Can’t We Just Skip to the Good Parts?
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This Dvar Torah on Parashat Vayakhel is edited from one written by Rabbi Mordechai Soskil, who has been teaching Torah for more than 25 years. Currently he is the Associate Principal of the High School at Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School in Baltimore. He is also the author of a highly regarded book on faith and hashkafa titled "Questions Obnoxious Jewish Teenagers Ask."
Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash
If you were making a movie version of the Torah, you wouldn’t have a Parshas Vayakhel.
You would have last week’s Golden Calf episode; you might have Moshe “on the mountain” getting instructions for the Mishkan.
You certainly would include the splitting of the sea in your movie. You might even have a scene where we hear Hashem say, “build Me a mishkan and I will dwell among them,” from Parshas Trumah and some jump-cut edits to building the various mishkan components.
But you certainly would not have Moshe telling all the details of the build to the Jewish people and then the actual item by item description of the build like in Parshas Vayakhel.
Instead, you would have a montage.
Before you think I’m about to hate on a montage, I think you should know that a good part of my childhood was spent idolizing BA Baracus in a build montage on the A-Team.
Of course, I’m aware that anyone born with the number 2 in front of their birth year has no idea what I’m talking about, so for you young’uns – remember the transformation montage in the Princess Diaries?
If the Torah wanted to give us a written version of a montage, it could have just said, “And then the nation went about building the Mishkan according to the way Hashem commanded Moshe. And it was completed on…”
And then we wouldn’t need around 117 of the 122 pesukim in Parshas Vayakhel. And yet here we are. So, um, yeah. What’s up with that?
The fact is that the sheer drudgery of doing something again and again, and making small, nearly immeasurable progress is how life works.
I’m fond of a quote attributed to Bill Gates, “We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in five years.”
We think that our progress in any area will be montage-y, but it’s not at all like that.
Barring some life-altering catastrophe, we change through the grunt work of focused monotony.
There is a trendy word for a person who has the ability to keep pushing steadily forward through all the monotony – grit.
Grit is the ability to keep working when it’s hard and boring and progress is slow.
Grit is what makes us able to look at problems and suggest solutions, not to seek salvation.
Grit is the ability to think that with hard work we can fix things.
And one only gets grit through hard work.
And that brings us back to Parshas Vayakhel.
The Torah could have given us a montage — a quick summary of the Mishkan’s construction — but it didn’t.
It gave us the details, the process, the hard work.
Because that’s where grit develops, and growth happens.
Maybe the Torah takes the time to give us all 122 pesukim because the work is the point.
Maybe it wasn’t just about building “a place where Hashem could dwell,” maybe the process was also about making us a people where Hashem would want to dwell.
