They brought the trees. When our ancestors left Egypt they brought flat loaves of bread that had no time to rise — and trees. Fleeing from slavery in the middle of the night, crossing a dark sea with an army at their backs, they carried full grown cedar trees into the unknown desert. This image from the Midrash Tanchuma is cited by Rashi in his commentary on this week’s parasha. The text instructs the people to build a mishkan, a tabernacle, a holy structure through which to pray, which will act as the portable home for God as the people journey through the desert. Amongst a number of precious medals and clothes, this tabernacle is to be made of cedar wood, in Hebrew shittim. But how, Rashi wonders, could they have found cedar, a conifer primarily adapted to a mountainous climate, in the desert? Knowing there was no nearby forest or local Home Depot, the rabbis conclude they must have brought the trees with them from Egypt.
Rashi takes what seems like a completely absurd idea one step further. Wondering how those trees found their way to Egypt in the first place, this midrash takes us back to the time of Jacob. Long before the first Israelites ever found their way down to Egypt, Jacob had a vision. He foresaw through divine inspiration that Israel would one day build a mishkanin the desert and they would need wood. And so, when the family traveled down to Egypt to join Joseph and wait out the famine, he brought cedar seeds and planted them in Egypt. Jacob then instructed his children that when the time came for them to leave Egypt, they should bring the trees. And they did. This is an incredible image. Incredible in the plain sense that it seems impossible, outlandish. Incredible for its poetic beauty. And incredible because of how much we can learn from it.
I am struck first by the weight of it. The wooden panels and beams required for the mishkan make clear that carrying it for forty years of wandering wasn’t simple. Just because this was the travel version of the Temple doesn’t mean it was light. And I think this matters. We learn from this that holiness — in addition to being brightly colored and skillfully crafted — is weighty. Perhaps God’s home needs to have some gravitas. Heavy things remind us to move slowly. They require us to work together to share the load. They prevent us from hurrying too quickly to the next thing. One reading of the Torah tells us that the gold of the mishkan was prescribed in response to the golden calf. The people need something big and heavy and shiny to remind them of God’s presence. The pressure of the wood on their shoulders as they traveled likely did the trick.
But what’s even more striking than carrying a heavy wooden tabernacle is the idea of carrying the raw trees. Before they were transformed by the wise-hearted artisans, the weight of transporting these trees must have felt absurd. Why would Jacob have left this onerous and taxing instruction? Why force his descendants to bear such a burden? I imagine these trees as metaphoric baggage. Nobody walks away from slavery empty-handed. Our ancestors departed from Egypt carrying the weight of hundreds of years of oppression and suffering. They carried this baggage into the desert so their children could transform it into something holy. The metaphorical manifested in the physical.
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It was the role of the first generation was to bring the trees, to carry the baggage. It was the role of the next generation to remake that pain into something beautiful that could serve God. Studying this midrash in previous years I always imagined myself, our generation, to be the builders of the mishkan. We are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We inherited so many unimaginably painful stories and testimonies, and it is our job not to preserve them as we received them, but to shape them into something sacred. Our task has been to turn our inherited trauma into instruments of prayer, into places for the divine presence to reside among us.
Returning to this midrash now, given the past 500+ days since October 7th and the unbearable pain they have held, I read the story anew. Now I feel a weight on my shoulders. I’d like to put this new weight down, to rid myself of the burden of carrying these new traumas and simply slip out and leave it behind. But I know that I won’t — we won’t. We will continue to carry this burden and as we reluctantly pass it down to our children we will pray that they find ways to transform it into something sacred, something holy, a place for God to dwell.
