Weekly Torah Reading, Pekudei, March 29, 2025

 

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, last week’s and this week’s. The main difference is that, while the earlier readings prescribed what was to be done in the future, 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 a basic purpose of the Torah. The only way for a person truly to stand before God 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 biblical 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 had been planned, no matter how carefully, never actually gets finished. So of course Part A is true: “The end of a matter is better than its beginning.”

 

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 an analogy problem: Just as the end of a matter is better than its beginning, so better is a patient person than an impatient one.

 

But apparently, such a proverb would have been a little too obvious for Kohelet. What this one is saying is more subtle. Someone who is patient is willing to 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.

 

Shabbat shalom!