The Torah describes two acts of creation: God’s creation of the universe, and the Israelites’ creation of the Mikdash, or Mishkan, the Sanctuary that travelled with them in the desert, the prototype of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The connection between them is not incidental. As a number of commentators have noted, the Torah invokes a series of verbal parallels between them. The effect is unmistakable. The latter mirrors the former. As God made the universe, so He instructed the Israelites to make the Mishkan. It is their first great constructive and collaborative act after crossing the Red Sea, leaving the domain of Egypt and entering their new domain as the people of God. Just as the universe began with an act of creation, so Jewish history (the history of a redeemed people) begins with an act of creation.

The key words – make, see, complete, bless, sanctify, work, behold – are the same in both narratives. The effect is to suggest that making the Mishkan was, for the Israelites, what creating the universe was for God.

Yet the disparity is extraordinary. The creation of the universe takes a mere 34 verses (Bereishit ch. 1, together with the first three verses of Bereishit ch. 2). The making of the Mishkan takes hundreds of verses (Terumah, Tetzaveh, part of Ki Tissa, Vayakhel, and Pekudei) – considerably more than ten times as long. Why? The universe is vast. The Sanctuary was small, a modest construction of poles and drapes that could be dismantled and carried from place to place as the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness. Given that the length of any passage in the Torah is a guide to the significance it attaches to an episode or law, why devote so much time and space to the Tabernacle? The answer is profound. The Torah is not man’s book of God. It is God’s book of humankind. It is not difficult for an infinite, omnipotent Creator to make a home for humanity. What is difficult is for human beings, in their finitude and vulnerability, to make a home for God. Yet that is the purpose, not only of the Mishkan in particular but of the Torah as a whole.

A Midrash puts it graphically:

“It came to pass on the day that Moses finished erecting the Tabernacle” [Num. 7:1] – Rabbi [Judah HaNasi] said, “Wherever it says ‘and it came to pass’, it refers to something new.” Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said, “Wherever it says ‘and it came to pass’, it refers to something that existed in the past, and was then interrupted, and then returned to its original situation.” This is the meaning of the words “I have come into My garden, My........

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