Torah Commentary

I've always loved animals. Even when I was a child, every single animal struck me as intelligent. They all had distinct personalities. I started feeling from an early age that it was my duty to take care of all the animals, and indeed, I did just that! As a child, I had two guinea pigs, one rabbit, one dog, three cats, and many fish.

Children, and teenagers especially, are often told to think about what they say, and how they say it. Instead of speaking cavalierly, it's best to speak carefully and in a measured manner. In fact, perhaps it's best to listen more than speak. This is a lesson many of us could benefit from, and this week's parashah could help us.

We often encounter paradoxes in life, things that appear to be mutually incompatible. Paradoxes sometimes appear in the unlikeliest places, and they deserve our close attention, like the one hiding in this week's parashah.

As I was reading this week’s parashah about the construction of the Tabernacle, I found that one repeated detail caught my attention: “And he [Bezalel] made fifty gold clasps and coupled the curtains to one another with the clasps, so that the tabernacle became one whole,” and then just a few verses later we are told again that, “He made fifty copper clasps to couple the tent together so that it might become one whole” (Exodus 36:13,18).