From The Exodus by James Tissot. Jewish Museum.
Once a week for the last several months, Mosaic has taken to publishing brief excerpts of Leon R. Kass’s new book on Exodus, Founding God’s Nation. Curious about one of the foundational texts of the Jewish tradition? Read along with us. To read earlier excerpts, go here.
This week is our last installment. On the coming Sabbath, Jewish communities all over the world read Exodus 35:1-40:38, which constitute the two final portions of the book, known as Vayakhel and P’kudey. Following on the heels of the sin of the golden calf, these chapters recapitulate instructions for crafting the Tabernacle and its various accoutrements, and they catalogue donations collected for this purpose.
In Leon Kass’s reading, these mundane-sounding design instructions carry a larger and more majestic significance. The Israelite construction of the Tabernacle culminates a process that was first introduced to readers of the Hebrew Bible back in Genesis.
After the story of the Creation, the remaining tales of Genesis (and the narrative first section of Exodus) reveal in greater detail the many aspects of man’s moral ambiguity and God’s early efforts to address it, all in the service of making man “good”—complete, whole, holy. The Garden of Eden story shows the tragic meaning of lost innocence yielding to human choice—non-obedience—exercised by looking to nature (the tree) for wisdom about how to live. The paradigmatic story of the first man born of woman, Cain, shows that brotherhood uninstructed means rivalry to the point of fratricide—over a matter of sacrifices. After Adam dies and the earth degenerates into violent chaos, the Lord washes out most of the Creation and starts over with Noah. He preserves life against the watery chaos through the rational artifice of the ark, and for the first time, He establishes a covenant with the earth and prescribes a foundational Law for humankind, the Noahide code, in defense of life. But after a metaphorical patricide in Noah’s house and the hyper-rational—godless and amoral—project of Babel (a technological refuge against nature’s cruelty and indifference, but not a true home for mankind), the Lord ceases to work with the whole human race. He tries more modestly with one follower, Abraham, to get a foothold on earth for His Way. Forming a covenant with Abraham and teaching him something about justice, He succeeds, not without difficulty, in keeping something alive within the patriarchal families for three generations, avoiding fratricide, patricide, and incest. His people come down into Egypt, the watery fertile place, where they are fruitful and multiply and swarm like fish. But it is only in Exodus that His full plan takes shape on a national plane, a plan that we have been following from the beginning of this book.
In its essentials, the plan for people formation comprises separation and deliverance, law, and worship in the Tabernacle. Human nature in community is to be completed—made good—through culture: through story and song, through law and custom, and through ritual. The first attaches people to something larger than themselves through shared tales of their past history and experience, their suffering and persistence. The second guides their day-to-day lives toward personal fulfillment and the common good, according to acknowledged ethical and moral principles. The third gives expression and direction to the deepest longings of their souls: to be in touch with what is highest and best.
At the center of this plan is the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. But before they can receive the law, the people must come to appreciate its necessity. They first have to be shown what is wrong with nature worship. Through the contest with Pharaoh and through the plagues, the Lord demonstrates how inhospitable the waters below and the heavens above are to human need and aspiration. He shows how reliance on those powers, and on the human agents that seek to manipulate them, brings the despotic rule of man playing god—which the Israelites experience firsthand—and the enslavement and eventual destruction of the rest. He shows His people that He is mightier than nature, and mightier too than the mightiest king and the strongest civilization that have taken their bearings from nature and from altering nature for human benefit.
The second stage, anarchic life in the dry wilderness, prepares the people to discover the need for Law. They learn to moderate their appetites through the rules about manna; they get their first lesson in courage in the battle against Amalek; the visit from Jethro introduces some measures for the institution of justice and points toward the need for divinely given law. The people learn that the Lord is not only powerful but also solicitous of their daily welfare. These experiences prepare the people to see the necessity of Law. After the deliverance from Egypt and their early wilderness experience, they readily accept a covenant with the Lord. The Lord and His commandments will provide what neither nature nor Pharaoh can give them: the principles and guidelines for self-rule and human flourishing. Serving God, unlike serving Pharaoh, is the very opposite of servility.
When the Law comes, it comes first as divine speech backed by lightning and thunder: a logos with teeth. The beginning of the Law mainly addresses the mutual wrongdoings of human beings that result in oppressive slavery, bodily harm, damage to property, and loss of reputation. Not content, however, with punishing crime and rectifying tort, the law moves gradually into moral and spiritual domains. It encourages compassion for the stranger and humaneness toward the widow, the orphan, and the poor; it teaches truthfulness and fairness in judging; it institutes Sabbath observance, giving the more-than-natural, out-of-this-world seventh day a central place in the moral-political order of human things; it institutes sacred festivals for the Lord and a sabbatical year for the Land.
So far so good. The Lord has disclosed Himself to be mightier than either nature or Pharaonic Egypt. He has shown Himself to be solicitous of His people and a teacher of law and morals. But something is missing, an answer to the longings of human beings to be in touch with what is highest and best, longings expressed in the text beginning with the sacrifices of Cain and Noah and continuing to the episode of the golden calf. Once they have experienced His power and beneficence, the people seek communion with the Lord.
In the past, they did so ambivalently. They stood apart in fear and trembling during the Decalogue, but once Moses disappeared on the mountain, they feared the Lord’s absence. They feared His power and shuddered at His judgment, but they wanted His protection and His guidance. When God seemed to have abandoned them, they made in His place an idol.
Yet after the golden calf, something wondrous happens. The people learn, through the worst sort of disobedience, that the Lord is not only powerful and judgmental but also merciful and full of compassion. In the presence of repentance and return—thanks to “the man Moses,” whose mother looked on him as an infant and “saw that he was good”—He is willing to forgive. Reassured by this discovery, the people are more than prepared to allow Him into their everyday lives. The Tabernacle—not a microcosm of nature but a divinely instructed, humanly built alternative to nature—is the perfect vehicle to satisfy their longings for the Divine Presence near at hand, and they go to creating it eagerly, with the ruaḥ elohim, and earn Moses’s blessing.
In the Creation, God gives the orders and carries them out Himself. In building the Tabernacle, He gives the orders, but the people carry them out. As a cooperative project between Creature and Creator, the Tabernacle stands as a completion of Creation—not as a summary or microcosm but as the culmination. God’s Creation produced a hospitable world in which human beings can live. God’s Law sets forth a Way under which they can live well. God’s Tabernacle, built for Him by human beings, offers rituals by which they can aspire to be holy, as the Lord their God is holy.
The Tabernacle is the capstone of God’s cultural project to remedy man’s incompleteness and restlessness. Human beings can be complete and at home only when they acknowledge their dependence on their Creator, and even more when they come intimately to know their Creator and He them. The Creation itself will be complete only when the Creator is known and intimately Present in the life of His godlike creature. It was, we recall, for their mutual benefit that Y-H-V-H took up with Israel in the first place: that they may come to know Him, and that He may be part of their lives forever. “I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them. I am the Lord their God” (29:46; emphasis added).
Excerpted and adapted from Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus by Leon R. Kass. Published by Yale University Press in January 2021. Reproduced by permission.