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, dolphin skins, and acacia wood (atzei shitim)…(Exodus 25:3-5)
The righteous bloom like a date-palm;
they thrive like a cedar in Lebanon (Psalms 92:13)The voice of the LORD breaks cedars;
the LORD shatters the cedars of Lebanon. (Psalm 29:5)Immediately, Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, entered the study hall and taught: A person should always be soft like a reed and he should not be stiff like a cedar, And therefore the reed merited that a quill is taken from it to write with it a Torah scroll, phylacteries, and mezuzot. (Taanit 20b)
Imagine a large group of ex-slaves, traveling through the desert with only as much as they can carry with them, and receiving a divine commandment to build a portable Temple. Under normal circumstances, we’d imagine them scrambling to scrounge together some stuff for a make-shift structure. But no, the people are well prepared. They already have gold, silver, copper, dyed wool, yarn, fine linen, ram hides, and acacia wood.
While the precious metals, dyes, linen, and hides have day to day utility, and can serve to adorn the body, the wood stands out. Who schleps heavy wood through the desert? Of course, it’s plausible that they found this wood in the desert—the text doesn’t specify where they got it from—but Rashi cites a Midrash suggesting that they already had the wood; they’d been stewarding it for over 200 years. Their ancestors knew it would be needed one day. Their wood was an heirloom, prepared under conditions of prosperity, maintained under conditions of oppression, and sustained under conditions of liberation.
But from where did they get this [wood] in the wilderness? Rabbi Tanchuma explained it thus: Our father Jacob foresaw by the gift of the Holy Spirit that Israel would once build a Tabernacle in the wilderness: he therefore brought cedars to Egypt and planted them there, and bade his children take these with them when they would leave Egypt. (Rashi; Midrash Tanchuma, Terumah 9)
The Lubavitcher Rebbe emphasizes that Rabbi Tanchuma is drawn to this teaching because of his own name, meaning comfort. The cedar wood was given to comfort the Israelites through hard times.
Torah uses the word shitim, acacia (a tree that grows in the desert), while Midrash Rabbah uses the word arazim, cedars. How can we reconcile this apparent contradiction? One possibility is that both types were needed for the building project, with the cedar serving as structural and the acacia as more cosmetic. Alternatively, the Midrash uses cedar expansively to include acacia.
But what if this apparent contradiction contains a deliberately pointed message?
The cedar is Biblically significant:
The righteous bloom like a date-palm; they thrive like a cedar in Lebanon. (Psalms 92:13)
Cedars of Lebanon represent the epitome of rootedness, strength, and permanence. Some live for thousands of years, standing as majestic sentinels of stability and endurance. The Cedars of Lebanon suggest an association with a particular land, too. Their association with Lebanon is a metonym for their association with rootedness, as well as with a kind of fearsomeness, a menacing neighbor. Yet the Psalms also tell us:
The voice of the LORD breaks cedars; the LORD shatters the cedars of Lebanon. (Psalm 29:5)
This tension reveals a deeper truth: what seems most permanent can be uprooted by divine will. The might of the enemy is brittle. The mighty cedar, symbol of unwavering strength, is not as immovable as we might think. The Talmud takes this further:
Immediately, Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, entered the study hall and taught: A person should always be soft like a reed and he should not be stiff like a cedar. And therefore the reed merited that a quill is taken from it to write with it a Torah scroll, phylacteries, and mezuzot. (Taanit 20b)
The cedar, despite its impressive stature, lacks the reed’s humble flexibility—and it’s precisely this flexibility that allows the reed to become an instrument of Torah. The rooted cedar is robust, but the replanted cedar is anti-fragile. Mighty civilizations have come and gone; the Jewish people has endured not by being more mighty, but by being more adaptive. We found a way to replant ourselves in exile.
When Jacob plants cedars in Egypt—a foreign land—he’s already engaging in an act that transforms the cedar’s traditional symbolism. These trees, typically representing rootedness in their native soil, are deliberately transplanted. This foreshadows Israel’s own journey: rooted, then uprooted, carrying their sacred traditions through Diaspora.
We are the cedar, not of Lebanon, but of wandering, the displaced cedar in the desert. Israel is a transplant. God’s home—the Mishkan—must be formed with materials that are carried across epochs and topographies, repurposed through each climate. Tradition is not the unmoved cedar, but the cedar that travels, the tree that even goes by multiple names and multiple identities as it crosses boundaries.
The strong tree must adapt and become uprooted to be integrated into a sacred dwelling place. Similarly, the Jewish people must learn not simply to be sturdy like the rooted cedar, but adaptive like the desert acacia.
This transformation from rooted tree to portable sanctuary component serves as a metaphor for Jewish spiritual resilience. The might of the cedar is transformed from its metric height to its temporal longevity and ecstacy.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish life became a portable religion of prayer, study, and practice. The wooden beams of the Mishkan find their spiritual successor in the wooden rollers of the Torah scroll—the atzei chaim (trees of life)—upon which the parchment is mounted. The Torah scroll became the new portable sanctuary, carried through exile as the focal point of Jewish communal life.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:
The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine than neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that apostasy cannot that easily obliterate: The Day of Atonement. According to the ancient rabbis, it is not the observance of the Day of Atonement, but the Day itself, “the essence of the Day,” which, with man’s repentance, atones for the sins of man.
Yes, the Mishkan is a palace in space, but it is one whose fundamental structure, in Rashi’s commentary, is an allusion to time, the time of anticipating and waiting, the time of hoping. The people who built the Mishkan enjoyed the culmination of centuries. Now, with no operative, material Temple to speak of, we can look to the cedar wood as a metaphor for all that our ancestors have bestowed upon us, and which we must haul through our own wilderness.
Rashi goes out of his way to emphasize that the Israelites carried wood with them for hundreds of years. The source of their most needed element—the element that defines a building—was one that required literal tradition. Jacob planted trees in Egypt with seeds from Israel (or perhaps even replanted uprooted saplings), which were then cut down and turned into boards and beams people had to carry through the sea.
This paradoxical image—of roots that travel, of permanence made portable—captures something essential about Jewish survival. The contradiction between cedar and acacia isn’t a textual problem to be solved but a truth to be embraced. We are simultaneously the firmly rooted cedar and the adaptive desert acacia. Our tradition is rooted in ancient soil and responsive to new landscapes. And those landscapes shape it, in turn.
Just as the cedars Jacob planted were transformed into the portable dwelling place for divine presence in the wilderness, our teachings were transformed into portable practices that could sustain Jewish life in any location.
Thus the righteous will thrive not simply like the Lebanese Cedar that remains rooted in native soil, but like the Lebanese cedar that is able to thrive in displacement, be it in Israel, Egypt, and the desert; the cedar that is capable of becoming an acacia, the cedar that is capable of founding a divine home.
For hundreds of years, Jacob’s descendants wondered, “What is this wood for?” Perhaps they had even forgotten, so crazy might the answer have seemed. Yet they carried it nonetheless.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins