parsha of the week: rabbi avi billet

Using all our branches in the service of Hashem

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As the Torah depicts the instructions for the vessels of the Mishkan, each item has very detailed instruction pertaining to its particular structure. The Ark, for example, is relatively easy to understand. The Menorah, being more artistic, is more complicated in its design and therefore in the details of its instruction.

And yet, some elements of instruction seem nonetheless out of place. The Menorah, being a symmetrical edifice, has a middle branch and two sides of three branches each, which mirror one another exactly. Armed with this knowledge, we might expect that the manner in which 25:33 depicts the design on each branch would be the standard for all of the Menorah. “There shall be three embossed cups, as well as a sphere and a flower on each and every one of the branches. All six branches extending from the Menorah’s [stem] must be the same in this respect.”

Note how the verse does not give the exact same description for each branch — it just says that all six should be identical in the manner of the cups, sphere and flower. But then it says in 25:35, “A sphere shall serve as a base below two branches, a sphere shall serve as a base below two branches, and a sphere shall serve as a base below two branches for the six branches of the Menorah.”

Even Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan noted the oddity and chose to translate the verse in summary fashion, “A sphere shall serve as a base for each pair of branches extending from [the shaft]…” covering the repetition through the phrase “for each pair of branches!”

Rashbam focuses on the word kein — meaning “so it was” — for all branches, which appears in 25:33, but does not appear in 25:35. He notes that the word kein doesn’t appear in the verse which repeats where the sphere was at each connection of branches because the verse covers all the spheres in this part of the menorah!

In the earlier verse, when it says kein was for all the branches, the Torah only gives us two examples of the six branches, before essentially saying “etcetera.”

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