Shabbat Parashat Beha'alotecha - 5783

Shabbat Parashat Beha'alotecha - 5783

Rabbi Hal Miller

And this is the workmanship of the Menorah, beaten out gold to its base, to its flower,

it is beaten out, according to the image that God showed Moshe, so did he make the

Menorah. [Bamidbar 8:4]

The manufacturing process of the Menorah is not clear. We know that Betzalel was

assigned to make everything, or at least to supervise all the manufacturing according to

the specifications that Moshe gave him and the guidance that God implanted within him.

Rashi cites the Midrash that Moshe was having difficulty understanding God's instructions

for the Menorah, to the point that Moshe threw the block of gold into the fire and the

Menorah "made itself". But these conflict with our verse, which indicates that "someone"

made it, and with the idea that God gave Betzalel all the instruction he would need. How

do we reconcile our verse with what we know about Betzalel doing the work and Rashi

and this Midrash?

From a grammatical standpoint, our verse is indicating that Moshe made the Menorah

since "so did he make" immediately follows after "God showed Moshe". This is the position

Ramban takes, as does Ibn Ezra and the Sifrei. Targum Yonatan says that the "he" here

refers directly to Betzalel to reconcile it with the earlier verse. Rashi understands it to

refer to "whoever made the Menorah" and does not further identify this whoever. In

Tanchuma it says that God made it. So, who made it?

The answer is, "all of them". How can that be? For this we look quickly at what this verse

is doing here at this point in the story. Rav Schwab notes that God showed Moshe "the

details of the Menorah through a vision of fire", thus God had a part. This explains the

story of Moshe casting a block into the "fire", Moshe's part. What came out still needed to

be "made" by Betzalel according to the form that God installed in the material in the fire.

The confusion in our verse about the identity of whoever made it is eliminated by the

understanding that this verse is not describing an act happening now, but what happened

earlier in Shemot. The subject here is not the construction, rather an explanation of the

workmanship of what already exists by this time, thus the "he made" is not pointing at

anything we do not already know.