A thought on Parshas Tetzave

"...orech he'chatzer meah ba'ama v'rochav chamishim ba'chamishim..." (27:18) "...the length of the Mishkan courtyard was 100 cubits and the width fifty in fifty..." The two parshios of Terumah and Tetzaveh introduce the structure and content of the Mishkan, the mobile shrine in the desert where our nation brought offerings to HaShem. We learn in these parshios about the architecture, the implements and ornaments, and the vestments which were involved in the services and rituals. We know that the Mishkan was a forerunner of the Mikdash which was later constructed in Israel, and for which we still pray today in anticipation of restoring the sacred avodah. As we learned last week, the Gan is of the opinion that having a Mishkan, and ultimately a Mikdash, was all part of "Plan A." Following the revelation at Sinai, the Jews were always intended and destined to congregate at a central place of worship (see earlier 15:17 where the Song at the Sea enunciates this). These holy places would always be part of our religious reality, whether in the desert, in Shiloh, in Nov, in Givon, and finally in Jerusalem. Our sages extrapolate from the details of the Mishkan and its contents to the broader and historically later advent of the Mikdash. Some of our verses here and last week which describe vestments and utensils, for example, are taken as the blueprints for constructing identical items once the Mikdash was established centuries later. This might imply that within the passages which define the Mishkan are allusions to the later emergence of the Mikdash. After all, it is one single "Plan." It would stand to reason that whereas the architecture differed in the Mishkan, in the Shrines of Shiloh, Nov and Givon, and in the Mikdash (the former used animal skins and trees, both living things, whereas the Mikdash was made out of stone, with no organic components, a topic for another discussion iyH), the ritual avodah was essentially the same and required similar altars, arks, tables, utensils and clothing. There was clearly a link between our parsha's topic of Mishkan and the much later topic of Mishkan. Does our parsha hint at this eventual Mikdash? The Gan finds such an allusion. In depicting the dimensions of the Desert Mishkan, the Torah describes its length, its breadth and its height in unequivocal measurements. There is one ambiguous phrase, however, In our verse, upon giving absolute measurements such as "100 cubits length" and "five cubits height", the verse says that its width was "fifty in fifty" (or fifty by fifty) without specifying that this was in cubits. Rashi and others go to significant lengths in helping us compute this numeric coupling of 50 in 50. The Gan offers another thought, citing an explanation which "HaRav Bechor Shor heard directly from his father." (We studied the Bechor Shor three years ago. He was Rabbeinu Yosef of Orleans. His father was Rabbeinu Yitzchak. It is fascinating that in the Bechor Shor's own commentary, there is no reference to this interpretation from his father!). Anyway, this is what the Gan tells us in his name: The courtyard of the great Mikdash in Jerusalem was massive. Its dimensions were a full 500 by 500 cubits. The Mishkan, in contrast, was 100 by 50. Now, what are the square cubits of the Mikdash? 250,000 square cubits. What were the square cubits of the Mishkan? 5000 square cubits. What is the ratio of 5000 to 250,000? The Gan relates that 5000 is one fiftieth of 250,000. This now explains the atypical numeric reference of our verse. By writing that the Mishkan was "fifty in fifty", the Torah is telling us that the Mishkan, which was a small precursor to the Mikdash, had dimensions which were a fiftieth of the Mikdash yet to come! With this perceptive calculation, the father of the Bechor Shor was able to make sense of words which might have seemed both redundant (fifty in fifty) and might have seemed insufficient (by omitting mention of amos or cubits).Instead, the measurement is in really a ratio of the size of the Mishkan relative to the size of the eventual Mikdash. Good Shabbos. D Fox