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This week’s parsha describes building the משכן:
Rabbi Shulman has been teaching ספר דניאל, and he cited an interesting midrash:
We’re all familiar with this model of the four kingdoms as a model for Jewish history from the first churban: four גלויות, Babylon, Persia/Media, Greece and Rome (with Egypt as the “zero-th” גלות). Rabbi Shulman pointed out that this model comes from Daniel:
(in this vision, Daniel only names Babylon as the first. In later chapters, he will explicitly name Media as the second and Greece as the third).
This model of future history comes up a lot in חז״ל:
The latter two I understand; תהו ובהו are bad, אימה חשכה are bad. They midrashically connect to גלות. But in our parsha, ה׳ says build Me a מקדש and the midrash reads it as build it out of Babylon et al.! What does that mean?
I think there’s a hint to an idea that comes out the philosophy of Rav Kook, from R. Zadok of Lublin. But first, Hegel.
The Hegelian model of history is one of a series of “dialectics”, opposing grand concepts (like capitalism vs. communism during the Cold War), called thesis and antithesis, that need to reach a synthesis, which then becomes the thesis to a new dialectic. Every stage leads to a further evolution of humanity until it reaches its final development, the “End of History”. חז״ל didn’t read Hegel, but one way to understand the ארבע גלויות is as a series of dialectics between Israel and each of the kingdoms, leading to a higher spiritual level for Israel as it is redeemed from that גלות. It’s a very Hegelian idea, and fits with the way we use the term אחרית הימים.
This way of looking at the ארבע גלויות is expressed in the writings of R. Zadok.
The Divine purpose in history is bring the Divine wisdom, the Torah, to the entire world:
And in R. Zadok’s model, it’s not just the Jews who have this wisdom. We need to interact with everyone else to fully understand the Torah. It’s worth noting that he does not say that exile per se is needed; he gives the examples of זה לעומת זה of Abraham/Nimrod and Shlomo/Queen of Sheba as cases when we learned from other nations without the punishment of exile. See Dr. Elman’s article for details.
And Rav Kook took that dialectical/developmental model of history and saw in it the nationalism/globalism and religious/secular dialectics that would lead to the State of Israel.
So, back to our midrash. There may be a hint here of this idea.
Our mission in the world is ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם. We can only do that by building the מקדש of the זהב וכסף ונחשת of the entire world.