There is a stunning detail hiding inside the boring carpentry of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 36:33. The middle bar that ran the length of the Tabernacle's north wall, mortised from board to board, end to end — where did it come from? The Targum answers: of the tree which our father Abraham planted in Beira of Sheba, praying there in the Name of the Word of the Lord, the everlasting, God.
Genesis 21:33 reports that Abraham planted a tamarisk tree — eshel — in Beersheba and there called on the name of the Lord. The plain text leaves it at that. But the Targum insists the tree had a destiny. Four generations later, when Jacob went down to Egypt, he passed through Beersheba and cut down the tree, carrying its wood with him (this tradition is spelled out in Genesis Rabbah and elsewhere). The wood traveled to Egypt, was kept sacred through 210 years of slavery, was carried out in the exodus, and finally arrived at Sinai — where Bezalel used it to make the middle bar of the Mishkan.
The Targum's phrase — the tree which our father Abraham planted — spans a thousand years in one line. The oldest patriarchal prayer site and the newest national sanctuary are connected by a single piece of timber.
The homily embedded here is breathtaking. The spiritual structure of Jewish history is continuous. Abraham's prayer under a tree in the Negev and Israel's Tabernacle in the wilderness are not two separate religious moments. They are the same wood, the same continuity, the same covenant. What the patriarch planted, the nation built with.
The takeaway: nothing sacred in Jewish life appears from nowhere. The Tabernacle's middle bar was Abraham's tree. Every new act of holiness rests on something an earlier generation had the foresight to plant.