Parshat Vayekhel: Our Work is to Combine

by Shoshana Jakobovits '26

The beginning of the book of Shemot is absolutely breathtaking: the burning bush, ten plagues, the Exodus from Egypt, the parting of the sea of reeds, the revelation at Mount Sinai. There is never a dull moment. In comparison, the latter parshiyot of the book, the ones that describe the building of the mishkan, do not have quite the same narrative tension. By the end of the book of Shemot, epic narrative has made way for a detailed description of the building of the mishkan and for a different type of relationship between God and the Jewish people—one where humans are empowered to build a structure to house God’s presence in their midst.

This mishkan has an architect who is pushed into the limelight in our parsha: 

And Moses said to the Israelites: See, God has singled out by name Bezalel, son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, endowing him with a divine spirit of skill, ability, and knowledge in every kind of craft, and inspiring him to make designs for work in gold, silver, and copper [...] (Exodus 35:30-32).

Not only does our architect have a name, he is also spotlighted by the pesukim with the use of the word “see” (re’u) and the highlighting of his know-how and skill. All these are literary cues that there is something important about his craft. The Gemara on these verses says: “Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: Bezalel knew how to combine (letzaref) the letters with which heaven and earth were created” (Berakhot 55a).

What a strange way of describing craftsmanship. What does Rav Yehuda mean to say? This allusion to the creation of heaven and earth clearly throws us back to Bereishit and the act of creation. And in the creation narrative, it is striking that God creates the world through a series of acts of separation.

God separated the light from the darkness… God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.”… God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night…” (Bereishit 1:1-14).

God creates the world by separating, untangling, and dividing the primal chaos into light and darkness, waters above and waters below. Interestingly, Bezalel’s wisdom, the type of artisanship that is needed for building the mishkan, however, is precisely the inverse: the verb used by the Gemara, “letzaref” can mean to connect, to build together, to join, to combine. The polar opposite of “separating.”

“Letzaref” means to know how to bring together the heavens and the earth that God separated a long time ago. God brought the world into existence by separating out the primal cosmic material into heaven and earth. But Bezalel is the one who knows how to bring them back together, how to combine them to make something new that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Now that we’ve left Egypt; now that the ten plagues, the parting of the sea of reeds and the thunderous revelation at Sinai have passed, we’re inching on our path towards the real world, away from the miracles and epic narratives of Bereishit and the beginning of Shemot. The end of the book of Shemot is the beginning of a transition from a mythical existence to a mundane, historical, human era. An era in which we are challenged to bring together people as different and opposed as heaven and earth. 

May we know how to combine and bring people together. May we continue in Bezalel's tracks “letzaref,” to take the elements of God's creation and combine them to build homes and live peacefully, make a sanctuary for God to dwell among us. May we use our human wisdom to combine and to build, not to divide and separate, so that God, the God of peace, can dwell among us.

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Shoshana Jakobovits's passions are texts and languages (both human and computer languages). She is a software engineer by profession, occasionally a teacher, and consistently a wholehearted Jewish learner born in Geneva, Switzerland. She studied at Ein Hanatziv, Hadar, and the Center for Modern Torah Leadership and has a particular interest in the process of psak and halakha in general. When she’s not in the Beit Midrash, Shoshana expresses her love for text by working as a software engineer in natural language processing at Google AI Research. She is fluent in English, French, Swiss/German, and Hebrew. Shoshana lives in Zurich, Switzerland, with her spouse Michael and their baby Liad.