When Moses Raised the Tabernacle the Angels Built One Too

The Word That Carried Two Buildings

Moses finished raising the Tabernacle. The Hebrew says it plainly. But Rabbi Simon looked at the word et in the verse, a small grammatical particle that can be optional in its construction, and asked what it was doing there.

The question every rabbi asks of an extra word is: what does it add? Rabbi Simon's answer opened a second story above the first. When God told Israel to build a tabernacle below, He told the angels in the same breath to build a tabernacle above. The et folds in the second building. When Moses raised the earthly sanctuary, the angelic builders finished the heavenly one. Both came up together on the same morning. The verse records not one completion but two.

The Address of the Blessing to Come

The implication did not stop there. In this world, God has charged Aaron and his sons to bless Israel with the priestly blessing. In the world to come, God will bless Israel directly, in His own glory, as Psalm 134:3 promises: The Lord who made heaven and earth bless you from Zion. The heavenly tabernacle is the address from which that future blessing will come, and it was raised the same morning Moses nailed down the last peg of the earthly one.

So the morning held two structures at once. Below, the boards stood upright in their sockets, the curtains drawn over the frame, the smell of fresh oil and acacia wood in the desert air. Above, in the place no eye on the camp floor could see, the angelic counterpart stood finished in the same instant. The earthly tabernacle would shelter the daily blessing pronounced by human hands. The heavenly one waited, raised and ready, for the day the blessing would come without any priest standing between God and Israel at all.

The Vestments That Passed Between Hands

Aaron was dying on Mount Hor. Moses had to transfer the priesthood from brother to son without the vestments profaning either man in the process. A high priest who wore the sacred garments outside the Temple mount received forty lashes, the linen and wool combination that made the priestly clothing was a mixture ordinarily forbidden, permitted only in its specific sacred context. The garments could not travel down the mountain as garments. They had to travel as something else.

God told Moses: take Aaron and his son Elazar and bring them up the mountain. Strip Aaron's vestments and put them on his son. Aaron will die there. The verb take was the key. It was the same word God had used when He first inducted Aaron into the priesthood at the beginning of Leviticus: Take Aaron. Rabbi Simon in Midrash Tanchuma reads the repetition as a transfer of commission. The same word that opened the priesthood closed it for Aaron and opened it for Elazar simultaneously. The stripping was not a removal. It was a relaying, the same authority, traveling down one generation through the same gesture that had established it.

What Aaron Saw on the Mountain

So the three of them climbed, Moses leading his brother and his nephew up the bare slope of Mount Hor with the camp shrinking behind them. At the top, Moses worked the garments loose from Aaron's body one piece at a time, the tunic, the robe, the breastplate with its stones, and laid each on Elazar in the order it had first been put on Aaron. Aaron stood and watched his own vestments rise onto his son even as the strength left his limbs. He saw his priestly role continuing on another man's shoulders before his eyes had closed.

This was the consolation God had offered Moses in anticipation of Aaron's grief: Aaron was bequeathing his crown to his children. Moses had no such inheritance to give. But Aaron, on the last morning of his life, dressed his son in what had been Aaron's own before the mountain claimed him, and died knowing the garments would go on being worn.