Nation-Building: An ancient Answer to a Contemporary Problem

Sometimes the circumstances in which you arrive at a new understanding of Torah are as interesting as the understanding itself. This is the story of one such moment. Through it I came to learn something about the structure of the book of Exodus as a whole, and the place within it of the long narrative about the construction of the Sanctuary. I also discovered something no less important, namely that the Torah still has much to teach us – not only Jews but others also – as we strive to create a better, more inclusive society.

I came to know Tony Blair several years before he became prime minister of Britain. He was and is a deeply religious man who has an abiding love for the Bible. At that time, he told me, he read it nightly. Our first long conversation was, in fact, about Bible study. We were flying back, together with Prince Charles, from the funeral in Jerusalem of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, on 6 November 1995.

During the flight I was studying the weekly parasha, using a standard Mikraot Gedolot, the classic edition of the biblical text printed together with the main commentaries: Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides and others. Tony Blair was intrigued by the layout of the book: a central text surrounded by commentaries. There is no English book set out in quite this way. He asked me what the book was, and why it was set out like that. I explained what each of the texts was, who the commentators were, their historical background and their distinctive approaches. I added that for us the biblical text always has to be understood against a background of commentary representing the way the Torah has been understood at different eras of Jewish life.

He was enthralled, and asked me to teach him the particular text I was studying. Prince Charles was listening intently from across the aisle. For the next hour I gave a shiur, a study session, to Britain’s future king, and its next prime minister. At the end of the session I recalled the verse from Psalm 119:46 – “I will speak of Your statutes before kings and will not be ashamed” – and thanked God for the opportunity of fulfilling the verse. From then on, Tony Blair and I became friends, and when he became prime minister we continued this new tradition. During our meetings, once we had finished our agenda, we always ended with a brief study session about a biblical passage.

I never knew in advance what the topic would be: it was always the passage he had happened to read the night before. In this way we came to discuss the book of Job, the prophet Jeremiah, and various other texts. On our last session together, when he had already announced his resignation, we discussed the great sixth chapter of Micah, with its challenging summary of the religious life: “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). I reminded him that an American president, Jimmy Carter, had quoted this verse in his inaugural address.[1]

One day he said to me, “I’ve just come to the boring bit.”
“Which boring bit?” I asked.
“You know,” he said, “the passage about the Tabernacle at the end of Exodus. It does go on, doesn’t it?”

I agreed, using the analogy of the way politicians judge the significance of a press item, by talking about “column inches” – the length of a newspaper article. I explained to him the linguistic parallels between the biblical account of the making of the Sanctuary and God’s creation of the universe, and then quantified the difference. The narrative of creation takes a mere thirty-four verses, while the account of the making of the Tabernacle takes some five hundred verses.

I then offered the explanation given in a previous essay, “The Home We Make for God,” (p. 199). I said that it is not difficult for an omniscient, omnipotent God to create a home for humankind. What is difficult is for finite, fallible human beings to create a home for God. This tells us that the Bible is not man’s book of God, but God’s book of humanity. What God is interested in is how we create, not how He creates. What the last third of the book of Exodus is telling us is that our primary task is to build a home for the Divine Presence. I then gave him the blessing Moses gave the builders of the Tabernacle: “May it be God’s will that his presence rests in the work of your hands.”

That might have been the end of the story but for one thing: I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this answer. I remembered an occasion, described in a famous midrash, in which Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai gives an explanation of the rite of the Red Heifer to a Roman, interpreting it as a form of exorcism. When the Roman departed, satisfied, the students turned to Rabban Yochanan and said, “Master, you have given him a shallow answer that satisfies him, but what will you answer us?”[2]

The answer may have been satisfactory as far as it went. But an obvious question remained: Why was this long narrative included within the book of Exodus, whose subject is the making of a nation? It belongs more naturally to the book of Leviticus, which deals with the service of the Tabernacle itself. What is it doing in the book dedicated to the liberation of the Israelites from slavery and their birth as a nation under the sovereignty of God? The question lingered in my mind, unresolved for several years.

In the meantime, a major social and political question arose in Britain and other European countries, most notably Holland. Having embraced multiculturalism – the idea that there should be no dominant culture in the ethnically diverse societies of contemporary Europe – these countries discovered that far from mitigating social conflict, the new doctrine exacerbated it. Far from promoting social integration, it was leading to segregation. It did not make societies more tolerant, but less so. The Dutch put it well. Tolerance, they said, ignores differences; multiculturalism makes an issue of them at every point.[3]

Was there – people began to ask – a way of moving beyond multiculturalism without sacrificing the idea of an inclusive society? It was then that my mind went back to the unanswered question about the place of the story of the Tabernacle within the book of Exodus. If the theme of Exodus is nation-building, then this is the book to which we should turn if we would seek biblical insight into the contemporary fragmentation of society.

Moses’ challenge was precisely this: how to turn a group of escaping slaves into a cohesive nation. In chapter 1 of Exodus we find the first description of the Israelites as a nation. Pharaoh calls them an am, a people. But an am, as Rabbi Soloveitchik pointed out, is a community of fate, not yet a community of faith. For this latter the Torah uses the word edah.[4]

An am shares a past; an edah shares a future, a set of ideals and aspirations. The path to nationhood in the book of Exodus might be described as the journey from am to edah.

Two things are striking about the people Moses leads. First, they are divided into twelve tribes or clans. The Torah emphasizes this at every point. They are not yet united into an overarching sense of identity. The second is that they include an unspecified “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12:38), a heterogeneous group who were not ethnically Israelites. Moses was faced, in other words, with a problem not unlike that of multi-ethnic and multicultural states.

What is equally striking as the narrative unfolds is that the Israelites lack the moral maturity to become a free nation. At every stage, they complain. They do so after Moses’ initial intervention makes their burdens worse (Ex. 5:21). They do so again as they come to the Reed Sea (Ex. 14:11–12). After the crossing of the sea they twice complain about the lack of water (15:23–24; 17:2), and again about the lack of food (Ex. 16:2–3). The portrait the Torah draws is of a people with a slave mentality. This is not yet a people of faith, of trust in God, of responsibility and restraint. They cannot see beyond the present. And this, let us recall, is the people who had just witnessed the ten plagues and the division of the Reed Sea, the greatest miracles in history.

What happens next is the revelation at Mount Sinai, an unprecedented event when God appeared to an entire people. The Torah tells us that “When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear” (Ex. 20:18). Yet a mere forty-one days later, when Moses “delayed in coming down the mountain” (Ex. 32:1), they made a Golden Calf. The Torah says that after the making of the Calf: “Moses saw that the people were broken loose – for Aaron had let them loose for a derision among their enemies” (Ex. 32:25). They had become a rabble. What more needs to happen to such a people before they are transformed into a cohesive group with a sense of identity and mission? There can be no greater miracles than the division of the sea and the revelation at Sinai. If they do not suffice, what will?

It is at this point, at the beginning of Vayakhel, that Moses commands the people to construct the Tabernacle – and this is the stroke of genius. It is as if God had said to Moses: if you want to create a group with a sense of collective identity, get them to build something together. It is not what happens to us, but what we do, that gives us identity and responsibility. What transformed the Israelites is not what God did for them but what they did for God.

Until the making of the Tabernacle, the story of the Israelites is a sequence of events in which God acted for the people. He liberated them, divided the sea for them, gave them water from a rock and food from heaven. During all that time, they quarrelled and complained. Yet throughout the construction of the Tabernacle, there were no quarrels, no complaints. The people gave of their wealth, their time and their skills. They gave so much that Moses had to issue an order that they should stop (Ex. 36:5–7). This is behaviour we have not seen before. The Israelites were indeed transformed – not by a miracle, but by their own efforts. What we do, not what is done for us, changes us.

It was now clear to me precisely why the story of the Tabernacle belongs in Exodus, not Leviticus – because it is a story about nation-building. The most effective way of transforming individuals into a group is by setting them a task they can only achieve as a group. This cuts across all other divisions, tribal, social and cultural. A nation does not depend on shared ethnicity. It can arise simply from the sense of collective responsibility that emerges from the performance of a shared task.

The Torah, in other words, offers a striking way out of the dilemmas of multiculturalism. It suggests that the citizens of a nation see themselves as co-creators of society seen as the home we build together. This then became the book I published, under that title, in 2007.

It is a radical alternative to most other contemporary political philosophies – those based on ethnicity, for example, or on citizenship as a set of rights, or on society as the embodiment of a moral consensus. It attaches positive value to ethnic and religious difference while giving equal weight to social cohesion. It invites us to bring our different heritages as contributions to the common good. It says in effect: by being what I uniquely am, I give what I alone can give. It makes a strong connection between building and belonging. I call this integrated diversity, and its source is the biblical narrative of the Tabernacle, whose length and detail so puzzled Tony Blair.

I tell this story not simply to show how a biblical passage can help solve a contemporary political and social problem but also to make a point fundamental to the study of Torah. Torah is not merely learned. It cries out to be lived. Nor is the Torah merely a private code of conduct. It is about the way we construct a society. By establishing a dialogue between Torah and contemporary society, we will find ourselves enlightened by new facets of its insight into the human condition.

I end with one further corollary of the argument developed here. Rabbi Norman Lamm, past president of Yeshiva University, once remarked that he knew of only one joke in the Mishna, namely the statement that “the disciples of the sages increase peace in the world.” Surely, he said, this cannot be meant seriously, because rabbis are known for the number of arguments to which they give rise. I replied: the statement is not a joke, but to understand it you have to read to the end of the passage. It quotes a verse from Isaiah (54:13), “All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children” and continues, “Read not banayikh, your children, but bonayikh, your builders.” When leaders become builders, they create peace; otherwise they merely create dissent.

The proof is the Tabernacle. So long as the Israelites were builders there was peace among them. As John Ruskin wrote, “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.” More simple still was the slogan of the early Zionist settlers who said that they came to the land livnot u’lehibanot, “to build and to be built.”

We are made by what we make.

[1] Available at http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres60.html.
[2] Bamidbar Rabbah 19:8.
[3] For this and the rest of this essay, see Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together (Continuum, 2007).
[4] See “Kol Dodi Dofek,” in J. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut Veha’arakhah (Jerusalem, 1982), especially pp. 41–43.
[5] See note 3 above.
[6] Berakhot 64a.
[7] Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).