The Mishkan as metaphor-form and anti-form: on the transformation of urban space

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Bonnie Roche

If we have been created to endure the same suffering, to be doomed to the same prearranged death, why give us lips, why eyes and voices, why souls and languages all different? (1)

Edmond Jabes

At the center of steel and stone in our modern cities stands the same individual that once stood in the shadows of the ancient desert. This individual yearns for the same spiritual rootedness to a universe larger than oneself. This cry for a glimpse of the ineffable is becoming increasingly audible as a public voice in the canyons of our urban environments.

Can we by way of an ancient metaphor, the Mishkan, the Tabernacle of the Hebrew Bible, create a sacred moment in a secular city? And, can we achieve this by re-mapping the factors integral to the world's cities in such a way that the spiritual and cultural capital that lies latent within these cities be manifested in real time and real space, thus beginning a journey back to the roots of the generative source of the creation and continuity of great cities?

We cannot look at the cities of the world as the literal material of their urban landscape, some more compelling than others in their obvious organizations of great cathedrals and gathering places. We must look at urban environments as an architecture that had a genesis, a reason for becoming, a universe "that did not come about by necessity but as a result of freedom," (2) a freedom of ideas that began with the individual and formed by the collective.

What we once knew in the ancient world, more than ever, has relevance today; that the ancient Mishkan, the tent assembled and disassembled for forty years throughout the journey of the People of Israel, was critical to creating and holding a newly formed community from a nomadic people in a land that was ownerless and free. The Mishkan became a vehicle for spiritual rootedness within nomadism, within mobility.

We began as nomads, free and limitless in a land not sown. It was all earth and sky, a land and a light of exquisite contrasts, with a wind and a people moving across its endless space. The choreography of our movement was vivid. Our stopping to rest in our journey had significance. It was an existence based on time with no physical points.

When we began planting, for the first time, we produced the artificial. According to Spengler (3), the peasant found a rootedness in the planting. He himself became the plant, no longer nomadic, limitless or free. And the marketplace of the peasant was one of individuals, rooted to their crop.

But we went further, leaving the rootedness of the peasant life of the earth. We imagined, through the abstract life of the mind, a built world manifesting a universe greater than oneself. The intellectual construct of the collective, which we know as urban landscape, freed us, made us limitless and again nomadic.

The fact that almost the entire Book of Exodus is dedicated to the most intricate and detailed descriptions of the building, contents, materials, assemblage, and even timing of the assemblage of the Mishkan along this journey, indicates an enduring importance to the People of Israel that is significant beyond its literal physical attributes. The Mishkan became the vehicle that strengthened the bonds between individuals assisting greatly in their evolution as a People.

It is held in the Jewish text that God created this physical world as a dwelling place for man. And in turn, man created the Mishkan as a dwelling place for God. Just as the world that God created needed man to complete it, the dwelling place that man created was not complete without God. This reciprocal act of "making" signifies the partnership established between God and man.

The act of "making," (4) the very construction of the sanctuary, became evidence of the contract between God and humanity. It was a conscious reciprocal exchange, an act of will and a mirroring of dwelling places between the spiritual and the human realms. Periodically a sign of the hovering cloud came to rest, indicating to the People of Israel that their journey was to stop. "The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting. When the cloud was raised up from the Tabernacle, the Children of Israel would embark on all their journeys. If the cloud did not raise up, they would not embark until the day it rose" (Exodus 40:34-37). With each movement of the cloud, the Tabernacle was disassembled and transported in parts until the cloud rested once again. Even in our dwelling place there is always the reminder that the "holiness" was in the act and not in the thing.

This "arrest" along a nomadic journey, was determined by a force outside the people. The Mishkan took on a life separate from human activity, a life choreographed by God, a pause, "so that he may dwell among them." What a wonderful theatrical device this was. Individuals in the infancy of forming a community are told when to stop, to organize in a collective effort that which they developed a growing passion to do, and which they repeated over and over, each time as if for the first time.