When the offering was completed (1 Chronicles 18:26), the midrash reads it through Song of Songs: the thread of crimson, the image of the veil that separated the holy from the profane. There was no vessel in the Temple more praiseworthy than the veil, Rabbi Berachiah said, citing Tractate Middot: forty cubits long and twenty wide, woven as thick as a handbreadth, requiring three hundred priests to move it. The veil was both barrier and connection — the thing that kept the holy of holies separate was also the thing that acknowledged something worth separating from.
Israel is compared to the veil. As the veil separated holy from profane, God has separated Israel from all the nations. The separation is not rejection of the nations — it is a structural distinction, a set-apart-ness that serves the same function as the Temple's inner curtain. What is set apart is set apart for something. The veil did not merely divide space. It defined what was on the other side of it.
"We will do and we will listen" — Israel's response at Sinai (Exodus 24:7) is the veil in time. The commitment to act before understanding, to accept the covenant terms before hearing all the terms — this is the moment of separation that echoes through history. The veil in the Temple, the vow at Sinai, the thread of crimson on Rahab's window (Joshua 2:18), the scarlet thread marking Zerah's wrist (Genesis 38:28) — the rabbis kept finding the same red thread: the sign that something has been marked and will be remembered.