My three-year-old is, like most three-year-olds, fiercely independent while tethering the line of being totally dependent on me at the same time. “Mommy, I want to do it myself” is her current mantra, whether she’s putting on her shoes on the wrong feet, pouring her own water all over the counter, or insisting she can buckle her own car seat. It’s maddening and beautiful all at once, because what I’m watching is a tiny person learning to lay claim to her place in the world. She’s not just doing things. She’s becoming someone. Someone who can act, who can contribute, who matters.
I think about this every time I read this week’s Torah portion, Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19), because I believe it contains one of the most powerful teachings on resilience and human growth in the entire Bible. And it’s hiding in what looks, at first glance, like the most tedious section of Scripture: a construction manual.
Terumah launches the building of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, the portable dwelling place for God’s presence that the Israelites carried with them through the desert. The instructions are staggeringly detailed. Measurements for the Aron, the Ark. The Shulchan, the Table. The Menorah, the Lampstand. Curtains, planks, silver sockets. It goes on for chapters. And it raises an obvious question:
Why does God devote so much space in His Word to the blueprints of a temporary tent?
The Mishkan was not the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It was portable. It was made of wood and fabric and animal skins. And frankly, it doesn’t even seem to belong in the book of Exodus, which is the story of a nation being born. Slavery, liberation, the covenant at Sinai. The Mishkan feels like it should be in Leviticus, the book devoted to sacrificial worship and priestly service. So what is it doing here, as the grand conclusion to Israel’s origin story?
The answer has everything to do with my three-year-old and her shoes.
Look at the Israelites’ track record up to this point. It is wall-to-wall complaining. They complained when Pharaoh made their labor worse. They panicked at the edge of the sea:
After crossing on dry ground, dry ground, they complained about the water. Then the food. Then the water again. And then, mere weeks after hearing the voice of the living God at Mount Sinai, they built a Golden Calf.
The sea split. Bread fell from heaven. Fire came down on a mountain. And none of it changed them.
So God tried something radically different. He said: Build Me something.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it in a line I carry with me: “It is not what God does for us that transforms us. It is what we do for God.”
As long as God was rescuing and Moses was problem-solving, the Israelites remained spiritual toddlers. Passive, dependent, reactive. Their only reflex was to cry out and complain. And of course it was. When someone else handles every crisis for you, you don’t grow. You just wait for the next disaster and resent whoever isn’t fixing it fast enough.
But the Mishkan changed everything. Suddenly every person had something to give. Some brought gold, silver, and bronze. Others donated fine linen and animal skins. Craftsmen offered their skill. Women spun thread. The people gave with such enthusiasm that Moses had to tell them to stop, which might be the only recorded instance in human history of a leader saying “Enough, we have too much.”
And here is the detail that should knock us off our feet: during the entire construction of the Mishkan, not a single complaint is recorded. Not one.
The people who couldn’t go three days without grumbling suddenly became generous, collaborative, and focused. What changed? They had something to do. They had something to build. They went from passengers to partners, from recipients to contributors. They put their shoes on, maybe on the wrong feet, but they did it themselves.
The Talmud plays on this idea with a beautiful piece of wordplay: “Al tikrei banayich ela bonayich,” which means, “Do not read the word as ‘your children’ but as ‘your builders.'” That is the turning point. Children become adults when they become builders.
This is why the Mishkan belongs in Exodus. The birth of Israel as a nation was not complete when they crossed the sea. It was not complete when they received the Torah at Sinai. It was complete when they built something together, when they stopped being passive and started giving. Bereishit, the book of Genesis, opens with God building a home for humanity. Shemot, the book of Exodus, closes with humanity building a home for God.
God did not need a tent in the wilderness. The Creator of the universe does not need acacia wood and goat hair. But His people needed to build it, because the only way out of dependency, the only path to resilience, is to stop waiting for someone else to fix your life and start building with your own two hands. Even if it’s messy. Even if the shoes are on the wrong feet. That is how a person, and a nation, grows up.
