Parshat Vayakhel
This d'var Torah was given on Shabbat Parshat Vayakhel,
March 21 2025 at Hinenu Baltimore.
This week’s parsha, Parshat Vayakhel, details the craftspeople and their making of the Mishkan. The people give, and they give, and they give until Bizalel and Oholiab have to say, enough! The generosity of spirit was so consuming that the people had to be told enough was enough.
Because imagine, you're told that we need materials to build a sanctuary for God. Of course you're going to find everything that you can possibly give. What an incredible opportunity. Imagine just for a minute what that could have felt like.
So they give of their yarn, their crimson, blue, and purple yarn, of their oil, of their lapis lazuli, or as Heidi taught me, lazuli, and other stones, of their hides, of ram skin and tachash skin.
What's a tachash, says Avi?
Well, thank you so much for asking, because Rashi says that this animal existed during the time of the building of the Mishkan, but since became extinct.
And in the way that Rashi often does, he's like, oh, it's a problem with language.
When Rashi doesn't really have an answer, he'll just say, it sounds like this word in French.
But that's true.
But in this context, he says, the translation of tachash in Aramaic, which is the language of the Talmud, is sos gona.
So the Aramaic had many words taken from Hebrew, so Rashi writes that sos gona is a contraction of the words sos and givana, happy and colors.
Teaching that the tachash animal took pride, as it were, in its unique hide that displayed a variety of colors, meaning that the tachash is a joy-colored animal.
Perhaps a rainbow animal, a rainbow fish.
Yes.
We'll come back to that.
A dolphin, no, of course not a dolphin, although many of our translations give us dolphin.
No, Heidi, dolphin doesn't make any sense.
Of course, a joy-colored animal makes more sense.
Of course, please, if only you studied more.
So Bezalel and Aholiab get to making, with their many, many apprentices, the ark and the curtains and the lamp stand and on and on and on.
And we get to chapter 38, the creation of the altar and its various accessories.
The basin of water, the kior, which was made of copper as well as its stand, made of the mirrors of the women.
The Torah says, He made the basin of copper and its stand of copper from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the tent of meeting.
What do you want to know about that verse?
What makes no sense to you?
What's the tent of meeting?
Okay, that's a great question.
This is what we're talking about, the place where God's presence comes in, this thing that we are constructing together.
Great question.
What else do you need to know about this verse or what's confusing?
Sarah whispered prostitutes.
Do you want to say more about that?
So you're thinking about sacred, like the cultic sex workers who would be outside of the temple.
Isn't that great?
Is that what these women were doing outside of the temple?
Great guess.
What else?
Well, we're going to get there.
Heidi?
They were in such a hurry to leave Egypt, but they figured out how to find enough bubble wrap to pack their mirrors, their tchotchkes.
What's up with that?
These are all great questions.
Some of my questions were, what women? What tasks were they doing outside the meeting? And what mirrors?
Yeah, exactly.
Our commentators want to know the same thing.
Ibn Ezra wants you to know that the women and their tasks referred perhaps to the women who spun all of the kinds of cloth that were needed, or maybe they were the ones who came to pray at the tent and study.
They gave up all the vanities of the world in pursuit of Torah, so of course they didn't need their mirrors.
Apparently, according to Ibn Ezra, ordinarily women have no other occupation than to beautify their faces every morning, and according to Isaiah, arrange their hats.
I don't really know what was happening, but Ibn Ezra says that in terms of tasks, it doesn't mean that they performed tasks, that they showed up in an army, because there were so many of them, these pious, frumpy women.
Bekhor Shor, who's in France in the 12th century, says that the mirrors actually refer to in the sight of the women, in reference to this grotesque sotah ritual, in which a husband who suspects his wife of adultery takes her to the tent of meeting, and she is forced to drink water mixed with dirt from the floor of the mishkan, and await bloating and infertility as proof of her suspected adultery.
This is a what-else-floats-a-duck sort of a situation, we'll get there.
Rashi brings this amazing wild commentary that my Torah study friends and I learned earlier.
He says, when the women brought these mirrors as an offering to the supply drive, Moshe tried to reject them as something used for vanity and the evil inclination, but then God says, no, give me those mirrors.
They are more precious to me, says God, in this midrash, than all the rest, for by means of them, those mirrors, women produced vast armies of Israelites in Egypt.
Okay, what's that about?
What's the deal with that?
Kind of weird.
Yes, this is my favorite midrash that you might have remembered from about a month ago.
So Rashi reminds us that when the husbands in Egypt were exhausted from the ruthless toil imposed on them by the Egyptians, the wives would take them something to eat and drink and bring along their mirrors while they toiled in the field.
Each of them would look at herself and her husband in the mirror and seduce him by saying, I am better looking than you are, and in this way, because of course mocking seduction really works for the Jewish people, they would arouse their husband's desires and conceive and have children, even though these men wanted to do anything but bring another generation into enslavement.
And so the words of our verse could also be translated, says Rashi, as by the means of the mirrors, the women made armies.
So the mirror was used to maintain peace between partners, says Rashi, and perhaps that means that this basin from which the water for a sotah ritual is drawn, perhaps we could see this as a framing that the sotah ritual itself is overall a peacemaking ritual.
And if you think that it means service, back to Rashi, then you're wrong.
Because our favorite fighting Frenchman, he says that the Hebrew word, hatzvaot, is used for the armed service, and that means that the women came in armies to bring the mirrors as their special contribution.
And to explain it away, there were so many ladies.
You all know that I love this drasha already, it's about the rebellious and liberatory power of pleasure, the power of flirting and of sex and of choosing life even in the face of so much promised death.
This drasha from Rashi, I believe, could be for everyone having sex, that uses contraception in a country criminalizing abortion and STI education, for every queer person falling in love.
For, as my havrusa, Rabbi Eli DeWitt, put it, the redemptive power of cruising, which is flirting while threats from empire fall all around you.
This drasha is for everyone whose self-love and admiration in femme war paint was called vanity, but we know it as resistance.
For everyone who decorates themselves and others because beauty makes the world worth living in and draws the shechina's presence down.
This, I believe, is Torah for shalom bayit, for peace in the home, for the most sacred of Jewish acts, that which brings beloved and family back together under the shadow of destruction and the seductive draw of unending bickering.
The bold swings that we make to find our way back to each other, out of the squabble, into the sanctuary that is not covered in ram skins and weavings, but the humble, joy-colored places where we rest our head.
Those sanctuaries.
This is Torah, perhaps, that redeems the painful and violent ritual of sotah, instead a peacemaking ritual to bring jealous husbands back to their wives, appeasing with smoke and with mirrors, to give overreacting men cover, to return to peace.
The Mishkan is the original bayit shalom, house of peace, where shlemut, wholeness, and shalom, peace, dwells.
So we honor the big swings our ancestors made for the next generation.
We honor the necessity of taking risks for shalom bayit, for swallowing our pride, for our bigger truths, for allowing our nervous system to relax before trying to have that conversation again, for the small pageants we put on to soothe a beloved's concern.
May each of our homes be a sanctuary.
May we draw deep from sacred waters that remind us of our connections to each other.
And may we see our pleasure as especially beloved to God.
Amen.