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Covenant & Conversation

Parshat Vayakhel

Immediately after his return from the mountain top, having secured forgiveness for the people after the sin of the Golden Calf, Moses assembles them and commands them, first, about the Sabbath, and then about the making of the Tabernacle.

The parsha repeats much of what was said earlier in Terumah, with this difference: that there we read the instructions, here, their execution. The people give willingly, and Betzalel and Oholiab, the craftsmen, fashion the various structures.

Vayakhel • 5772, 5785
Mirrors of Love
The Torah in Parshat Vayakhel, which describes the making of the Mishkan, goes out of its way to emphasise the role women played in it:…
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Vayakhel, Pekudei • 5769, 5777, 5785
Encampments & Journeys
Right at the end of the book of Shemot, there is a textual difficulty so slight that it is easy to miss, yet – as…
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Vayakhel • 5771, 5784
God's Shadow
In Vayakhel we meet, for the second time, the man who became the symbol of the artist in Judaism, a man by the name of…
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Vayakhel • 5776, 5783
The Social Animal
At the beginning of this parsha Moses performs a tikkun, a mending of the past, namely the sin of the Golden Calf. The Torah signals…
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Vayakhel • 5775, 5782
The Spirit of Community
What do you do when your people have just made a Golden Calf, run riot, and lost their sense of ethical and spiritual direction? How…
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Vayakhel • 5774, 5781
Team-Building
How do you re-motivate a demoralised people? How do you put the pieces of a broken nation back together again? That was the challenge faced…
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Vayakhel, Pekudei • 5780
Communities and Crowds
Melanie Reid is a journalist who writes a regular column for The (London) Times. A quadriplegic with a wry lack of self-pity, she calls her…
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Vayakhel • 5768, 5779
The Beauty of Holiness or the Holiness of Beauty
In Ki Tissa and in Vayakhel we encounter the figure of Betzalel, a rare type in the Hebrew Bible – the artist, the craftsman, the…
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Vayakhel, Pekudei • 5778
Making Space
With this week’s double parsha, with its long account of the construction of the Sanctuary – one of the longest narratives in the Torah, taking…
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Vayakhel, Pekudei • 5767, 5773
Three Types of Community
A long drama had taken place. Moses had led the people from slavery to the beginning of the road to freedom. The people themselves had…
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Vayakhel, Pekudei • 5770
Where does the Divine Presence live?
Finally the long narrative of the construction of the Tabernacle – to which the Torah devotes more space than any other single subject – is…
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