As mentioned earlier, ancient lore considered the tabernacle to be a mirror of the structure of the human psyche as well as the structure of the universe. The art of creating the tabernacle, then, is a mirror of, or a commentary on, the primordial act of creation spoken of in Genesis, on one hand, and the nature of human creativity on the other.

We are told that the artisan who was charged with overseeing the construction of the temple was called Bezalel (בצלאל). The name itself reveals to us the ideas of the Torah about the creative process. The name Bezalel means “in God’s shadow”, an image that in Biblical idiom means “shielded by God”. For example, we are told in the Psalms:

מַה יָּקָר חַסְדְּךָ אֱלֹהִים וּבְנֵי אָדָם בְּצֵל כְּנָפֶיךָ יֶחֱסָיוּן:

How precious is your faithful care, O God! Mankind shelters in the shadow of your wings. (Psalm 36:8)

In addition to his revealing name, the Torah informs us, on a number of occasions, that Bezalel’s skills were a result of a gift of profound wisdom granted to him by God:

וַיְמַלֵּא אֹתוֹ רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים בְּחָכְמָה בִּתְבוּנָה וּבְדַעַת וּבְכָל מְלָאכָה:

[God] has endowed him with a divine spirit of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of every kind of craft. (Exodus 35:31)

What is that special wisdom the Bezalel received? The Jewish tradition tells as the God created this world by means of speech: God commands vayahi or (ויהי אור), “let there be light,” light indeed manifests, because the letters of the Torah, the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, are said to contain within them the fundamental vibrations of the universe, and the divine creative wisdom is combining these letters in such a way that the words represent the vibrational quality of the object which they represent. Said differently: the word used by the Torah for an object (e.g., or for light) are not arbitrary symbols, but contain the essence of the object portrayed.

Ancient lore has it, that the special wisdom afforded to Bezalel was the very skill with which God has created the universe: the skill to create through the combinations and permutations of the letters of the alphabet. Later traditions attributed this knowledge to saintly rabbis, such as the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew, the legendary creator of the Golem (Incidentally, the Maharal’s father was called Bezalel).

Judaism is not alone in considering letters, the fundamental components of speech, as the primordial energies that lie at the basis of physical creation. The Hindu mythology relates to the texts of the Veda as the speech of Brahma, the creator. Like the Torah in Judaism, the Hindus consider the fundamental vibrations of the Veda to be the blueprint through which creation has come about. They also believe that the words of the Veda are not arbitrary symbols, but that each word contains the vibratory essence of the object to which they refer.

And just like in the Jewish tradition, the Vedic notion is that the knowledge of those fundamental energies can be created not just for the creation of the universe but also for specific acts of artistic creativity. For example, in the Mahabharata, and enormous Indian epic about the war between the clans of the lunar dynasty, the magical palace of the Pandavas is said to have been constructed through mantras, Vedic sounds, by Vishwakarman, the architect of the Gods.

How are we to understand this in our day and age? I believe that the text offers us profound commentary about human creativity. The letters of the alphabet are quantified values of the fundamental Energy-and-Intelligence that created the universe, which is beyond any quantification. This idea is particularly clear in the Hebrew tradition, since the Hebrew letters are also—or some would say primarily—numbers. As expressions of divine intelligence, they are quantified expressions of that which cannot be quantified, cannot be expressed.

While some may understand the story of Bezalel to be about an ancient figure in the desert, I prefer to see in it a universal commentary about how we create. Bezalel is each and every one of us, when we harness our creative potential. That creativity, which we personalize, is not really ours. Its source is mysterious. Read some of the descriptions of creative people about their moments of creative inspirations and they sound remarkably similar to the descriptions of mystics of all traditions about their insights into the deepest nature of reality.

One of the takeaways of the Torah portion of vayakhel is that human creativity is divine and should be harnessed for what the Torah sees as the purpose of life—to make every corner of the Earth sing the glory of heaven. This Torah portion reminds us that this is our task.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)

Famously, Moses goes up the mountain and returns with the Torah inscribed in stone. Ancient lore has it that he received not only the written Torah (torah shebikhtav), but also the oral Torah (torah she’be’alpe), a tradition of interpretation of the written text which was initially passed on orally.

Few Biblical scholars take seriously the claim that the entire Torah was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Even some orthodox and ultra-orthodox scholars acknowledge the fact that the books of the Torah—let alone the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the Kabbalistic texts—are a collection of writings contributed by different authors at different periods (see this article).

Does that mean that the concept of divine revelation is a sham? Only if you relate to Torah as the text that appears in the books. But in the Jewish tradition, this is only one of a few ways of understanding the concept of Torah, and if you consider the others, the story gets interesting.  (This may appear a bit abstract to some).

Torah as Alive Primordial Intelligence

Rabbinic literature relates to the Torah as much more than a concrete text and a tradition of its interpretation. The Torah is also described as:

· The speech of God or the name of God;
· Embodied as chokhmah, Wisdom, the architect of creation;
· A sequence of expressions that serves as the blueprint for Creation (the DNA of the universe, if you will).

These three concepts of Torah emphasize its nature as an alive level of primordial intelligence, rather than as merely text.

Interestingly enough, this mirrors the attitude towards the Veda in the Hindu tradition*. While the Veda is commonly understood as a text, a collection of mantras that are recited during the sacred performances, the Veda is also described in the Vedic literature as:

· The Word, the essence of the ultimate reality, Brahman (this is parallel to the Jewish concept of the Torah as the speech of God or the name of God);
· The totality of knowledge, embodied as the Creator (parallels the Jewish concept of Wisdom or Chokhmah);
· A sequence of sounds which forms a blueprint for Creation (again, the “DNA of the Universe”).

What is the connection between the concrete words of the text of both Torah and Veda with these more esoteric understandings of them? Abiding by the concrete texts and by the performances derived from them is meant to align one with the alive, transcendental level of wisdom as a living reality within oneself.

Be Awake and See the Sounds

The close similarity between the notion of Torah and Veda in both traditions may be informative. By understanding what the Vedic tradition says about the process of cognition of the Vedic hymns we may glean something about prophecy and revelation in the Jewish tradition.

About the Vedic hymns, the Rik Veda proclaims:

यो जागार तमृचः कामयन्ते
yo jagara tamrichah kamayante
He who is awake, the richas [Vedic hymns] seek him out. (Rik Veda, 5.44.14)

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the foremost teachers of Vedic teaching in our time, often commented on this verse. He explained that the Veda—much like the Torah—eternally murmurs to itself in the transcendental field of creation. The hymns zoom forth in the awareness (“the richas seek him out”) of whoever can bring his or her awareness to that level of reality [“he who is awake]”.

An interesting feature of this process of cognition is that it involves not only sound but also sight, not as two separate elements but as a unified cognition of sound and sight. For this reason, the person who is able to thus cognize the Veda is referred to as a rishi, a seer.

This may shed light on a peculiar expression in this week’s Torah portion. After listing the ten commandments, the Torah describes the experience of the People of Israel as they heard them, starting with a peculiar phrase:

וְכָל הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת הַקּוֹלֹת

And the people see the sounds (Exodus 20:15)

Sounds, of course, are heard, not seen. Could it be that the reason the text here says that the sounds were seen is that it describes a process of cognition similar to that describes in the Vedic texts?

Torah Revelation Now

The Torah phrase describing the process of revelation has another peculiarity: although it is referring to an event that occurred in the past, it uses the present tense. Instead of saying “the people saw the sounds” it says “the people see the sounds.” Just as the Veda spells out a principle—“He who is awake, the richas [Vedic hymns] seek him out”—so does the Torah suggest to us that we can realize the Torah as a living reality within our awareness right now.

In other words, instead of speculating whether or not the entire Torah was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, let us be like Moses and allow the Torah to be a live presence in our awareness. That would be the fulfillment of what Moses declared that he wanted:

וּמִי יִתֵּן כָּל עַם יְהוָה נְבִיאִים כִּי יִתֵּן יְהוָה אֶת רוּחוֹ עֲלֵיהֶם:

Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29)

And this will also be the fulfillment of the words of Prophet Jeremiah:

הִנֵּה יָמִים בָּאִים נְאֻם יְהוָה וְכָרַתִּי אֶת בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאֶת בֵּית יְהוּדָה בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה:… כִּי זֹאת הַבְּרִית אֲשֶׁר אֶכְרֹת אֶת בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל אַחֲרֵי הַיָּמִים הָהֵם נְאֻם יְהוָה נָתַתִּי אֶת תּוֹרָתִי בְּקִרְבָּם וְעַל לִבָּם אֶכְתֲּבֶנָּה וְהָיִיתִי לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים וְהֵמָּה יִהְיוּ לִי לְעָם: וְלֹא יְלַמְּדוּ עוֹד אִישׁ אֶת רֵעֵהוּ וְאִישׁ אֶת אָחִיו לֵאמֹר דְּעוּ אֶת יְהוָה כִּי כוּלָּם יֵדְעוּ אוֹתִי לְמִקְטַנָּם וְעַד גְּדוֹלָם נְאֻם יְהוָה כִּי אֶסְלַח לַעֲוֹנָם וּלְחַטָּאתָם לֹא אֶזְכָּר עוֹד:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,* says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

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* The analysis of the various non-scriptural understandings of Torah, as well as their parallel to the non-scriptural understanding of Veda in the Hindu-Vedic tradition, is based on Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture, by Barbara Holdrege, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. The book is based on her PhD thesis at Harvard.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)