In this week’s parshah, we see that God’s presence did not rest on the Mishkan until it was completely finished. While this may sound obvious, it really is not. For why should God’s presence be understood as all-or nothing? In fact, the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 31a) speaks about His presence moving away from the Temple only gradually during its last days. So would it not have made more sense for God’s presence to also come down gradually while the Tabernacle was being built? The closer the building came to its completion, the fuller God’s presence – until the final brushstroke marks its almost imperceptible culmination, both physical and spiritual.
There are certainly many ways to go with this observation, but one thing that strikes me is the apparent need for completeness in order to bring down God’s presence. Perhaps it is God’s own, albeit all-encompassing, completeness that prevents Him from dwelling in an incomplete Mishkan. Whatever the reason, it makes us think twice about the nature of completeness and its absence.
Incompleteness is not just something lacking a piece of itself. Before any given piece of Mishkan furniture is built and placed in its proper place, the area where it will one day stand is not simply empty space. Rather, it contains a non-Mishkan entity and so fragments the Mishkan.
In the last hundred years, Western intellectuals are speaking more and more about a fragmented world. They feel that one can no longer hold on to some grand cultural narrative of truth. Of course, there always have been multiple narratives, each culture inevitably looking at reality from its own unique perspective. What has changed is that the Western intellectual has lost that primary allegiance to his own narrative, an allegiance characteristic of human life as it had always been known. It is thus not Western culture that has become fragmented – there are
still many intelligent people that hold on to the Western Christian narrative. Rather it is a growing number of individuals who have become fragmented. And as they have done so, they have not surprisingly felt further and further away from God.
Is the Orthodox Jewish intellectual in better shape? To the extent that he or she has lost primary allegiance to the Jewish narrative, the answer must also be no. Perhaps even more so than for their non-Jewish colleagues. For even if contemporary academia is willing to admit a bias, that bias is not to be Jewish. It was only 2002 when Robert Bellah could, I believe correctly, point out that “our culture has always been Protestant to the bone and still is. Catholics and Jews [who participate in it] have been Protestantized for a long time…”
If we think that we really have no choice if we are to be taken seriously, we should perhaps review Echad haAm’s critique of Wissenschaft der Judentum when he said,“that there was no sign of any attempt on the part of Jewish scholars to controvert, this axiom of Christian investigators, that the historical evidence of Greek and Roman literature is always to be accepted as against that of the Talmud and Midrashim, where the two are in conflict… [while, in fact,] the Talmudic method rests on sound foundations… the difference between that method and the Greek logic is not accidental, … [with] its roots in a deep-seated and fundamental difference of spirit between the Jews and the Greeks”.
This is certainly not a call to ignore the rest of the world and the fascinating realm of ideas that should legitimately attract our interest. Rather, it is a call to first return home, not only physically but ideologically. Before we can criticize ourselves, we must be ourselves. Without this, whatever else they have to say will simply float in mid-air, in some wraith-like form, unattached to anything because it is not rooted in anything.
Perhaps the point is best summarized by an important footnote in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations: In enumerating the important civilizations of the world, he seems ambivalent about skipping over the Jews. He points out that today “with the creation of Israel, Jews have all the accoutrements of a civilization… But,” then he asks the pointed question, “what about [Jews’] subjective identification?” What indeed?