The Experience of Being - Astonishing to discover that a parasha which essentially consists of one message only, “And they did it!” repeated ויעש again and again, should hold within it the most profound elements of a restructured Torah and new world of new Moshe! And though we asked all the right questions and developed the approaches to an answer, it took the רבינו בחיי to deal fully with the issues fully—he even bases himself on the same מקורות that we discovered. Nowhere is it more important than here to establish what the point of all the repetition is, for a simple ויעש ככל אשר צוה משה would have sufficed, as even Rashi leaves out any new information, simply saying: רש"י על שמות פרק לה פסוק ה כבר פירשתי נדבת המשכן ומלאכתו במקום צוואתם. Nowhere does the definition of what Torah consists of become more clear than in a parasha with little actual “teachings”, nowhere than immediately after the saga of the עגל is more appropriate to discover the relationship of מעשה בראשית and the original צל סוכת בראשית than in the relationship of בצל אל to a newly positioned משה. And it turns out that the redefinition of the position and purpose of a Torah that is based on דברי"ם – אלה הדברים – על פי הדברים, a Torah that is recreated every הקהל to reconstruct this ויקהל משה, the essential rebuilding of the ויקהלו על אהרון to create an עגל and an ersatz-Moshe out of the אל מדעתם, yes, it turn out that the redefinition in terms of the relationship to הקב"ה is כביכול linked to the very re-description of Torah in terms of Moshe!
The only way to deal with the inordinate amount of repetition and detail in the Mishkan is to recognize that the criterion for the Torah is not the information per se, but the “experience” of the information on the part of הקב”ה just as דברים represents the experience of the information for Moshe. In sharing the experience we share infinitely more than the data, in exactly the way that consciousness per se is infinitely more than data, being the experience of the data as an organism. The essential distinction of חכמה באומות תאמין תורה באומות אל תאמין lies in this, for as has already been made clear in an equally astounding manner by אבן עזרא exactly where it makes the most sense, there is no point in the intellectual content of Torah or any חכמה, as יחשבו כי המעשה העיקר. ואיננו רק הלבב והמעשה והלבב והלשון להרגיל. וכן כתוב בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו וקדמונינו אמרו רחמנא לבא בעי. ושרש כל המצות עד שיאהב את השם בכל נפשו וידבק בו וזה לא יהיה שלם אם לא יכיר מעשי השם בעליונים ובשפלים וידע דרכיו. וככה אמר הנביא כי אם בזאת יתהלל המתהלל השכל וידוע אותי. אז יתברר לו כי השם עושה חסד משפט וצדקה בארץ ולא יוכל לדעת השם אם לא ידע נפשו ונשמתו וגופו. כי כל מי שלא ידע מהות נפשו חכמת מה (אבן עזרא על שמות פרק לא פסוק יח ) and only the sharing of consciousness which entails the experience of Being can be meaningful, in which case what was meant to be an expression of אור פניך which is אור הגנוז would have meant the information within the context of מסוף העולם עד סופו must now be accessed through the reconstruction of another mind, the experiences of Moshe himself. This is the rediscovery of love that brings the Rambam to redefine אהבה through Moshe as an experiential awareness rather than an active מצוה- וכיצד הוא הדרך לאהבתו וליראתו.
Thus יפה שיחתן של עבדי אבות לפני המקום, or חביבות is another element in experience. But most striking is the way that the greatest focus is always upon the problems linked to the fundamental relationship to this sharing, such that the most חביב לפני המקום is watching the process of self-discovery and the growth of לב and passion. The mistakes of אחיתופל וירבעם ודואג in their hearts are profoundly part of this story all the way at the beginning, and it is precisely the confusion of מינות in which consciousness is believed to exist in glorious isolation, that all the horror begins. So the camera stops on אדם בגן עדן וחוה, on סיני-עגל-משכן or on נדב ואביהו and on every striking step of responsiveness of a Creation that can lead to ישמח ה’ במעשיו.

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