Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

This is Ari Levisohn. Here’s an awkward situation I had recently. I was at a friend’s house on Shabbat, and I spilled some wine on my shirt. It was red wine. On my favorite white shirt. My friend’s cousin was visiting, and he was so worried! He was searching for the stain remover, trying to help me get the stain out. This was his first time visiting, and really his first time hearing anything about Shabbat, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to him, “No, no, it’s really nice of you but it’s fine. I’ll just leave it for later because it’s Shabbat.” What does Shabbat have to do with it, he asked. I know on Shabbat you’re not supposed to do any “work.” But I’m not saying to go scrub out the shirt on some rocks in the river! It’s just a little Tide-to-go!

So I was like: I’ve got this! I can explain why the stain remover is an issue. See, the Israelites had this mini-temple to God. It’s called a Tabernacle – a Mishkan. And to build it, they had to carve wood, and hammer gold, and make curtains, and to make curtains you have to bleach the cloth to make the curtains, and removing a stain is a KIND of bleaching, and see, that’s how we know what counts as “work” on Shabbat… It was a great explanation, full of technical details. But it was pretty clear that the more I talked, the crazier he thought I was. 

And I totally get why. Even I wasn’t satisfied! Because I wasn’t giving him any good reason why these laws should be meaningful or spiritually satisfying. We’re talking about the Sabbath! The holy day that commemorates how God rested after creating the universe. One of the most central, precious parts of Judaism. If Shabbat is going to have all these specific rules… shouldn’t those rules have some profound meaning for us? Shouldn’t they lead us straight to something that touches our souls, some deep knowledge of God?

This week’s episode shows us that deeper meaning. And we’re bringing you something special, a two-part format that we haven’t tried before. First, Rabbi Fohrman is going to answer the questions about why Shabbat laws are linked to the mishkan. He’s going to take us back to the creation of the world, and from there, we’ll go back before creation, to the moment when God made a plan to bring space and time into being. And in the end, we’ll see how it all ties together… how those very specific laws connect us not only to God’s plan for us, but also to our unique human destiny.

It’s an incredibly rich discussion and a favorite here at Aleph Beta. I really wanted to dig into these ideas more, so I called Beth Lesch, one of the scholars here, to reflect on them with me. So after we hear from Rabbi Fohrman on Shabbat and the mishkan, the exploration will continue as Beth and I share our thoughts. All right, here’s Rabbi Fohrman.

Rabbi David Fohrman: As most of us know, the Torah prohibits labor on the Sabbath. But what does “labor" mean? The Hebrew word for this is melacha, and according to the Mishnah and Gemara, there end up being 39 different categories of melacha which are all prohibited on the Sabbath. Where did those categories of labor come from?

When you open this week's parsha, the first thing you hear is a command that Moses gives to the Jews regarding the observance of the Sabbath: שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים תֵּעָשֶׂה מְלָאכָה – for six days you should do melacha, you should do labor, וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי – but on the seventh day, יִהְיֶה לָכֶם קֹדֶשׁ – it should be a holy day, a day of Sabbath to God (Exodus 35:2).

And then right after this, וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל כׇּל עֲדַת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר – Moses says to the entire people, קְחוּ מֵאִתְּכֶם תְּרוּמָה לַיקוָה כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ – a command for everyone to bring things, various different kinds of raw materials out of which the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, will be constructed (Exodus 35:5). And the Sages inferred from the juxtaposition of these two texts – the command to observe the Sabbath and the command to construct the Tabernacle – that the template for prohibited labor on the Sabbath comes from the way the Tabernacle was constructed. If you want to understand what it is that you're not allowed to do on the Sabbath, just look at what the people did when constructing the Mishkan. The people colored material with dyes, so coloring material with dyes is prohibited on the Sabbath. The people engaged in weaving when constructing the Mishkan, so weaving is prohibited on the Sabbath… and so on and so on until we get 39 different types of activities that are all prohibited on the Sabbath. 

And the question I want to ask you is, why? Why is it that the way the Tabernacle was constructed becomes the template for the kind of labor that's prohibited on the Sabbath? In other words, I understand the legal inference which the Talmud is making. But what are we meant to understand from it? Conceptually, these things seem to have nothing to do with each other. What does the Sabbath have to do with the Mishkan? Why should these things be connected?

I think when we think about this, we'll begin to see a very fascinating connection between the original Sabbath on which God rests and the Sabbath that God is now commanding mankind to undertake, just before commanding us to build the Mishkan.

The Original Sabbath

Let's think about the original Sabbath. How did that day come to be? God rested on the seventh day after creating the world in six days. We all know that. But let's ask: What was the significance of God creating the world on those six days? How did that act of creation change the status quo?

Now the answer to that question seems incredibly obvious, doesn't it? I mean, obviously the act of creation was the most dramatic change of the status quo that one could possibly imagine. Before, there was absolutely nothing, and after creation, there was everything! But if you think about it, that's only true from our point of view. It's not actually true from God's point of view.

Ask the question this way: From God's point of view, what was the significance of the act of creation? You can't say: Before creation, there was nothing. Yes, if you're man – living in a world of space and time with stars, planets, hydrogen, oxygen, black holes, all of that – before creation there was nothing, but not if you're God. If you're God, you don't live in that world. As a matter of fact, if you're God, before creation, there was everything. There was you. You were doing just fine, living in your own tremendous realm, whatever that is. And if you think about it deeply, from God's point of view, creation didn't make everything. If anything, creation was almost a kind of diminishment. It was like you carved out a space in your world for something that wasn't you. The Kabbalists called this idea tzimtzum, almost a contraction of God, so to speak, when God makes space for something else besides Him in existence. 

Why did God do that? God did it for the same reason that people have children. God did it out of love. As a matter of fact, the process of doing this was very much akin to the process of having a child. Think about it. Your whole body, all of your organs, every last one of them, it's all there to nourish your life, except for one part of the human body that isn't there for you, but for someone else. And that's the womb. The womb is there for creation. It's an environment that's perfectly calibrated to nourish the being that you want to create.

So why did God do this? Why did God contract Himself, as it were, to make room for something else? He did it because He had a plan – a plan that involved a kind of womb. He wanted to create a being, a child, a creature, another separate being possessed of free will with whom God could form a relationship, a being that God could love. But that being, it couldn't exist in God's world. It had to have a world of its own. It needed a whole new environment in order to exist, so God went about creating that environment in what we call six days.

A Perfectly Calibrated Environment

That environment required the creation of space and time itself. It involved the creation of sub-atomic particles, the simplest atoms, hydrogen. These hydrogen atoms would aggregate into clouds. The clouds would collapse through the force of their own gravity, and the friction would ignite their thermo-nuclear furnaces, and they would become stars. Supernovas would create carbon, zinc, gold, all the heavy elements. This environment would require perfectly calibrated laws of physics: a nuclear strong force in perfect ratio to a nuclear weak force, gravity, electromagnetism, Planck's Constant, laws of thermodynamics. All of these things would need to be held in perfect balance in order for the environment to work, and God did all of that out of love.

God Himself didn't need any of that. God doesn't need planets, stars, laws of physics, but God paid attention to those laws for one reason… because God knew that the being that He wanted to love required them in order to exist. And after creating that wondrous environment, the final thing God made on that sixth day was that child, that being itself that God would love.

וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹקים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ – and God created man in His image (Genesis 1:27). Strange. God created this being to be like God in some sort of way. What had God been doing this whole time? God had been creating this perfectly calibrated environment. Well, the being that He created had the power to create too. In one glorious instant, God had brought everything that the universe would be into existence and then spent six days molding it, shaping it to suit His will, dividing things, putting this over here and that over there, allowing things to develop, to unfold their potential. That process God called melacha, the process of deciding with mind what you want and then acting to make it so. Well, man engages in that process too. Man can adapt his environment to suit his desires. Big creator, little creator.

But not only can man adapt his own environment using this process we call melacha, man truly is God-like in that he can create an environment too. As a matter of fact, he can do – his destiny is to do – exactly what it is that God did.

An Apartment for God

Let me explain. Look at the center of the Torah, what everything revolves around, the last half of the Book of Exodus, the first half of the Book of Numbers, and the entire Book of Leviticus. What is it all about? It is about man creating a version of what God created. What did God do when God created the universe? First, there was everything, and then God said, "No, I'm going to create a little apartment in everything for the being that I love." And now, mankind does the same thing. His everything is the vast universe of space and time, and mankind says, “I'm going to carve out a little section of this for the One that I love. It's going to require special laws, laws that have nothing to do with me but that have to do with God, but I'm going to observe those laws because I love God and because I need to do that in order to create a place that works for God.”

So there's laws of purity and impurity. There's laws of kodesh and chol, of holy and profane, that have nothing to do with the human realm, they have to do with God's realm. But we observe those laws because we care about God and we want the environment to work for God, because we want God to inhabit that apartment. The same way that God observes the laws of physics to make our world work, we observe those Godly laws to make God's apartment work. And we call that apartment the Mishkan. And just as we create the Mishkan, God says “You know what? I have a secret to let you in on, little creator. It's called rest. You should observe the Sabbath just like I do.”

So, of course, where are the laws of Sabbath going to come from? What did God do when He rested? God rested from all the melacha that He did when He created that little apartment. So we're going to rest by desisting from all the melacha that we do to create God's apartment. It makes perfect sense.

As a matter of fact, who is it that builds the Mishkan? What's his name? His name is Betzalel. What a strange name. What if Betzalel were an acronym, what would it stand for? What is mankind – this one created in the image of God? How do you say “the image of God” in Hebrew? בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹקים (b’tzelem Elokim). Betzalel, the name, is just shorthand for בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹקים (b’tzelem Elokim). Betzalel is the one who realizes the vast potential of humanity to be like God. He represents all of us in attaining our collective potential. He is our agent, in a way, to realize our very humanity.

Neil Armstrong understood when he took his first steps on the moon that he wasn't just taking them as a man. It was one great leap for mankind. And Betzalel takes a great leap too, a great leap for all of us. He allows us all to attain our destiny as צֶלֶם אֱלֹקים (tzelem Elokim), being God-like, creating the apartment for the One that we love.

Ari: This is one of those episodes that makes your head want to go in a million places. There is so much to think about: creation, the Mishkan, parenting...  These ideas about parenting really got me thinking. Our rest on Shabbat is tied to the building of the Mishkan, where we emulated God's creation of the world. I wondered: Is there also a kind of Shabbat in parenting, which is the other way we emulate God's creation? And then, about a year ago, my colleague Beth Lesch and I got into a conversation about this piece. You see, Beth was pregnant at the time, and when Rabbi Fohrman compared God's tzimtzum to the nature of the womb, that really spoke to her. We got that conversation on tape, and I’m going to share it with you now, for two reasons.  Number one, it's just a really fascinating and inspiring conversation about what it means to create space for another being. And number two, because Beth answers that question that had been bugging me about the Shabbat of parenthood.  All right, here we are.

Ari: Hi, Beth.

Beth Lesch: Hi, Ari.

Ari: Thank you so much for joining me.

Beth: Any time.

Ari: One thing I found so beautiful was the comparison of God’s creation of the world to a mothers nurturing a baby in her womb. I think there’s a lot to learn from this metaphor in each direction, but the first thing I want to talk about is the idea of tzimtzum, the idea that God had to constrict Himself in order to make space for the finite universe to exist within God’s infiniteness. So I want to ask you, Beth, how does this idea of tzimtzum play out in childbirth?

Beth: When you make that decision to have a child, so, on the one hand, you are gaining something in your life. You are gaining something huge. But you’re making space in your life, and it's space that used to be taken up by other stuff. Sleeping late goes out the window, and last-minute vacations to foreign countries. There are parents who manage to do all of these things, but it’s not about whether you do take your kids hiking up Everest in a baby carrier or not. We only have so much space in our lives. You are being diminished, and you are making space for someone else.

Ari: Not just physical space, but also space in time and emotional space.

Beth: Yes, all of those things.

Ari: You don't just exist for yourself anymore, but you actually have to support someone else's existence.

Beth: That's right. The insight that this is happening even on the level of biology is totally breathtaking. Here I am, I've got all these organs, all of which serve me. Then you've got this thing called the womb. Most of the time, the womb is really small and it's not taking up any space and any resources. But when you're pregnant, it takes up all the space and all the resources. Like, I will tell you, Ari, every glass of chocolate milk that I'm drinking during the first trimester, it's going straight to the womb. That's how it feels, at least. It's rachamim (mercy) built into the infrastructure of our bodies.

Ari: We often translate rachamim as mercy, but the root of the word actually comes from rechem, which means womb. So what rachamim really seems to mean is the relationship that a mother has with the fetus she is carrying in her womb, a form of love which has its archetype in this relationship.

Beth: I think it's love and giving that's unearned, in the same way that when we use the word “mercy" it's like, “You know, Judge, this guy deserves to be punished, he doesn't deserve your leniency, and yet let's be lenient on him.”

Ari: It's the act of nurturing a fetus that couldn’t possibly have done anything to earn it yet, purely out of compassion and love.

So the Talmud says we are supposed to emulate God. And when it asks, what does that mean, that you should emulate God, it says: Just as God is chanun v'rachum, just as God finds favor and compassionate, loving mercy – however you want to translate it – "af atah chanun v'rachum," so too you should have compassion and love towards other people. And so the act of literally nurturing a baby in the rechem, in the womb, is the ultimate act of rachamim, and it’s the ultimate act of emulating God. You’re creating a progeny that’s going to live on indefinitely. You’re creating a world for them.

Beth: Yeah. It really does feel like you're creating the everything. How is it that I could have possibly thought that the everything that I had before this was anything?

One of the things Rabbi Fohrman points out here that I found really striking was this whole notion of: Okay, when you view creation, whose point of view are you considering? Are you looking at it from man's point of view, from the perspective of the one being born, or are you looking at it from God's point of view, are you looking at it from the perspective of the creator? 

Rabbi Fohrman says, from the perspective of the one being born, first there was nothing and then there was everything. There was a novel I read that started with the birth of the main character, and it was being told from the main character's point of view. So you, as the reader, didn't exactly know what was going on. It was sort of, like, darkness, and then all of a sudden, blinding light, and it's cold. It's cold, and I'm feeling wind blowing on my body, and blinding light, and oh my gosh, I feel my lungs opening up for the first time, and now there's air passing through my body in a way that it never has before. You realize that it's describing birth, and it really gets you in that mindset of, what's it like to be the baby going as if from nothing to something? 

From the perspective of the creator, it's totally different. The sentence “before creation, there was everything” – there's almost something haunting about it. I think about my life before the birth of a child and after the birth. You feel that way: before the creation, there was everything. Was I aware that my life was lacking? I had 24 hours of the day, I had rich interactions and experiences, I had a relationship with God, and I read books and I went to museums and I worked a job. I wasn't aware that there was this person that I didn't yet know and love. Then after a baby is born, it's like, how did I not know that this person was missing from my life? How could I have seen what I had before as everything? But it was. 

From the perspective of the world, yes, there's been an increase in life here. But what about from the perspective of the mother, from the perspective of the creator? There's been a loss. She used to have another life in her body, and everywhere she went, that life went with her. She could feel it kicking and she could feel it hiccupping. And in a wild way, it makes me wonder what it was like for God to birth us and to create us and to let us go. And to say, what I want more than anything is to be close to you. I'm creating you because I love you, but I don't get to keep you here in my womb with me. I'm going to put you out there into your own world. 

It's loss that's coupled with the nachat (satisfaction) of having brought new life into the world. This is sort of a crazy conversation to have. But it's one of the many times in my life when, as a parent, I have felt invited into that space of empathizing with God. Empathizing with God is not something I normally do, or normally did. I don't have the hubris to think that I've gotten it right. I don't have the theological simplicity to think that God's emotional experience is anything like mine. But even with all of those caveats, there's something very powerful about being invited into that place where you say, what is it like in God's shoes? Like, I never had the chutzpah to put myself there or to wonder, but God's a parent. I'm a parent. We have that in common. 

Ari: So there's one final question I want to ask. If God, after creating this whole environment, creating a space in His own existence for humankind to exist and to have someone to have a relationship with, and then afterwards God rested, and we emulate God by resting in our creation of a space for God… I wonder, when we're emulating God in creating other human beings, do we also have some sort of Shabbat as part of that process?

Beth: Ari, my first reaction is, like, a big, heavy sigh. It's like one long Shabbat. But when I say it's one long Shabbat, I don't mean it's one long kiddush with kugel and Torah and naps. I mean you really feel the restraint, and maybe even the pain of God in that moment at the end of the sixth day, laying down the hammer. Because that's your job as a parent. Your job as a parent is to raise your child into a human being, living a life in relationship with God, and respecting other people, and filled with richness and goodness.

And that your child can do that independently and be separate from you, can initiate things on his own, can create things on his own, and one day you won't be there anymore. You need to have prepared your child for that. The whole point is that you're inching towards independence every day, and it's dramatic because that child starts inside of you. They start out inside you, and then the first three months that they're in the world – they say playfully, the baby now wants a womb with a view. They still want to be connected to you, but this time they can see the brightness. It's not dark anymore.

Child psychologists talk about a child learning to walk as a milestone of independence, because the child realizes that their legs can carry them away from you. The first time that I dropped off my son to preschool, it was really hard for him at the beginning, or so it seemed. He cried a lot when I left. Then the teachers told me that he was fine two minutes later. But it was still incredibly hard for me. I called a friend to talk to her about it. I was feeling so badly for having left him, and she was like, “Beth, this is such a necessary step. He's going to be an independent person and he's going to go off and have all these experiences without you. Yes, you can still be there for him as an important anchor in his life, but you don't want him to need you.”

In a few years it's going to be like, “bye Ima, I'd rather go out and play with my friends.” It's your job to encourage that. It is your job to equip them with all the skills they need so that they can and want to walk away from you. So yeah, the whole thing is Shabbat. And I know my parents are still doing the Shabbat thing with me. I see the ways in which they're still letting me go. It's like, their success is when I have my own life and I have my own family, and I don't have as much time to talk to them as I did when I was seven.

Ari: You know, I see that in my parents too. I think my mom still wishes that she could hold me in her arms. It's something that I guess parents are forced to do, a very slow process of letting go and allowing that which you have created to take on an existence of its own.

Beth: Another dimension of this whole Shabbat thing is the parent watching the child seemingly make mistakes, in the parent's eyes. I'm going to let you make your own choices. I'm going to let you do this thing that I think you shouldn't be doing. It's like, oh my gosh, does that put me in God's shoes, because with Shabbat, with the advent of Shabbat, God did this crazy, crazy thing, which was to give us free will. And boy, do we misuse it all of the time. What must it be like sitting there, looking over the world and seeing your children make the wrong choices left and right? But on the other hand, there's no alternative, because the alternative is that your children are you. Your children are robots who are making the same decisions that you would, and that's you. You can't have a relationship with yourself.

Ari: That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing what all this means to you.

Beth: Ari, it was totally my pleasure.

Credits

This episode was written and recorded by our lead scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman, and by myself, Ari Levisohn, together with Beth Lesch.

When this piece originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was produced by Imu Shalev. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our senior editor is Ari Levisohn. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.