(Haf)torah Goes Hollywood: Understanding the Mishkan-Mikdash contrast, with a boost from Queen and Seven Samurai

Hi and welcome back to the Candyland that is Torah Goes Hollywood. If you crave daring adventures through Lollipop Woods and Cupcake Commons (the Torah flavor), you’ve come to the right place.

For last year's look at what an Abba song tells us about the nature of donations in Terumah, hop on over here. And for our Pixarian view two years ago into how the parshah walks the elitism-democracy line, roll the dice this way.

And our archive, it's over in this Peppermint Forest.

We promised more forays this year into areas beyond the straight parshah, and this week we get one — yes, it's time for an episode of (Haf)Torah Goes Hollywood. How do the juxtaposition of the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus and Solomon's building of the Temple in Kings connect? Can anyone tell us what the contrast means? Yes, the Candyman can.

To the construction site!

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The dialogue between our week's Torah portion and our week's Haftorah portion is loud, and telling.

Our portion of Terumah tells of God's command to the Israelites to build the Mishkan, or Tabernacle, the (temporary) home for God in the wilderness. Famously (25:8): V'asu li mikdash v'shachanti b'tocham, "Build for me a temple and I shall dwell among you."

And then the Haftorah with its echo right back. "And Solomon built a house to God." (Kings I, 6:2)

What follows in each account is the various woods, precious metals, fabrics and other materials involved in said building, along with all the dimensions. Yes, this is "Cribs," Bible-style.

The Kings-Terumah parallel is a beautiful one, suggesting that for all the singularity of the building of the Temple in Israel, it was in fact preceded by the Tabernacle (also a helpful lesson 500 years later for the Israelites building the Second Temple; they knew they were drawing on the same blueprint as their forebears).

I wanted to take a look at one of the premiere essays of modern scholarship examining the relationship between these texts of building in Terumah and Kings — the one from Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, the chief rabbi of Yeshivat Har Etzion. And thread a few parallels to some touchstone Hollywood works to help us understand it long the way.

Rabbi Lichtenstein is immediately struck by the parallels between our parshah and the passages in Kings; the words in the latter, after all, contain some conscious callbacks. But he also notices some major differences. One of the biggest is how funds and labor for the projects were sourced.

In our portion we are told that to build the Tabernacle God asked that the Israelites contribute "me’eit kol ish asher yidevnu libo" — "how much each heart wanted to donate" (25:2). And goes on to enumerate in great detail all the varying materials the Israelites could donate.

In our Haftorah, by contrast, Solomon collected a fixed contribution from the people of either free labor or money and free labor to build the Temple." King Solomon imposed forced labor on all Israel; the levy came to 30,000 men." (Kings I 15:28).

This, Rabbi Lichtenstein argues, makes for an unfavorable comparison. "If in Parashat Terumah the emphasis is on the prompting of the heart and the free-will donation, in the book of Kings we read about a tax. Solomon does not turn to the people and try to excite them about the project, but rather he imposes a tax upon them."

An instructive point, and one that I think our portion is coming to make — people will feel better about an enterprise when they have a hand in it.

The idea evokes the scene in the 2018 Queen biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody,” in which guitarist Brian May is explaining the conceit of the song "We Will Rock You" to a skeptical Freddie Mercury. The band has been struggling for hits, and May has the idea that people will listen if they feel more invested. So he comes up with the famous two-stomp, one-clap of "We Will Rock You," which crowds at live shows (or even someone at home) can bang along to.

"I want," he says "to give the audience a song that they can perform."

His point is the same one as God is conveying in the desert — and Solomon does NOT embody in the Haftorah: if you want to make people motivated about what's been built, give them a part in the construction.

The particular system Solomon devises, meanwhile, is pretty ingenious. The Temple is a massive undertaking — more massive than anything the Israelites have tried before.

So Solomon comes up with an elaborate program involving the aforementioned 30,000 able-bodied individuals. Ten thousand were called to action. They would serve for a month, and then be go home and be replaced by a different set of ten thousand. On the third month, a fresh set would come in. And then the cycle would repeat, for all or at least most of the Temple’s 13-year construction period.

This was backbreaking labor. By staggering it in this way, Solomon could ensure that the people were rested and the work done well. (Not to mention efficiently — had Solomon only accepted volunteers, he would have gotten fewer people and the work would have taken longer.

But Rabbi Lichtenstein notes an unfavorable aspect to this clever system. Instead of being motivated to go out and help when they felt moved to do so, people were now conscripted for a fixed time in which they had no choice when or even if to go. This made the building not a beautiful act of volunteerism but coercion, with all the attendant lack of psychic benefits.

(This decision may have been driven by Solomon’s ego-driven desire to finish as quickly as possible; the Midrash Tehilim that writes on the book of Psalms amplifies this point and says Solomon "became arrogant and said: 'I have surely built a house for You.’” The argument is buttressed by the use of pronouns — the Temple construction often is described in the first-person singular of Solomon, a far cry from the collective “v’asu” in our portion.)

This approach, Rabbi Lichtenstein says, that would go on to spell doom for the Jewish people. By not giving the people a stake in what was being built — by not letting the audience perform the song — Solomon was not just breeding resentment for Israelite leaders but disconnecting them from each other, from the Jewish project.

"It seems that a heavy national price was paid for this policy...the division of the kingdom following the death of Solomon," he writes. "Had Solomon allowed them to participate in the effort, surely they would not have viewed this as an obligation, but as a privilege." By not taking the volunteer approach laid out in Terumah and instead forcing people into labor, "this burden would be remembered on the day of reckoning between the people and the house of Solomon,” Rabbi Lichtenstein writes.

There is a more charitable reading of Solomon's conscription system as a unifying force that brought in all elements of Israelite society — the WWII draft instead of the Iraq War enlistees. But even if one wanted to interpret sympathetically in this direction, the point according to Rabbi Lichtenstein would be undermined by the way the system was carried out. He notes the verse in our Haftorah citing 3,300 men who oversaw the workers — a vast mandatory bureacracy. “The contrast to the impressive voluntarism displayed in connection with the construction of the Mishkan cannot be greater."

I find this read compelling, but also wanting. The needs of the Temple were far, far larger than the Tabernacle. And the people who would do it far more diffuse and unpliant; we are a long way from an intimate band of Israelites several centuries before. Sure, it would have been nice if Solomon could have motivated the people to get the job done. But would that have been possible? We are talking about the difference between a collective and a nation. Not to mention a project many times greater in scope. It wouldn't have been realistic to just scrape up some volunteers.

People in Israel at the time wanted to be home making a living for their families, not laying stones or hammering altars for months every year in downtown Jerusalem. They needed to be conscripted. How else could Solomon have gotten them on board?

One template for how this indeed could have been done differently comes some 2500 years later in Akira Kurosawa's landmark "Seven Samurai, in which a village in Japan c. 1586 needs to defend their village from bandits.

The villagers dream of hiring elite samurai who can fend off the bandits. But their plan has a major obstacle — they have no money to pay the samurai. The village leaders turn to a wise elder named Gisaku, telling him of the hurdle. Gisaku utters one of the more famous and pithy lines in cinema history. "Find hungry samurai," he says.

Because the villagers have no money but they do have food. That provides them an avenue — they just need to find samurai who need that food. And, indeed, the villagers go out and do just that.

The film suggests that the solution to a labor-shortage problem is not about coercing people or even bribing them. It is about aligning your available strength with workers' most pressing needs. Solomon shouldn’t have bribed people to come out, of course. But he could have found those who needed food literally or spiritually (ie those who would have most derived meaning from being part of this project) and gathered volunteers that way. The fact that he didn't do that — that he didn't find hungry samurai — and instead used his kingly power to coerce people was a cardinal error.

The Temple was one of the great achievements of the Jewish people, no doubt. But the means Solomon brought it into being, Rabbi Lichtenstein proposes, was a mistake.

And it led, he says, to awful consequences. Solomon's lack of "asher yidvenu libo" — of being able to move the hearts of the Israelites into an act they wanted to do instead of an act they had to do — bred resentment of the monarchy, spelled the fissures between Judah and Israel and ultimately led to exile.

Viewed this way, our portion and our Haftorah aren’t just a superficial pairing of construction projects. They provide a vivid tutorial: a split-screen of what could have been and what was.

There's a famous scene in Marc Webb's 2009 hipster romantic dramedy "(500) Days of Summer.” In the modern movie classic (get out there and stream it if you haven’t seen!) Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom falls in love with Zooey Deschanel's Summer. After a brief but rich romance she breaks up with him, leaving him heartbroken and bent on winning her back.

Tom comes up with a big plan to do so at a party at her apartment. As the scene begins with him walking up to the party, the screen splits, labeling the left side "Expectations" and the right side "Reality." Over a haunting melody by Regina Spektor, it then shows the night unfold in two ways — a warm and reuniting encounter on the left and the cold and lonely situation on the right. (Watch and feel the pain below.)

The scene offers a pointed visual demonstration of how the best-laid plans go up in smoke when a reality grenade is lobbed in. Planning the ideal, it says, is a lot easier than making it happen.

I think this a strong metaphor for the Torah on one hand and Tanach (and really so much of Jewish history) on the other.

The Torah, particularly the instructional parts of Exodus and Leviticus, is generally laying out the left side of the screen — the expectations. But when people and the harsh winds of reality blow in, we get the right side of the screen.

“This is where the figurative evening of Jewish history could be going,” the Torah says.

“And then this is where it actually goes,” Tanach and our records say. Expectations vs Reality. (That so many phrases in Tanach explicitly call back to the language of the Torah underscores the point.)

I believe that a weekend like this, in which we read the Haftorah that executes the template from our parshah, brings the message home in shattering ways. This Mikdash-Mishkan twofer isn't just an easy topical connection — it's a blast of cold water. Our portion first is full of idealism, of the literal best-laid plans of how Jewish spiritual society can function. And then the Haftorah tells us of where all those plans actually go.

Of how despite all our desire to the contrary, the Jewish story too often moves from the left side of the screen to the right, from expectations to reality. The Temple is built but then fighting — within it, outside it, about it — happens. And tragedies follow.

Yet this sad lesson is not the end of the story. For all the ways Jewish history has moved in this direction, Terumah says that we can still strive to stay on the left side of the screen. Our reading of the portion isn't just a mocking reminder or even wistful recollection of how idealistic we once were — it's an active exhortation to get that back.

After all, in the movie Tom appears on the screen in the next scene, capable of pressing on. And even after all the historical heartbreak, the Torah is still in our lives, urging us to press on. It's up to people, Terumah is saying, to put the idealism into action, no matter how daunting — to keep alive the spirit of volunteerism and unity the Torah lays out so beautifully, no matter the admittedly bigger, messier and more challenging national circumstance of today. So we can meet, as Rabbi Lichtenstein puts it, "an exalted religious challenge" and not simply enact "a task that must be performed. "

The parallel extends, I think, to a moment we moderns have been living through. The past year brought great disunity among Jews in the land of Israel and beyond. Amid the fights over judicial reform (and general tribalism, inequality and other challenges in Israel), the spirit of volunteerism was nowhere to be found. The spirit of division was. And the promise of an egalitarian unity on which Israel had been founded 75 years earlier — “a country for the benefit of all its inhabitants based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel…with complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants,” as Israel’s Declaration of Independence so poetically put it — has felt like a great distance away. Yes, we have in the 2020’s been in the land of Reality, a depressing distance from the land of Expectations.

The four months since Oct 7 have been their own roller coaster, as we have careened between these points, seeming to set aside differences only to bring them right back again, in Israel and in the diaspora.

But the portion comes along, as it does so often, to remind us of what’s possible — to gently nudge us about Expectations. To tell us the Mishkan side is still available, and that we can grab it back.

To tell us that the spirit of everyone pulling in the same direction was here once. And that while it hasn’t been present for much of Jewish history, or in the last year, it can be now. We are, after all, all living on the same screen.

Thank you as ever for reading, and have a good and peaceful weekend.