Amram from the second to the first; and on the day that Moses erected the Tabernacle: The glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle (Exod. 40:34). Scripture states: For the upright shall dwell in the land (Prov. 2:21). This should be read: “They caused the Shekhinah to dwell in the land.” (Midrash Tanchuma Pekudei 6:2)
Exodus is bookended by passages of descent. It opens with the descent of the Israelite family into Egypt and it ends with the descent of God into the Tabernacle (Mishkan). Just as the people go into Exile, so, too, does God. Just as the people leave their homeland, so, too, does God. God is the ultimate stranger in a strange land.
The Midrash quoted above notes the parallel between the human and divine journeys. The word “these” appears twice—first, at the beginning of Exodus, to introduce the list of names of the people, and second, at the end of the book (in this week’s parasha, Vayakhel-Pekudei) to introduce the details of Tabernacle.
But the parallel is strange. Is God’s descent to earth really a kind of slavery? Is the Tabernacle a sort of snare? Is human religion—is Judaism—in a sense, a form of bondage, forcing the divine mystery to diminish itself, to squeeze itself into the confines of human language, history, prejudice? Imagine thinking that every time we speak about God we are condemning God to the gulag of human understanding?
From both a mystical and skeptical point of view, such an understanding of religion is reasonable. Consider Maimonides’ injunction that we can’t define God in the positive—we can only say what God is not. Taken to its logical extreme, any God-talk would be strictly off-limits; even to posit God’s existence would be a diminishment of the divine. Thus, as Franz Rosenzweig notes, mystics and atheists agree that God is, fundamentally, Nothing—that is, no thing. All religion would be an insult to the divine presence. Religion aims at God but ends up being a form of anthropocentrism. Is this not the critique of those who identify as “spiritual, but not religious?”
But the Temple, of which the Mishkan is a prototype, is called a home (bayit). How can a Sanctuary be both a place of exile and a home? How can a home be both a constriction akin to slavery and dislocation and a site of meaning, transcendence, and freedom?
This, as I understand it, is the question that the Midrash addresses. It gives two different answers, with two different implications. The first, as I’ve elucidated, is that the Sanctuary is a kind of concession to human need; it’s an act of divine generosity to let us worship and discuss God, even though, strictly speaking, all religion is idolatrous. The difference between the golden calf, for which the Israelites were punished, and the golden cherubs which they were commanded to place outside the ark, is slight. This is the Platonic view that sees all earthly examples as pale “imitations” of the eternal forms. The Mishkan can only be a simulacrum; just as this life is an illusion. If there is holiness to be found amongst mortals it is only in the recognition of how much is missing.
But the second possibility the Midrash gives is that the Mishkan culminates a process that was already in the making, since the time of Creation. It completes a process of healing and repair. It is not a sudden rupture. God’s original intent was to dwell amongst mortals. Disappointed by our (moral) failures, God was driven away. Each time we erred, God decided it would be safer to remain far away in the upper reaches of heaven that have nothing to do with us.
The story, though fantastic, is familiar. God is traumatized, as it were, by human betrayal. The highest heavens are not God’s home by choice, but by necessity—God’s getaway. Transcendence is a defense mechanism against the vulnerability of relationship. What Maimonides and theologians of the via negativa celebrate as God’s hiddenness, God’s mystery, is better understood as God’s tragic aloofness, God’s learned disassociation. God, as it were, would prefer not to be distant. And perhaps, if we psychologize the negative theologians, they, too, want nothing more than for God to drop the mystery charade and show a face. But they’ve been burned. Better to insist that we can know nothing of God and keep the risks of religious passion under wraps.
For the Midrash, the Mishkan completes a process initiated by Abraham of luring God to return to earth, to risk vulnerability a second time, to trust humanity even after trust has been breached. Note that it is humanity, in general, that disappoints, but a particular Abrahamic lineage that repairs. Particularism emerges as a plan B after universalism fails. The Mishkan is a limitation; it is a constriction. But it’s a constriction that offers God a place to focus, to move forward, to heal. The Mishkan is not a prison, but a refuge.
The leitmotif of a God who takes 7 steps back from the world only to take 7 steps forward, again, surfaces in a Talmudic tale (Bava Kamma 117a) about the Babylonian sage Rav Kahane. Banned from teaching, Rav Kahane must restrain himself from raising objections in the House of Study (he’s supposed to keep a low profile, as he’s hiding from the Roman authorities). But each time that Rav Kahane remains silent during the day’s lecture, he is demoted a row, so that by the end of the day, he has been moved all the way to the back of the lecture hall. Unable to bear the shame, Rav Kahane declares his 7 demotions a kind of atonement expiating him of his banishment sentence, and precedes to raise objections to the lecturer, each time, getting promoted until he is at the front of the classroom again. The magical and bizarre scene depicts a culture in which to be silent is to be humiliated and to speak is to assert one’s power.
Transposing the Talmudic tale onto the Midrash, we can imagine God’s original banishment from the world, even if self-imposed, as a terrible burden. Have you ever been in a lecture and wanted to shout something out at the lecturer—perhaps an objection, but perhaps simply an addition or clarification? This is how God feels, as it were, in the presence of the righteous—from Abraham to Moses.
The Mishkan restores God to God’s place, as it were, in the front of the classroom. Imagine God’s frustration—condemned to being a student in a class in which God knows better than the teacher. But there must be some importance in the trial, a way in which God learns more by observing humanity from the student-side than standing at the front and lecturing. When God tried that, it didn’t work. Teaching can only occur if there is learning, and God’s lectures don’t seem to land the way God intends. And so it is not enough to know. The hardest thing is to transmit. By dwelling in the Mishkan, God learns something from us—not how to be right, but how to teach, how to inspire, how to connect.
The second reading of the Mishkan transforms the idiosyncrasies of Judaism, and of human culture and religion, from obstacles to divine perfection into vessels for divine connection.
One problem with idolatry—and one reason the golden calf is different from the golden cherubim—is that there is no relationship in it. God is treated as an object. Idolatry is the inverse of a God who is so transcendent as to be personally insignificant. When we treat religion and theology as technologies aimed at capturing God, when we fetishize holiness as an attraction of spiritual tourism, we miss the point. But when we castigate religion and theology as being small-minded, when we criticize the aspiration to holiness as naive or primitive, we commit the same error in reverse. The Midrash teaches that relationship with God is a difficult project. If God has good reasons to hide, so do we.
But the lesson of God’s hiding, demonstrated by the Mishkan, is not that we should accept it, or that we should reason about it. Rather, we must (re-)build. We must find ways to coax God out of hiding. Will it always work? No. Will it, at times, feel foolish? Yes. Should we be uncritical? No. The Torah tells us it is possible to make a home in our lives for the divine. It doesn’t say it will feel good, easy, or comfortable. Instead, as the Midrash observes, it draws a parallel between the construction of the Sanctuary and Egyptian slavery. Home, too, can feel like exile.
Why does it matter so much that the God of the Torah wants relationship with us? That God, in Heschel’s words, is “in search of Man”? To me, the lesson is that Godliness is to be found most acutely and meaningfully in relationship itself. When it comes to spiritual life, intersubjectivity, not objectivity is the goal. The Torah aims at encounter, not knowledge. Another lesson is that if our relationship with God is dynamic, then spiritual life is about process, habit, practice, not any achievable goal, be it scientific or moral.
The Mishkan is a beginning—a re-beginning—not an end.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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