The Opposite of Patience

 

This week’s reading ends the Torah’s account of the building of the mishkan, the portable sanctuary created to allow the Israelites to worship during their travels from Egypt to the land of Canaan.

 

In a way, the mishkan was a kind of symbol of the Torah as a whole. The multitude of commandments connected with it, all the detailed instructions about its component parts and how they were to be put together that were spelled out over the course of three weekly Torah readings, are repeated in the following two readings, Vayyakhel and Pekudei. The main difference is that, while the earlier readings prescribed what was to be done, these later two go on to say almost word-for-word, that the Israelites did in fact do exactly what they had been told.

 

The point is obvious, but worth repeating. Just as with the mishkan, so with the Torah as a whole: fulfilling each commandment provides an opportunity to carry out God’s instructions—the mitzvot—to the letter. And this highlights the basic purpose of the Torah. The only way for a person to stand in the presence of God on a regular basis is to become His employee, to serve Him every day by carrying out all the minute details of the mitzvot.

 

But there seems to be another point to this week’s reading in particular. It’s rather the same point that Kohelet (the speaker of the book of Ecclesiastes) had in mind in a certain proverb he composed (7:8): “The end of a matter is better than its beginning; better a patient person than an arrogant one.”

 

This is one of those two-part proverbs that have the pattern, “Just as you know Part A is true, so recognize that Part B is as well.” In such proverbs, Part A is basically unarguable; and indeed, who would disagree that the finished product is infinitely better than something still in its planning stage? After all, lots of things can go wrong on the way to completion; in fact, sometimes what has been planned, no matter how carefully, never actually gets finished. So of course Part A is true.

 

But what about Part B here, “better a patient person than an arrogant one”? This is one of those puzzling non-parallelisms you sometimes find in biblical proverbs. You expect it to work like one of those analogy problems: A is to B as X is to C. By this logic, X should be something like the opposite of patient, so that the whole thing would say: Just as the end of a matter is better than its beginning, so “better a patient person than an impatient one.” And you could certainly say that in biblical Hebrew. But apparently, such a proverb would be a little too obvious. What this one is saying is more subtle. Someone who is patient is willing wait until plans come to fulfillment. But the arrogant person puts himself and his desires ahead of everything else. He’s so smart, he’s so powerful—so of course he’s impatient. That’s just what it means to be arrogant, alas.

 

It might be worthwhile to remember in this connection Torah’s description of Moses: “the man (ish) Moses was exceedingly humble, more than anyone else on earth” (Num 12:3). Unless you’re an expert in biblical Hebrew, you probably don’t hear the hint of irony in this sentence. Often, the word “man” is a title of distinction; for example, the High Priest was addressed as “O my ish, the High Priest.” But it was in spite of his being a man of distinction, indeed, the greatest of the prophets, that Moses was still able to be exceedingly humble. So he, more than most, knew that the point was to wait until each of the commandments connected to the mishkan had been fulfilled, one by one. It was only then that, as this week’s reading says, he could stand back and see that “the glory of the Lord filled the mishkan.”

Shabbat shalom!