The Verb That Annihilated the Demons When the Tabernacle Rose

For one hundred and twenty days Moses lived inside a cloud on the mountain, and every dawn he opened his mouth on the same psalm.

"Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High," he said into the dark, "abides in the shadow of the Almighty." He was not reciting it for comfort. He was building a wall out of it. Below him the wilderness crawled with things that had been loose in the world since the gates of Eden swung shut behind the first man, and Moses knew their names, and he sang the psalm at them like a man holding a torch against a ring of eyes.

The Things That Roamed the Wilderness

They were called the mazikin, the destroying spirits, and they had ruled the unguarded places of creation for as long as anyone could remember. Some of them flew. Rabbi Berekhyah had described one that beats through the air like a bird and strikes like a loosed arrow, so that a man walking a road at noon could be dead before he heard the wing. Others did not fly at all. The worst of them sat in the heat of the day and waited.

Its name was Ketev Meriri, the bitter destruction that lays waste at noon. Its head was shaped like a calf's, and a single horn rose from the center of its forehead, and whoever looked at it, man or beast or wild animal, did not live to look away. From the seventeenth of Tammuz to the ninth of Av it held dominion, and in those weeks the noon hour belonged to it. People learned the rhythm of fear. They kept their children out of empty courtyards when the sun stood straight overhead.

The Psalm Moses Carried Down the Mountain

This was the danger Moses recited against. "You shall not fear the terror of the night," he said, and the words admitted what everyone already knew, that there was a terror, and it had a face. "Nor the arrow that flies by day. Nor the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that lays waste at noon."

Up in the cloud, the Holy One answered him. "You have trusted in Me," God said. "By your life, I will stand up for you." So Moses leaned the whole weight of his trust not on the sanctuary he would build, but on the One who had asked for it. He understood the difference. If a man trusts the building, he trusts walls and gold and acacia wood. Moses trusted the wings he could not see.

Resh Lakish, hearing the verse "His truth is a shield and buckler," said it plainly. To anyone who wraps himself in the truth of the Torah, God becomes a shield. The word for shield was tzinah, the tall body-shield a soldier hides behind entire. That was the kind of cover the psalm promised. Not a charm. A wall the size of a man.

The Single Day Everything Changed

Then Moses came down, and the building rose.

On the day the work was done, the Tabernacle stood in the camp, boards upright, curtains drawn, the gold catching the morning. And Rabbi Yochanan stopped on a single word in the verse that records it. Scripture says Moses finished setting up the Tabernacle. The Hebrew is kalot. Yochanan heard inside it the sound of kiluy, annihilation. The verse was not only saying that a structure was completed. It was saying that something was destroyed.

What was destroyed were the mazikin. On the day the sanctuary rose, the destroying spirits were annihilated from the inhabited world. The flying arrow-demon, the calf-headed thing that owned the noon, the pestilence that walked in darkness, all of them lost the ground they had held since Eden. The psalm Moses had carried for one hundred and twenty days finally closed its last clause: "No evil shall befall you, nor any plague come near your tent." Up to the word tent. Up to the curtained tent now standing in the middle of Israel, and not one step closer.

The Blessing That Sealed the Eviction

Resh Lakish was not satisfied to hear it only from the Psalms. "Why do I need to learn this from the book of Psalms," he said, "when I can learn it from its own place?" And he turned to the priestly blessing.

"The Lord bless you and keep you," the blessing begins, and Resh Lakish read into it the thing the verse would not say outright. Kept from what? From the destroying spirits. Kept from all evil. And the keeping took hold with its full force on a single day, the day the Tabernacle was erected. The blessing and the building and the annihilation all landed together, so that the words a priest would speak over Israel for the rest of its history were, underneath, a guarantee against the things that walked at noon.

Rabbi Chanina bar Abba had counted the guard another way. The psalm promises a thousand at the left hand and a myriad at the right, and he said they do not merely stand there. When a thousand destroying forces come against a man, they fall in front of him, beaten, and a myriad fall before his right hand, defeated by the weight of every good deed it has done. A legion stationed between a person and the dark.

So the noon emptied of its terror. Children crossed the bright courtyards. The seventeenth of Tammuz came around again, and the calf-headed thing that had owned those weeks found the inhabited world shut against it, sealed by a tent of curtains and a blessing and a single verb that had quietly meant destroyed all along.