Earlier this week, I spoke with someone I had known in another lifetime, back when I lived in South Korea. We have not met for two decades, yet across years and continents, we have remained in touch, and as we talked, the winter of 1998 resurfaced, aligning itself in my memory with the opening scene of the weekly Torah portion.

Parashat Vayakhel captures a rare moment of collective clarity. Moses calls for an assembly, and the Israelites respond with such overwhelming generosity that they must be told to stop giving — a scene that to many modern readers appears almost suspiciously idealised, a pious exaggeration.

But it occurred to me, suddenly and unmistakably, that I had seen it once before my very eyes, not in the burning heat of the desert but in the chilling cold of Seoul. In the winter of 1998, I watched citizens queue through bank lobbies and out onto the street, and at collection points, to donate gold to help their country repay an IMF bailout loan in the wake of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis.

Vayakhel is the biblical grammar of collective survival, the moment when a shaken people gathers after disaster and gives more than anyone expects. It means “and he assembled” or “and he gathered,” a deceptively simple verb that carries the weight of repair after rupture.

After the golden calf, after the chaos of idolatry and shattered tablets, Moses did not preach or punish but called the people together, assembling the entire congregation of the children of Israel, and the fractious mob that had melted earrings into a false god now stood as one, listening, and from that gathering came the order to build something holy instead.

Korea, in 1998, echoed it. After the currency’s collapse, the chaebols’ bankruptcies, and the IMF’s humiliating bailout terms, President Kim Dae-jung called the nation to a different kind of assembly: ordinary citizens — office workers, students, grandmothers, young couples — gathered to surrender private gold for public survival.

Both assemblies answered the same question: could a humiliated people still act as one? The golden calf had scattered them into sin, and the IMF crisis threatened to scatter them into poverty and shame, yet Vayakhel, the act of gathering, proved they could. In the wilderness, it birthed the Mishkan; in Seoul, it melted 227 tons of gold into national redemption, and the verb names the first step, not giving yet but showing up together.

I remember how tightly Korean society seemed to draw in on itself that winter, a reflex as old as any tribe in crisis. Groups shaped by collective trauma develop strong mechanisms of boundary maintenance that protect yet also exclude. Crisis intensifies both tendencies, sharpening the boundaries of belonging and making the ingroup more cohesive and the outsider more visible, a reflex found in every human community, ancient or modern.

As an outsider, I felt the contraction more sharply than the cohesion, even as I watched the extraordinary generosity unfolding around me, and yet within that contraction, even from the margins, it was unmistakable: people queued to give.

The government persuaded the South Korean public to participate in the gold‑collecting campaign to overcome the nation’s debt to the IMF. It was everywhere, on television, in newspapers, in conversations on the street, and the people answered the call. The campaign worked because the crisis was accepted as collective, becoming a form of ritualised behaviour, a symbolic exchange through which Koreans reasserted social cohesion.

I remember the tension, the collective embarrassment of national shame, the brittle resolve, the sudden capacity for generosity, the quiet inside those bank lobbies, the soft clink of gold on the scale, the way people held their small pouches with both hands, and how they waited in line to give something away, with no one forcing them and no one promising a spectacle.

A queue is a fragile and temporary social organism. Some time ago, I tried to name two kinds of them: those that belong to terror and those that belong to desire. The first are the lines that should have haunted Auschwitz forever, lines toward the ramp, the pit, the gas; the second are the lines that have replaced them, the restless shuffling of visitors who move as if towards a spectacle, the choreography of leisure overlaid on the architecture of loss.

This memory reminded me of another kind of queue, one in which people quite literally line themselves into a community, a line they join not because they are forced and not because they are entertained but because they have decided to give something away. It is the queue of offering, and no one drives people there at gunpoint and no one promises them a show; they stand in it because they choose to surrender something they could have kept.

Vayakhel is, in a sense, a story about such a queue. The Torah does not describe people lining up in front of a booth, yet the rhythm is unmistakable, its pulse one of ceaseless motion, everyone bringing whatever they can.

Men and women, all whose hearts moved them, all who would make an elevation offering of gold to GOD, came bringing brooches, earrings, rings, and pendants—gold objects of all kinds. And everyone who possessed blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned ram skins, and dolphin skins, brought them; everyone who would make gifts of silver or copper brought them as gifts for GOD; and everyone who possessed acacia wood for any work of the service brought that. And all the skilled women spun with their own hands, and brought what they had spun, in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen. And all the women who excelled in that skill spun the goats’ hair. And the chieftains brought lapis lazuli and other stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece; and spices and oil for lighting, for the anointing oil, and for the aromatic incense.

Men and women, all whose hearts moved them, all who would make an elevation offering of gold to GOD, came bringing brooches, earrings, rings, and pendants—gold objects of all kinds.

And everyone who possessed blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned ram skins, and dolphin skins, brought them;

everyone who would make gifts of silver or copper brought them as gifts for GOD; and everyone who possessed acacia wood for any work of the service brought that.

And all the skilled women spun with their own hands, and brought what they had spun, in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen.

And all the women who excelled in that skill spun the goats’ hair.

And the chieftains brought lapis lazuli and other stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece;

and spices and oil for lighting, for the anointing oil, and for the aromatic incense.

Gifts are brought every morning, the line of givers grows longer, and the materials pile up, until at some point the Mishkan simply has enough.

Decades ago, on the other side of Asia, Koreans formed that line in the world outside the text. In 1998, they queued inside and outside banks and at collection points with wedding rings, tiny gold figurines from a child’s first birthday, heirlooms, family hoards of gold, sometimes Olympic medals or even dental gold, to help pull their country out of an economic abyss, and they shuffled forward as people have shuffled in so many other queues on this continent, but this time to place something on the counter, not to have something taken from them.

Between Auschwitz and Vayakhel, between the gold teeth ripped from the mouths of the dead and the gold tooth voluntarily handed over in a Seoul bank, lies a moral distance that cannot be measured in carats, for the metal is the same and the bodily intimacy is the same; what changes is whose decision it is to let go.

From that gathering flowed something even stranger: donations so voluntary and so abundant that they overwhelmed. “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit was moved came, bringing to GOD an offering,” the Torah repeats, until Moses proclaimed through the camp that no man or woman should bring any more.

In Korea, those queues at the banks were not the product of coercion; no state agent compelled attendance, yet citizens arrived steadily of their own accord, and by June 1998 more than 3.5 million people had contributed, yielding 227 tons of gold, over two billion dollars’ worth, until broadcasters, almost incredulous, announced on air that the nation had reached its limit. Only when the IMF debt began to recede in measurable terms did the long lines finally disperse.

Twice, gold moved from private hands to public purpose, not under duress but desire, and the wilderness camp and Seoul’s streets proved the same improbable truth: when a people assembles after crisis, “all whose hearts moved them,” can flood the scales; communal crises sometimes produce generosity rather than fragmentation.

Both Vayakhel and the Korean gold‑collecting campaign have become part of their communities’ cultural memory, stories told not only about what happened but about who they believe themselves to be.

Covenantal belonging and national belonging are not identical, but they are structurally similar, and from abundance flows the harder question: why did they give, and what moves a people when the stakes are this high?

In the wilderness, it began with atonement. The same gold that had been fashioned into a calf was now returned, freely and in abundance, for the construction of God’s dwelling, not from fear alone but from a deeper impulse to repair the breach and restore the Divine Presence to their midst after betrayal. Yet the moment was never reducible to atonement; it was an act of belonging to the community, to the covenant, to the God who had not abandoned them despite the turmoil, and each contribution, from the chieftain’s precious stone to the widow’s yarn, marked them as a people still capable of holiness together.

Korea’s queues carried the same grammar, spoken in a secular tongue. There was shame, the currency’s collapse, the chaebol wreckage, the IMF’s supervision hanging over the country like a foreign overseer, yet the rings placed on bank counters and the dental gold pried loose by grandmothers answered a parallel call: they were one nation, and they would not dissolve into individual ruin, and where faith might once have surged, patriotism rose instead, and national survival took the place of divine indwelling.

The parallels between the two moments are structural rather than cultural. Crisis draws a group inward, narrowing the circle of “us” and sharpening the sense of who stands beyond it, while ritualised giving moves in the opposite direction, taking that contracted community and turning its anxiety outward into a shared act through which generosity becomes a visible expression of cohesion.

In the end, both stories show that belonging is not an abstract feeling but a practice, enacted in gold, in queues, and in the willingness to give something up for the sake of the whole. Gold for God or gold for country, the wilderness or Seoul’s snowy streets, when disaster fractures a group, giving declares who “we” still are, and beneath the different languages of covenant and nationhood, the pulse is identical: the resource a broken people draws on to prove it can still act together.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)