When the Song of Songs sings, "King Solomon made for him a palanquin" (Song of Songs 3:9), the sages of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:2 hear something far beyond a royal carriage. The King is not Shlomo son of David. The King is the One to whom shalom itself belongs. And the palanquin is the Tent of Meeting.
Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai tells a parable. A king had a little daughter. While she was small, he would meet her freely in the marketplace and chat with her in alleyways. But when she grew up, he said, "It is no longer fitting for my daughter that I should speak with her in public. Let us build a partition, and I will speak with her from behind it."
That, the sages say, is the whole arc of Israel's early romance with God. "When Israel was a youth, then I loved him" (Hosea 11:1). In the house of bondage, they saw Him: "I will pass through the land of Egypt" (Exodus 12:12). At the Sea, they saw Him: "Israel saw the great hand" (Exodus 14:31). At Sinai, they saw Him: "Face to face the Lord spoke with you" (Deuteronomy 5:4). But once Israel had received the Torah and become a full nation, a sheleimah, a whole people, the intimacy had to change shape. "It is no longer fitting for My children that I speak with them in the open. Make for Me a dwelling, and I will speak from within it." That is why the verse later says, "When Moses would come to the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he would hear the voice speaking to him from above the cover" (Numbers 7:89).
Every detail of Solomon's palanquin is then decoded into the Tent. "Wood from Lebanon" becomes the acacia boards standing upright (Exodus 26:15). "Its posts of silver" become the pillar hooks (Exodus 27:10). "Its seat of purple" becomes the blue and purple curtain (Exodus 26:31). And "inside it was joined together with love" — Rabbi Yudan says that love is the merit of Torah and the righteous. Rabbi Azariah says that love is the Shekhinah Herself.
Then a gentile came to Rabban Gamaliel with a sharper question. Why did God hide Himself in a lowly bush to speak with Moses? Gamaliel answered, "If He had appeared in a carob tree or a fig tree, you would be asking the same question. The point is this — there is no place on earth empty of the Shekhinah." The bush was proof that God dwells in the smallest corners.
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sakhnin seals the teaching with a picture. Imagine a cave on the seashore. The tide rises, and the cave fills completely with water, yet the sea is not diminished by a drop. So it was with the Tent of Meeting. The infinite radiance of the Shekhinah poured into a small canvas room — and nothing of the infinite was lost.
The deeper message running through this chapter of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, which belongs to the rich stream of Midrash Aggadah, is that the Tabernacle was never a downgrade. It was the architecture of a love that had grown up.