More significant than the physical structure of the Tabernacle was its metaphysical structure. The very idea that one can build a home for G-d seems absurd. It was all too easy to understand the concept of sacred space in a polytheistic worldview. The gods were half-human. They had places where they could be encountered. Monotheism tore up this idea at its roots, nowhere more eloquently than in Psalm 139:
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.
Hence the question asked by Israel’s wisest king, Solomon: “But will G-d really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (I Kings 8:27).
The same question is posed in the name of G-d by one of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah:
Heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house you will build for Me? Where will My resting place be? (Isaiah 66:1)
The very concept of making a home in finite space for an infinite presence seems a contradiction in terms.
The answer, still astonishing in its profundity, is contained at the beginning of this week’s sedrah: “They shall make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell in them [b’tocham].”
The Jewish mystics pointed out the linguistic strangeness of this sentence. It should have said, “I will dwell in it,” not “I will dwell in them.” The answer is that the Divine presence lives not in a building but in its builders, not in a physical place but in the human heart. The sanctuary was not a place in which the objective existence of G-d was somehow more concentrated than elsewhere. Rather, it was a place whose holiness had the effect of opening the hearts of those who stood there to the One worshipped there. G-d exists everywhere, but not everywhere do we feel the presence of G-d in the same way. The essence of “the holy” is that it is a place where we set aside all human “devices and desires” and enter a domain wholly set aside to G-d.
If the concept of the mishkan, the Tabernacle, is that G-d lives in the human heart whenever it opens itself unreservedly to heaven, then its physical location is irrelevant. Thus the way was open, seven centuries later, to the synagogue: the supreme statement of the idea that if G-d is everywhere, He can be reached anywhere. I find it moving that the frail structure described in this week’s sedrah became the inspiration of an institution that, more than any other, kept the Jewish people alive through almost 2,000 years of dispersion – the longest of all journeys through the wilderness.