Why don’t we make things in this country anymore?
You’ve probably heard that sentiment at some point in the last decade and the truth of it is hard to dispute. In 1953, a third of the American workforce was in manufacturing. Today, fewer than eight percent of Americans work in this sector. The American economy is now largely a service economy.
I’ve seen this shrinkage with my own eyes. As the owner of an independent publishing company, I used to have my books printed in Michigan, but at a certain point, this stopped being economically viable. Today, most of my books are printed in China, as are my boutique dreidels. Many Judaica manufacturers have made the same choice. Once you’ve seen the sheer power of East Asian manufacturing firsthand, it’s hard not to feel its absence over here.
As a country, we’re split about how to feel about this, about who to blame, and about whether we should be trying to reverse it. But while some of the contours of this debate are uniquely American, the question of manufacturing’s inherent value has a long history — so long, in fact, that you can find it in the Bible.
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This Shabbat we will conclude the Book of Exodus, traditionally seen as one of the dullest parts of the Bible. Much of it recapitulates the building of the Tabernacle, which had already been described a few chapters earlier — except now, instead of describing the construction to Moses, the Bible is recounting the actual building. The construction process is so tedious that even the Bible’s most stalwart commentators cannot find much of interest in it. Open any version of the Bible with the classical rabbinic commentaries and you’ll get the impression that they’ve gone on vacation until the start of Leviticus.
I won’t try to justify the Bible’s repetition of so many finicky details, but wrapped up in this manufacturer’s textual paradise is a basic question: Do builders know something that designers do not?
This question is embodied in the biblical figure of Betzalel, the individual selected by God to lead the actual construction process. Across the centuries, commentators have vacillated about how to treat this working stiff and their ambivalence is deeply revealing about the meaning of physical labor itself.
Take Josephus, for example. In the first-century historian’s retelling, Betzalel was not appointed by God at all, despite the Bible’s explicit statement to the contrary (Exodus 31:3). Instead, God simply rubber-stamped a decision that the people would have made anyway (Antiquities 3.104–6).
But the Talmud isn’t so sure. The name betzalel, it notes, literally means “in the shadow of God,” implying that Betzalel had access to divine wisdom. The knowledge that Betzalel possessed, the Talmud claims, extended beyond mundane manufacturing, for Betzalel also had the ability to “join the letters with which the heaven and earth were created” in order to achieve his ends. This elevated status is carried through in later rabbinic sources, one of which claims that Betzalel actually ascended Sinai separately from Moses to consult with God on the Tabernacle’s construction (Midrash Zuta 4:14).
If it seems strange that Betzalel would be afforded a status akin to Moses, consider that Betzalel’s role required him to be a sort of “craft Moses.” Yes, he is a builder — but building and teaching are inextricably linked, as any apprentice can tell you. This teaching role was particularly important for a people leaving Egypt with a skills deficit. According to both Nahmanides and Abarbanel, the Israelites lacked many of the artisanal skills necessary for a functioning society. The Tabernacle, then, was more than a home for the divine presence. It was a place for a new generation of Israelite builders to learn their trades. (This is still how academics recover lost building practices.)
Crucially, many commentators point out that Betzalel also needed to be a master interpreter. The Bible isn’t an Ikea manual; it doesn’t convey all the finer details of construction. Moses, according to the rabbis, did not understand how to construct the menorah from God’s instructions alone — and yet Betzalel built it without any trouble. In designating Betzalel, God recognizes for the first time the need for a Torah that goes beyond the written word: an oral Torah, if you will, conveyed from teacher to student down the generations.
In a world that does not yet know of rabbis, Betzalel sets the rabbinic template: a master of interpretation, a translator of abstract instructions into real-world solutions, and a transmitter of practical knowledge to new coteries of tradespeople.
Today, Betzalel is a footnote in Jewish history. Despite being a proto-rabbi, the rabbis do not claim him. This is unfortunately predictable. Us “knowledge workers” have historically been quite bad at recognizing manual labor as a worthy occupation, and frequently treat people who work with their hands as some separate class of beings who are incapable of a full mental workload. In the Talmud, an aristocratic rabbi is chastised for forgetting that some of his colleagues also had grueling day jobs. But in an age when many of us do work so ethereal we can do it from home, it’s easy to forget.
From a corporate perspective, it is certainly the case that better-paid work tends to be more abstract, less technical and wordier. There is something attractive about the idea that we can press a button to make a thing happen, that we can accomplish a task by a mere act of thought. The Bible itself suggests that hands-free achievements are divine, that they bring us closer to the divine ideal of creating light by simply saying “let there be light.”
There’s nothing wrong with these sentiments, but they need to be moderated. Physical labor has a value of its own; it’s a form of knowledge and action that resists abstraction and is stubbornly (and sometimes joyously) material. It cultivates endurance, precision and attention, rooting us in the limits and capacities of our bodies and environments in a way no algorithm can replicate.
If we want to restore the value of physical labor, we should probably raise up Betzalel, the model of what it means to transform words to action.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on March 29, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
