Tabernacle in the Desert

It’s easy to forget, as we start to read this week about the building of the elaborate Tabernacle, where the children of Israel were building it. Somehow, in the middle of the wilderness, they managed to find gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, fine linen, goats' hair, acacia wood, oil, spices, incense, and dolphin skins! There’s actually a fair amount of debate about what those “dolphins” (takhash in Hebrew) might be. Translations have included ermine, badger, antelope, okapi, giraffe, and dugong. According to the Babylonian Talmud and Rashi’s commentary, the takhash was a kosher, multicolored beast with a single horn, which came into being for the sole purpose of building the Tabernacle.

Gold we know they asked of the Egyptians—
and received—and silver for the clasps.
Cassia they gathered from the wadis,
though myrrh and frankincense were likely spoil,
a queen of Egypt having sent to Punt
for thirty-one small tubs of incense trees,
borne to Thebes aboard her royal barge.
Linen, too, they may have learned to heckle
for their one-time masters, enormous spools
for winding the dead, loaded when they left,
on hapless donkeys, or pounded from wild flax
they found along the way. Acacia bloomed
in the desert, brought by camel caravans
who grazed it on the African savanna
and dropped the seeds at Sinai where the plant
discovered how to hoard the brief rain.
Ram was plentiful, leaping the crags,
and served for sacrifice, horn, and hide.
So far, they might have built their Tabernacle
in perfect solitude, a tribe of nomads
in a waste of granite, sand, and sky.
And yet, those dolphins breach the text like fish
out of water. Takhash. The name itself
darts across the scroll just long enough
for G-d, whose every word created something,
to fashion the perfect covering for the Tent.
Then word and being vanish all at once,
a miracle spent in thirty cubits of curtain.