This week’s Torah reading of T’tsaveh (Exodus 27:20–30:10) is a continuation of last week’s, T’rumah (25:1–27:19), which deals with the construction of the Tabernacle and the sacred objects placed inside it—all but one, that is. That last item is the golden altar, which, in contrast to its larger bronze counterpart, is not used for the bodies of slaughtered animals but only for incense, and is placed closer to the innermost sanctum. Only at the end of T’tsaveh, after a lengthy description of priestly vestments, does Scripture give the specifications for the golden altar.

Devora Steinmetz seeks to explain why the description of the golden altar is seemingly placed out of order, drawing on the altar’s special role in the Yom Kippur service:

That God promises to dwell among the people challenges the community to live a life of purity, but inevitably people, as merely human, will sin and become defiled. And that defilement makes it impossible for God to be present in their midst; it undermines the very possibility of a sacred, pure dwelling place for God.

Thus, the Yom Kippur ritual is necessary to purge that dwelling place from the contamination effected by the impurities and sins of the people. The incense altar serves a key function in that purgation ritual, and this function is highlighted, alongside the incense-offering function, in the Exodus passage.

Exodus 25–29 is focused on the tabernacle as consecrated during the days of the inauguration: holy and pure. Thus, there is no place for the purgation function of the incense altar. But after this passage concludes with the anticipation that God will dwell in this sacred sanctuary, Moses is instructed to create an instrument whose mechanism is to restore the Tabernacle’s purity and sanctity when it is inevitably defiled.

The incense altar, then, serves as a sort of reset button. It is built into the system, but it stands apart from it.

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.