Shabbat Tetzaveh 5784

The Thursday lunch-and-learn group started a new course last week–a look at the weekly haftarah. For the next year, I’ll use this space to share something that didn’t make it into our class discussion.

For the second consecutive week, our Torah portion and haftarah focus on the minutiae of the mishkan and mikdash, the portable and stationary sanctuaries of ancient Israel. Instructions about architecture, interior design, and fashion are conveyed in exquisite detail (which is another way of saying ad nauseum). To us as moderns in the 21st century, this level of detail might feel excessive to the point of irrelevance.

If it makes you feel any better, the rabbis of antiquity felt the same way, even if they hesitated to express their boredom. So hesitant were they that they transferred this boredom to the generation that lived in Babylonian exile after the fall of the First Commonwealth. But for the prophet Ezekiel, a priest who lived in exile, this detail was almost excruciating. It was torturous to think and to be instructed to share all this detail with an audience that was unlikely to live long enough to see the Temple rebuilt. As such, God asking him to prophesy about a future Temple was what the rabbis call lo’eg larash, teasing the misfortunate. It would be dangling a hope that was unattainable.

On Shabbat morning, I’ll teach a rabbinic explanation for God’s insistence that Ezekiel share this prophecy in all its nuts and bolts, its blood and guts. And we will see how this lesson can be applied to other seemingly unattainable hopes.

Shabbat Shalom and Shalom al Yisrael,

Rabbi David Wise

Candle lighting: 5:20 PM
Torah Reading: Exodus 27:20-30:10
Haftarah: Ezekiel 43:10-27

Shabbat Tetzaveh 5784

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