Agency is Holy

History > Nature

And [Moses] set up the enclosure around the Tabernacle and the altar, and put up the screen for the gate of the enclosure. When Moses had finished the work, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. (Exodus 40:33-34)

Before the Mishkan was erected the whole desert was suitable for speaking with God, and after the Mishkan was erected the desert was no longer suitable.” (Bamidbar Rabba 1:3).

It’s so obvious a point that we might easily miss it: the Tabernacle is both a holy site and a constructed one. In contemporary culture, especially on college campuses, there’s a humdrum dogma, that “everything is a social construct.” Attached to this dogma is also an implicit creed that, “because everything is a social construct, nothing is sacred.” But the Mishkan—as both a site that is holy and a site that is constructed—is a reproach against this view, just as it is against the opposing naturalist view (whether described in Rousseau’s Emile or in neo-Darwinian social thought) that we must oppose all social constraints in favor of some naive, natural truth.

When you view a holy thing anatomically or mechanically it can be off-putting. A human being treated merely as a body is the ultimate expression of dehumanization. Dismemberment raises a philosophical problem: is the self just the result of adding cell to cell, organ to organ? Computational thinking assumes that human consciousness is simply code, that it’s only a matter of time before AI can do everything we can do, and then some. To know how the holy is made can feel like an assault on the holy, which we want to remain magical, beyond comprehension.

The description of the construction of the Tabernacle may read like a mere instruction manual, but there’s also something uncanny about looking at a heap of materials that all of a sudden is transformed into a house of God. Sacralization and desacralization are two sides of the same coin, for both point to the idea that holiness is an impermanent state, one that can come and go, that is in, but not of the material world. As Moses completes the finishing touches on the Tabernacle, its moves from being just a construction zone to becoming a place of reverence; it is a passage into life, like a child being born. Moses setting up the enclosure to the Temple is sort of like a cutting of the umbilical cord, the setting of a new boundary.

Once the Temple is created, the desert is transformed from a place of potential holiness to a place of mundaness. The energy of the horizon is now directed around the Temple. This is true in the architectural sense that buildings change the way we interface with space and landscape, but it’s also true in a spiritual sense; once you love someone or something, a sense of abstract possibility shrinks and concentrates to the beloved. To commit to the Temple also requires a turning away from the pseudo- optionality of the pantheist who says “Why should I worship here when I can worship here, and here, and here, also?” The final act of Tabernacle creation involves setting a screen on the courtyard, marking the desert a place where God does not speak, as opposed to one where God used to speak. The Tabernacle is a decision, as all institutions are, to commit.

The people are wandering in the desert, but they are no longer defined by their wandering. Now, they are defined by their commitment to the Mishkan. As newly liberated slaves, this is no small feat. The ability and desire to commit requires a self-confidence and “definite optimism” not possessed by people who don’t know what tomorrow brings. True, the people had already committed to keeping the Torah, but the Mishkan is something of their own making, an expression of agency. As Moses, closes the screen, we learn that nature can be holy, but so can works of human agency. When we are given the choice, Holiness rests in the Tabernacle more than it does in the sublime expanse of the desert. Part of being a holy nation involves ascribing holiness to the world, rather than just escaping it. To be God-like is to sanctify that which we are given by transforming it in some way, rather than simply accepting it. Applying this idea metaphorically, tradition is not something we pass through, like a desert, but something we build, unbuild, and rebuild, like a Mishkan.

Not all human constructions are holy, but some are. Nature is sublime, and, when one has no other recourse, is the most primitive and enduring pathway to a metaphysical sense that there is something more to our existence. But the task of the Israelites is not to reject artifice in favor of nature; it’s to challenge this static divide by cultivating a sense of agency in historical time. The God of Genesis creates the natural world, but the God of Exodus—and the God of the Covenant—is the God who partners with us to create history. The God of Genesis is a God who might be studied by physicists and biologists. But the God who of Exodus is, as it were, the God of the social sciences. The secular prejudice of academic social science takes God as merely a construct. But the theological response to this reductionism is that it is our very capacity to construct meaning that marks as divine emulators and collaborators.

When Moses erects the final screen on the Tabernacle courtyard he waves good-bye to the naive hope that we might remove ourselves from “civilization and its discontents.” We live in a post-Mishkan world now. He also waves good-bye to the idea that spirituality is “optimized” by being a tourist accumulating experiences. Rather, God is to be found in depth and constancy. Far from being boring, the commitment to a regular practice, enables one to confront the inherent dynamism and unpredictability of life with wisdom and grace. The Mishkan isn’t everything, it’s our everything. Just as historical time is not natural time, but it’s our time. While building can be a form of hubris or misdirection, as it was in the Tower of Babel, or in the case of the golden calf, it can also be holy.

We can’t code holiness, but we can prepare the conditions for our world to be suffused with it. We can and must do our part to ensure that the world appears as more than the some of its parts.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

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