Every year as I reread the chapters of Exodus week by week, there is a curiosity in the narrative that strikes me. The Torah, typically terse, offers two similarly detailed descriptions of every aspect of the building the mishkan, the portable tabernacle for housing God’s presence and providing a place for sacrifice and divine encounter during the years that the Israelites sojourned in the desert. 

There is really only one significant distinction between the two accounts of the mishkan’s funding, architecture, ornamentation and even instructions for how it was to be assembled and disassembled. It is this: In the first description, which begins in Exodus 25, God tells Moses how the mishkan should be created in the future. In Parashat Vayakhel, which we read this week, we learn — detail by detail — how God’s design was realized more or less precisely as planned. 

The creation story in Genesis, we might note, is yet another context in which we read about God making a plan and then immediately fulfilling it. “‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” (Genesis 1: 3) In six days a whole world is constructed, each a direct move from God’s planning to its realization, and each was deemed successful: “And God saw what had been made and found it very good.” (Genesis 1: 31)

What rationale might there be for such divine “before and after” stories? I suspect we are told the story of such plans that are made and their ultimate unfolding in order to learn that when plans are made by God, they come (with a great deal of human input, we might note) to fruition.

By contrast, human plans, if we are fortunate, sometimes do work out, but just as often they don’t, at least not in exactly the ways we had imagined and hoped for, and often it’s due to no fault of our own. Remember that familiar Yiddish expression: Mann tracht un Gott lacht — a person plans and God laughs. People seem to use the expression sardonically, perhaps acknowledging we’re being audacious if we imagine that our future will unfold according to our will just because we have it all figured out and worked so hard to get all the details in place. The Yiddish expression suggests that when we believe that we, like God, have control over the future, God (or some version of the “evil eye”) intentionally throws a wrench into our plans to teach us humility. 

To be honest, I don’t embrace a theology that sees divine intentionality when things don’t work out. Rather, in the face of things not going according to plan, I’m reminded of the byword of my sister, an ever resourceful TV producer who regularly encounters mishaps along the way of any shoot for which she’s carefully prepared: “Always have a plan B in your pocket.” Or there’s the commanding challenge that Tim Gunn, host of Project Runway, inevitably gives the competing fashion designers in the face of mishaps: “Make it work!” 

That said, in imagining the future, it is always wise to keep in mind that there are limits to what we can control. We might have compassion on ourselves when our plans get shaken up. (Or, as a wedding planner I know calmly says to couples on their perfect day when things get chaotic: “Whatever happens was meant to happen.”)

The Covid years gave us more than enough practice in being disappointed when our plans did not come pass — or when they had to be scrapped altogether, or replaced by alternatives that felt “less than.” I’m thinking of all students who were college seniors in the spring of 2020; their graduation gowns were rented, their parents had booked hotels and dinner reservations months in advance. And they ended up watching their graduation ceremony on Zoom. We know the wedding couples whose ceremonies were planned, replanned and replanned again. What did any of us learn from perpetual disappointment? Perhaps not allowing ourselves to become heartbroken when plans are necessarily cancelled and reframed. Perhaps anticipating good things ahead joyously, but always with caution. Or perhaps, when making any plans at all, to use another Yiddish expression — im’yirtzehashem (in Hebrew, im iyrtzeh hashem) meaning: “If God wills it.” For my grandmother, who used the expression multiple times a day when speaking about any plan for the future, it was a prayer: “Please, dear God, may this plan I am making come to pass.”

In many Jewish circles, one is discouraged from preparing for a new baby before it is born. It is frowned upon to say mazel tov when you learn that someone is pregnant, as if it showed you were positive that all would turn out well. Rather one would say, b’sha’ah tovah – literally, “in a good hour,” and meaning essentially: With God’s help, may the miracle of birth come to pass. No baby showers. No sharing names beforehand. Prospective parents might have a crib, rocking chair and baby clothes on order, but wait until the baby is actually born before hitting the “purchase now” and “express delivery” buttons. Some say this is about avoiding the terrible disappointment of coming home from the hospital to a fully decked out nursery without a baby. That rationale makes sense to me, enough to follow the practice many years ago when our first child was born. And while clearly I don’t hold that being optimistic about a happy outcome brings misfortune upon us, I do believe we might make our peace with the knowledge that we simply can’t know what the future holds. It is, as they say, in God’s hands.