Pekudei

Julian Sinclair is a rabbi, and Co-founder and Education Director of the Jewish Climate Initiative. He was the Jewish Chaplain at Cambridge University and is author of "Let's Schmooze: Jewish Words Today" (Continuum 2007) based on his weekly JC columns.

"Eleh Pekudei ... These are the accounts of the sanctuary... as they were counted, according to the commandment of Moses." (Exodus 38:21) With these words our sedra opens a detailed accounting of the materials that went into constructing the sanctuary. Rashi introduces his commentary on Pekudei: "In this parsha, all the values of all the voluntary contributions of gold, silver and copper are counted, together with a recounting of all the vessels for all the different service." We learn that precisely twenty nine talents and seven hundred and thirty talents were needed; a hundred talents and one thousand seven hundred and seventy five talents of silver, and so on.

Who cares? Why does the Torah find it necessary to conclude the series of parshiot about the sanctuary by itemising the quantities of materials that went into building it? The sanctuary is a sort of a paradigm for all building in the world. Nehama Leibowitz demonstrates the literary parallels between the construction of the sanctuary and the creation of the world. For example, she compares the fact that "the heavens and earth were finished" to the completion of the work of the sanctuary. Through these comparisons, the Torah sets up the sanctuary as a microcosm of the created universe.

This idea is accentuated in the Hassidic tradition. The Sefat Emet, R. Aryeh Leib Alter from Gur (1841-1905), writes that the building of the sanctuary was meant to redeem all future doing in the world; to set up a model of physical building that would show the redemptive potential in all other acts of construction.

I'm struck by a similarity between this parsha's accounts and those in another text about an act of model building. In his American wilderness classic, "Walden" (1854), Henry David Thoreau set out on a two year vacation from civilization and went to build a house on the shores of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, living a materially simple but spiritually rich life "by the labour of my hands only."

Thoreau finds it necessary to regale the reader with precise details of all of his expenses, telling us that he spent $8.03½ on wooden boards, so much on bricks, lime, nails, etc, amounting to a total expenditure of $28.12½ on all the building materials for his house.

Thoreau wants to tell us that the truly spiritual life requires us to take responsibility for the material inputs that underpin that life, down to the minutest details. (He ridicules university students who bankrupt their parents with their thoughtless extravagance, while immersing themselves in the spiritual classics of civilization!) As a founding text of environmentalism, Walden's message resonates powerfully today; you can't live a genuinely religious life while heedlessly squandering the natural gifts that make your life possible.

Our parsha is making a similar point. The sanctuary is God's house. A house fit for God to dwell needs to be constructed with mindfulness of the gifts that went into building it. So too, making our lives and our world fit for God to dwell in requires a careful and conscious accounting of the material resources we use in their creation.