8th century), for example, imagines that Moses was unable to visualize the object described to him by God. A story preserved in Midrash Tanḥuma (ca. Moses Doesn’t Understand What to Do (Midrash Tanḥuma)Īncient rabbis were aware that something is missing in the text of the Torah that hampers our understanding of it. Detail of Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, Claude Monet, 1875, National Gallery of Art. Only at a distance does the Monet painting come into focus and present a coherent whole-an “impression” (Figs. When you look at a painting by the impressionist Claude Monet up close, all you can see are brush strokes, colors and shapes. This creates a kind of impressionistic listening, with each detail of the biblical description melting into the whole.Īrt provides a visual example to explain my point. The voice of the reader fills spaces between the words, and drives our experience forward from object to object. My sense, though, is that the tabernacle texts are far more poignant when read out loud in a public performance, as they are in the synagogue. It is like asking a contemporary teen to imagine a samovar in a Shalom Aleichem story, without ever having seen one or having been served tea from one.Ĭommentators from antiquity to the present tend to focus on the detailed philological study of the menorah, word by word. We do not live within the same visual culture that biblical Israel did. Beyond that there is little consensus, prompting great discussions.Įnvisioning the real menorah behind the biblical text is no easy task. Most students agree that the menorah is a kind of overgrown plant, complete with branches, bulbs and flowers. ![]() Many times I have asked students to leave their preconceptions behind and to draw what they read based on the text alone, or to listen carefully when it is read aloud and imagine its form they find it virtually impossible to imagine what is being described. 25:36 Their bulbs and their branches shall be of one piece with it, the whole of it one piece of hammered work of pure gold. ![]() 25:34 and on the lampstand itself four cups made like almonds, with their bulbs and flowers, and a bulb of one piece with it under each pair of the six branches going out from the lampstand. ![]() 25:33 three cups made like almonds, each with bulb and flower, on one stalk, and three cups made like almonds, each with bulb and flower, on the other stalk-so for the six branches going out of the lampstand כה:לד וּבַמְּנֹרָה אַרְבָּעָה גְבִעִים מְשֻׁקָּדִים כַּפְתֹּרֶיהָ וּפְרָחֶיהָ. This is an almost compulsive word picture, whether in translation or in the original Hebrew. The menorah is described in great and even confusing detail two times in the Torah. The base and the shaft of the lampstand shall be made of hammered work its cups, its bulbs, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it. Exod 25:31 And you shall make a lampstand of pure gold. Exodus 25:31–40 describes God’s command to Moses to construct the golden lampstand ( menorah) of the Tabernacle.
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