Three Things God Had to Show Moses Directly

Moses stood outside the camp after dark and could not find the moon.

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It was there. It had been born that day, but it had been born late, and a month born after the sixth hour does not give the eye enough to work with, so a man can look straight at the place where it is and see the same black he sees everywhere else. Moses had brought Israel out of Egypt. He had gone up a mountain in cloud and come back down with the terms. Now he was standing in the dark squinting at a sky that was refusing him a crescent, and the whole calendar of a people was waiting on his eyes.

So God put out a finger and pointed at it. This one. This month, for you.

Then came the part that cost more than the pointing. "Until now I have been the one setting the year," God told him, "adding the extra month when the extra month was needed. From here it is yours. Like this you shall look at the new moon, and like this you shall fix it, and so shall it be for the generations." A man who could not see the moon unaided was handed the moon to keep time by.

God Caught Each Creature and Held It Up

The swarming things went the same way, by hand.

Leviticus was about to rule on which creatures make a person impure, and Moses could not hold the distinctions, because a lizard is a lizard right up until the moment somebody needs to know which lizard. So the Holy One caught each species, one at a time, and brought it up in front of him and said: this you may eat, this you may not. A mouse held up. A gecko held up. Whatever crawls in the sand, held up and named and set back down.

The midrash heads off the objection before anyone can raise it, since God had already walked every living creature past Adam so that Adam could name them. The difference is that Adam was being asked to invent. Moses was only being asked to remember, and he could not.

Four Fires on the Mountain

The third thing was a lamp.

On the mountain, in the middle of the whole plan of the Tabernacle, God came to the menorah, and Moses could not take it in. Bowls, knobs, blossoms, six branches off a central shaft, all of it hammered out of one piece. He heard every word and could not assemble the object behind the words.

"See," God said. "I am making it in front of you."

He took white fire and red fire and black fire and green fire, and out of the four of them he built a lampstand in the air, the bowls and the knobs and the blossoms and every one of the six branches, standing there burning in four colors. "This is the work of the menorah (the lampstand)." The word was this. Not a description, a finger.

Moses looked at it, and it did not go in.

The Design Engraved on His Hand

So God took Moses' hand and engraved the design into the palm of it. "Go down, and make it exactly as I have cut it into your hand."

He went down. Somewhere between the mountain and the camp the shape left him, and by the time his feet were on level ground there was nothing in his head at all, and nothing on his hand either. He turned around and climbed back up and asked to be shown again. He was shown again. He came down again, and it was gone again before he reached the bottom.

The third time, God took a menorah of fire and went through it slowly, every single detail of it, holding it in front of him until there could be no possible question about any part of it.

Moses came down. Then he said the thing that gave the verse its double meaning: mikshah te'aseh ha-menorah. Hammered work, the phrase means. It also means: how hard this thing is to make.

Throw the Gold Into the Fire

"Throw the gold in," God said. "Put a talent of it into the fire and it will make itself."

That is what the verse carries under the plain sense. The menorah shall be made, in a form that means made of its own accord, by nobody's hands. And still Moses stood there holding a talent of gold and could not form a clear picture of what was supposed to come out of the flame.

So God stopped teaching him. "Go to Bezalel. He will do it right."

Go to Bezalel

Bezalel was a young man from the tribe of Judah with good hands and no revelation. He had not been on the mountain. He had never seen white fire or red fire or a lampstand burning in the air, and nobody had cut anything into his palm. Moses told him what was wanted, and he did it at once, without difficulty, as though he had been given a drawing.

Moses looked at the finished lamp.

He knew it. That was the whole trouble of the last three ascents standing on a bench in front of him in hammered gold, the bowls and the knobs and the blossoms in their places, and he recognized every part of it on sight, the way a man recognizes a face he could never have described to anyone. He had held it three times and lost it three times. Bezalel had never held it once.

"God showed me over and over," Moses said, "and I could not seize it. You were never shown, and you made it out of what you already knew. You have the right name. Bezalel, in the shadow of God, as if you had been standing in God's shadow while He was showing it to me."

Then he turned his own hand over and looked at the palm. Nothing on it. There had been nothing on it since the first descent.