03/20/2025 Torah Commentary

This week’s parashah is called Va’Yakhel (meaning:  “He, Moses, assembled them”). You can find this  week’s parashah in the Book of Exodus 35:1- 35:20. This is not an easy parashah to read. In fact,  many people would prefer to skip it. However, justa because a text  is difficult,  does not mean that it lacks  value. We might even argue that struggling with a  text has its own value. To struggle is a Jewish value and Israel’s very name refers to Jacob’s struggle  with the “ish”, a Hebrew word meaning an angel, or  another man, or even himself. To struggle makes us  stronger and forces us to realize that life is a  challenge.  

Va’Yakhel unites two very important concepts: the  relationship between sacred time and sacred space.  Kadosh is the Hebrew word for holiness, for the  sacred. We derive the word from the verbal root <K D-Sh> meaning to “separate from, to differentiate, to  set apart”. We sanctify time by putting our daily  tasks and worries aside; we sanctify space by  creating locations that are different from the world’s  commercialism and often lack of caring.  

In this week’s parashah we first read about Moses’  injunction that the Children of Israel are to observe  the Sabbath; and that no physical labor is to be done. Almost immediately the text switches  directions and speaks to the reader about the  building of the Mishcan (Tabernacle) or sanctuary  that would accompany the Children of Israel through  their journey through both space and time. The text  provides us with a great many details concerning its  proper construction, and how we are to use the  sacred space to sanctify time.  

We read about the unity of space and time in the  works of the great twentieth century Philosopher  Abraham Joshua Heschel. Just as in the case of  another Jewish philosopher, Albert Einstein, Heschel  noted that sacred space and time are not two  separate ideals but two sides of the same coin. Understood in this manner, the Mishcan and  Shabbat are not opposites but complementary  notions. It is in this parashah that we learn that in life  we are all “builders” and our tools are both the concrete, the Mishcan, and the ephemeral, the  Sabbath. 

The careful reader will also note that this parashah  dedicates most of its “time-space” on the tangible,  physical world. However, it is in the other world, the  intangible world, that we build our most permanent  of sanctuaries, the intangible sanctuary of time, the  Sabbath. Perhaps it is ironic that the physical  tabernacle, the Mishcan, no longer exists, while the  intangible one, the Sabbath, has endured throughout  the ages. 

This week’s Torah portion teaches us the importance  of creating both sacred spaces and times. To “build  the Sabbath” is to transform the secular into the  sacred. It is in the Sabbath’s intangibility that we  find the depths of faith and the holiness of the human heart. Perhaps that is why the concept of Sabbath in this crazy world in which we live has  protected us more that we have protected it. What  do you think?