After weeks of recounting stories of the miracles that God performs on behalf of the Israelites — from a small bush aflame but never consumed to plagues that continuously haunt the Egyptian people, the awe-filled phenomenon of the Exodus and the astonishing revelation at Sinai — we now approach the moment when God directs the people: “And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).

While there may not be anything surprising about the fact that this newly established nation is commanded to establish a space designated for the Divine, it is perplexing that the commandment is for them to physically build it. We have seen time and time again God’s ability and willingness to intervene in nature. Given the painstaking precision in which the Torah describes the specifications of the Tabernacle, from measurements to materials to adornments, it would seem far easier for God to simply give the people the necessary structure.

If we pause to think about it, there is a certain cruelty to this assignment. The Israelites have just emerged from hundreds of years of slavery, grueling labor that the Torah describes as designed to break their bones, crush their spirits and strip them of their very humanity. They were exhausted, demoralized and traumatized. Why should their very first assignment as a free people be to do the very work they had just escaped: to build?

Moses Mendelssohn, a famous German Jewish philosopher of the 18th century, offers a beautiful insight. He compares the Israelites’ labor in building the Tabernacle to the commandment to offer God the first fruits of our land, the first of our livestock  and even the first of our children. Just like we are obligated to give the first of ourselves to God, Mendelssohn offers, so, too, we must consecrate the very first fruits of our labor as a free people.

The Israelites had spent generations working, toiling, building, but until now, their work had never been holy.

And in this we learn a beautiful commentary on the Torah’s notion of freedom. All too often, when we think about freedom, we think about freedom from burden. Yet though the Israelites were cared for throughout the time in the desert with miraculous food and water, God did not simply cause the Tabernacle to appear in their midst. 

Because herein lies the paradox of the Torah’s definition of freedom from slavery, explicitly stated later on: “For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants: They are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt, I the LORD your God” (Leviticus 25:55).

Slavery is about stripping people of a sense of self, but establishing a sense of self is not the same as selfishness. God redeems the Israelites not to free them from work, but so that the work could be their own, a work that is meaningful, a work that is holy.

For those of us blessed with freedom, the challenge we are called to each day is to find the holiness in our work, to create the holiness in our work and to strive for creations that make the world more sacred, more perfect and, most of all, more freeing for all who reside within it.

Maharat Rori Picker Neiss is executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis  and a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association.