Vayakhel-Pekudei: Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge

I sometimes think of the yearly cycle of reading Torah, haftorah, and the megillot as a year-round Great Books Program.  Throughout the year, we get the opportunity to study masterpieces of Jewish literature.  We get to ask what we can learn from them about our history, our spirituality, our psychology – and about what makes great literature.

Critical scholars of the Tanakh often speak about the “intertextuality” of the Tanakh as one of the features that makes it great literature.  “Intertextuality” means that some sections of the Tanakh clearly refer to other sections.  They borrow language, images, and concepts, and place them in new contexts, where they are used to make different points.  If we are careful readers, we will recognize familiar words even when they appear in the new context.  The old story will echo in our minds as we read the new one.  Then, when we reread the old story, the new one will echo.  The more we read, and the more we recognize intertextuality, the deeper the meanings of the words in the Tanakh will be for us.

This is part of what people mean when they call Hebrew a “holy” language.  Words are extra deep and extra-meaningful, because they refer to so many dimensions of reality at once.  In a holy language, no word is merely utilitarian, defined by a single function.  Every word is a metaphor that connects the divine and the human, the heavens and the earth, the macrocosm and the microcosm.

I’d like to give an example of “intertextuality” that plays on the motif of building the Mishkan, the main topic of this week’s Torah reading. The word mishkan refers to the portable sanctuary in the wilderness.  Literally it means “a dwelling place” for God’s presence.  In Shemot/Exodus 35:31, God says to Moshe, about Betzalel, head craftsperson for the construction of the mishkan:

Va’yimale oto ruach Elohim bechochma u’v’tevuna, u’vedea, u’vechol melachah.

Divine inspiration filled him with wisdom and with understanding and with knowledge and with every craft.

To repeat some key words:

Va’yimale – He became filled

B’chochma – with wisdom

V’tevuna – with understanding

V’dea – with knowledge

This verse from Shemot/Exodus suggests that three qualities are necessary for a person to effectively build a mishkan, a dwelling place for God:  wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.  The verse suggests that these are not incidental qualities: a person must be really be filled with them in order to succeed.

Since they are three separate qualities, it would seem that there are subtle differences between them.  But what are the differences between them?  What can each one accomplish?

If we read intertextually, we might be able to find an answer to the question. Midrash Tanchuma, a 9th century commentary and work of literature in its own right, points out that the same trio of characteristics appears in Mishlei/Proverbs 3:19-20:

With wisdom God founded the earth

With understanding God lastingly established the heavens

With divine knowledge depths were split

And the skies distilled dew

These verses from Mishlei/Proverbs 3 suggest that:

Wisdom gets us started on a task, perhaps helping us plan, as it is written “With wisdom God founded the earth.”

Understanding gives us the tools to sustain what we have built, perhaps giving us the flexibility to meet unforeseen challenges, as it is written, “With understanding God lastingly established the heavens.”

Knowledge helps us make distinctions between situations, so that we can apply our understanding, as it is written, “With divine knowledge the depths were split.”

If we put the verses from Mishlei 3 together with the verses from Shemot, we learn that to build a dwelling place for God we need wise planning, flexible understanding, and conceptual knowledge.

But these verses from Mishlei/Proverbs do more than just help us clarify the verse from Shemot/Exodus.  They actually offer us a whole new interpretation of the meaning of the activity of building the mishkan.  In Mishlei, the words “wisdom,” “understanding,” and “knowledge” describe not the building of the mishkan but the creation of the world.  By using these three words, the verse in Mishlei draws a parallel between the building of the sanctuary and the creation of the world.  The creation of the Mishkan imitates the creation of the world.

Listen to the verses from Mishlei 3 again.  Focus not just on the three intellectual qualities but also on what was created:

With wisdom God founded the earth

With understanding God lastingly established the heavens

With divine knowledge depths were split

And the skies distilled dew

The construction of the miskhan hints at three primal elements found in the first verse of the Torah: earth, heaven, and deep water.  As it is written “In a beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…and darkness was on the face of the deep, with God’s spirit hovering over the water.”  This parallel offers an explanation of the power of  the rituals conducted in the mishkan.  Because the miskhan is a mini-map of the world, its rituals have the power to right things in the world.  Because the creation of the mishkan symbolizes the creation of the world, it can effect a recreation of the world.

One might draw another parallel between the creation of the mishkan and the creation of the world: Just as the mishkan is a dwelling place for God within the Israelite camp, so the world is a dwelling place for God within the universe.

This interpretation is supported by another verse from Mishlei, 24:3-4, that uses the same three words in yet another context:

With wisdom a house will be built

And with understanding it will be well-established

And with knowledge its rooms will be filled

With all precious and beautiful things.

Here, the same three skills that established the world and established the mishkan establish a household – and perhaps a person’s entire earthly life.

Reading all three of the occurrences of our keywords together, we might conclude: The qualities that God used to create the universe – wisdom, understanding, and knowledge – are the same three qualities that human creatures can use to channel God’s presence.  The three qualities that human beings can use to channel God’s presence are the same qualities that humans should use to establish their earthly households.  Earthly households – when built with wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, are thus channels for divine presence, a reminder that God created the world.

The concepts of chochma/wisdom and bina/understanding deepen as they are brought forward in Kabbalistic thought to develop techniques for meditation.  My quick summary of medieval Kabbalistic metaphysics is drawn loosely from Arthur Green’s book Ehyeh: A Kabbalah For Tomorrow.  In this version of the history of the world, the world is not so much created by God as emanated from God.  The poetic language of Mishlei 3 – “With wisdom God founded the earth, etc.” is used to describe creation as an evolution of divine energy.  God, who is infinite fullness, contracts into nothingness so there can be a starting point for creation.  Next comes a first impulse to create that the Kabbalists call chochma– wisdom.  After the first impulse, created forms begin to emerge.  This emergence is called bina – understanding.

The poetic language of Mishlei 24 – “With wisdom a house will be built, etc.” – suggests that we human beings display the same qualities God used to create the world.  We, too, create when chochma, the germ of an idea, gives way to bina,an emergent form.

The description of Betzalel’s inspiration in Shemot 35 – “wisdom and understanding and knowledge” suggests that these qualities can be used to help us connect with the divine.  When we meditate upon our creative experiences, and in particular when we observe the movement of chochma (first intuition)and bina (first notion of defined form) in us, we are observing ourselves at our spiritual edge.  We are observing ourselves as we connect with something larger than ourselves, and draw on possibilities that were not previously available to us.  We are observing ourselves as we are infused with divine energy.  As we observe the trajectory of our psychic energy, we are, on a microcosmic level, observing the emanation and evolution of spirit.

Exodus 35:31 now reads quite differently.  Here is the translation I offered earlier:

Divine inspiration filled him with wisdom and with understanding and with knowledge and with every craft.

Here are some other translations:

Divine inspiration fills us, because we were created through the emanations of wisdom and understanding.

As we experience and observe the movement of wisdom and understanding, we fill ourselves with divine inspiration.

When we act with the insight we have gained through observing our own strengths and weaknesses in the area of wisdom and understanding, divine inspiration fills us.

A beautiful example of the way our holy language says many things at the same time.  A beautiful display of the elegance of our Great Books.   Because each word or sentence or story says so many things, because we can use them to say so many things, because we can follow so many different clues within a text and build so many different interpretations, because we can find insights about ourselves and the worlds we live in, reading never gets old.

— Laura Duhan Kaplan, 2006

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