PEKUDEI
By Agnes
March 15th, 2024
I asked GPT-3 to write me a drash about Pekudei, and mentioned a few of the questions and themes that have been on my mind. What the bot came up with felt a little… bland? And suffice it to say this is me talking now, not a chatbot. But I am kind of fascinated by these language models, and I think there’s something in them that runs alongside the theology our tradition has articulated around revelation. Revelation as a flood of language with its source of Sinai, a flood that rushes on through generations, incorporating new teaching, new Torah, deeping, evolving, transforming — a voice that both has a singular source — God — and a collective source — our living, our learning, our teaching.
But more on GPT-3 — on the idea of a language model — later.
I want to start with a story about a figure from Genesis who becomes important in the midrashic tradition: Serah. Serah is link across history and generations. She lives for hundreds of years. Whenever something important is happening, she’s there. We may not see her right away, reading Genesis or Exodus, but if you squint, you can catch the hint of her in the background. Serah is the daughter of Asher, one of Joseph’s brothers. And she came down to Egypt with the Israelites. And she was pretty old at this point, like, several hundred years old, the only living Hebrew who would have known the figures from Genesis. And so, early in Exodus, when Moses was first making noise, people came to Serah and said, This guy is going around saying he’s here to redeem us, what do you think, is he the real deal? And at first she shook her head and said no, no. But then someone recounted something God told Moses to tell the people:
I have surely taken note of you, פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙ אֶתְכֶ֔ם
(3:16)
And when she hears this, Serah bat Asher says, Oh! Actually no — he’s the guy. And suddenly everyone takes Moses seriously.
What that tips her off is that phrase — פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙
Because when Joseph was dying, he used a similar phrase:
God will surely take note of you, וֵֽאלֹהִ֞ים פָּקֹ֧ד יִפְקֹ֣ד אֶתְכֶ֗ם
And the midrash tells us that Asher passed that phrase on to his daughter Serah, and she remembered it, and it was a kind of secret code. So that when she heard Moses use the same phrase, she knew it was actually God who was speaking to him.
Which brings us to our parsha, Pekudei, and its opening words:
These are the records of the tabernacle, the tabernacle of the testimony, that were drawn up at the word of Moses.
אֵ֣לֶּה פְקוּדֵ֤י הַמִּשְׁכָּן֙ מִשְׁכַּ֣ן הָעֵדֻ֔ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר פֻּקַּ֖ד עַל־פִּ֣י מֹשֶׁ֑ה
And it’s not quite the gorgeous folded doubling of the earlier phrases — פָּקֹ֤ד פָּקַ֙דְתִּי֙ or פָּקֹ֧ד יִפְקֹ֣ד — but the same root does show up twice here — פְקוּדֵ֤י, the records — and פֻּקַּ֖ד, were drawn up. I’m struck by the recurrence of these words here, at this moment when we’re ending the second book of the Torah. It always feels like a new book means a key change, some deep shift in the framework with which we’re being asked to read. It is often destabilizing.
So what difference is being signaled here?
For one thing, the words are split — rather than a single phrase, with a root doubled to create a poetic kind of emphasis, the words here describe two separate activities. There is the record of the work of building the tabernacle, and the command from Moses to keep that record.
For another thing, they’re both curiously passive. In the secret code that Serah bat Asher was tracking, we’re talking about an intensely activated verb — not only will I notice, but surely I will notice. It has a clear subject, this verb — God. And but even when it becomes a phrase — spoken by Joseph about God, or related by Moses to the people — that phrase itself is a wildly powerful catalyst. Hearing those words sends a shock through Serah’s body, and her affirmation of Moses is, midrashically at least, what sends a shock through the whole people.
So what do we make of the fact that here, our secret magic code is not particularly verb-y. Pekudei, the records, is a noun, not a verb. And pukad, were drawn up, is a passive verb. They were drawn up al pi Moshe, literally on Moses’s mouth, at his command, but he isn’t the one who draws them up.
So our phrase — this central, wildly, explosively catalytic phrase, the phrase that bridges Genesis and Exodus, that links an operatic era of heroes to an earth-shaking chapter of collective liberation — has shape-shifted in quite a profound way.
I can’t help but think that this is a hint about how we are to read the book to come, Leviticus, a book that is famously dry, legalistic, obscure, thorny. A thicket, really, of rules of conduct, many of which we find either irrelevant or abhorrent, and now-defunct ritual instructions.
Something is shifting. A key change. The framework for who our story is fundamentally about is shifting once again. It has already shifted from the flawed and big-souled loners of Genesis to the unruly but beloved collective of Exodus. And now it’s going somewhere else —
If I had to go based on this concluding parsha, I would venture to say that the protagonist of our next book is going to be something even stranger and more expansive: something like systems of meaning, patterns of behavior — as expressed in language.
The narrative content of this parsha primarily concerns the last stages of the building and assembly of the tabernacle. We are getting it, finally, to the place where it is ready to be used to serve God, and to travel with the people through the desert.
There are more spices, and oils, and curtains. There are tables and lavers and hooks and rings and utensils. The breastpiece that the high priest will wear, and all his robes, are being constructed. Betzalel and his assistants are completing their work. And it’s partly Betzalel, and it’s partly the Israelites as a whole who do it. The pronouns slide from singular to plural — he to they — without notice. We go from hearing that Betzalel made hooks for the posts, in 38:28, to “the Israelites did so” in 32. And then they bring everything to Moses, and he finishes the work.
There’s a whole poem there, in those shifting pronouns and sentence subjects, about the nature of collective creation. About the ways each individual’s labor may be distinct or symbolic but ultimately, if hearts so conspire, the work can reflect something done together.
But there’s also a refrain here, which doesn’t show up as noticeably in the last parsha. It appears both in the phrases describing the work of the Israelites and the work of Moses:
They attached to it a cord of blue to fix it upon the headdress above—just as Hashem had commanded Moses.
He spread the tent over the Tabernacle, placing the covering of the tent on top of it—just as Hashem had commanded Moses.
And it comes back, like a refrain in a Ginsberg poem:
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
They do this — just as God commanded Moses.
They do this — just as God commanded Moses.
And on and on.
And it’s subtle, but this refrain is tipping us off to a huge inversion. A few parshiot ago, in Terumah, we got a series of instructions for how to build the tabernacle. Then we got a description of the actual building last week, in Vayakhel. The order is clear: God says, and, eventually, we do.
But here, as the book of Exodus closes, the order has flipped. We might expect: God commanded X, and they did X. But no. Our doing comes first. And God’s command comes second. Our action leads, and God’s wishes come in like an echo, an approving nod.
The language by which we codify behavior — the systems of meaning by which we conduct ourselves — and here I mean we, not in the symbolic Passover-seder sense that you and I are commanded to see ourselves as if we ourselves came out of Egypt — but literally you and I, now, today — the systems of meaning by which WE conduct ourselves – this alchemy of systems of meaning and behavior are becoming the protagonist of this wild, wild book.
It’s part of why I started by talking about GPT-3, a language model. A system of patterns and meaning and we can’t stop wondering if it’s “alive” or not. And the more we use it, the more we take it up, the more living it seems to be. What if Leviticus is a language model? And it, too, is alive, but only if we ourselves take it up.
Okay. Before I start rambling about AI, I want to step back and consider the stakes of what I’m proposing. If we are being told that our protagonist is shifting again — from historically specific individuals to a historically specific nation to a framework of meaning that gets transmitted in language — rules — what does that do to our sacred individuality? Every one of us is unique, we are taught. Every one of us is created in the image of God. If the focus is turning to rules, then what of each of our particular lives? Our waywardness, particularity, mess, joy, queer fuckery?
I’ve been reading about Simone Weil. And she talks about the I in a very particular way:
"We possess nothing in the world,” she says, “a mere chance can strip us of everything — except the power to say I. That is what we have to give to God.”
She further distinguishes individuality from personality. The I, she says, is a person’s sacred individuality. This is worthy of respect and honor. Personality, on the other hand, is more an accessory — it is the parts of us that are actually the least deep. The parts we list on dating apps and fret over, the parts that turn us towards self-absorption. The parts in which we so often locate our own value.
Weil writes: "Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.... Our personality is that part of us which belongs in error and sin.”
In her drash on Vayechi, Ezra wrote about the movement over the course of Genesis and Exodus from a book centered around certain exemplary figures to a book about a people:
The transformation of the patriarch era into an era of communal expansion in Egypt has [an]... opening quality, an uncovering that also entails a loss. The patriarchal intimacy with God, a clarity and protection, give way to an imperfect but much more widely shared relationship with God.
And I think there’s a loss here, too. We are leaving behind something of the idea of narrative. Something of the attachment we have to the personalities of Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Serah bat Asher. We’re entering a different kind of story. A story that exists in the fizzing, spitting mess that is some weird alchemy of fearless action and righteous compliance. We are entering a sacred language model. Our personalities are burning off, and only our blessed individualities remain. We may feel both erased and made sacred.
This is not a storybook anymore. We’re not hearing tales about other people way back when. We’ve been swallowed. We are doing this book. This book is inside us.
Pekudei was the first important word of our parsha. Our parsha ends with the word מַסְעֵיהֶֽם, their journeys.
For over the Tabernacle a cloud of Hashem rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys.
לְעֵינֵ֥י כׇל־בֵּֽית־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּכׇל־מַסְעֵיהֶֽם
Rashi notices a tension here. A few verses earlier, we are told that the Israelites travel when the cloud lifts. When the cloud is there, on the other hand, they stay put. So if, when they are traveling, presumably the cloud has lifted, what does it mean to learn that the cloud and the fire remain in the view of the Israelites “throughout their journeys”?
We end the Book of Exodus on a word whose root suggests pulling up tent stakes, setting out. A word of instability, of break. And yet at the center of this particular unstable journey is something called a Mishkan — I have been translating it as tabernacle, but really it’s a dwelling-place.
Way back in Genesis, God said to Isaac:
אַל־תֵּרֵ֣ד מִצְרָ֑יְמָה שְׁכֹ֣ן בָּאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ
Don’t go down to Egypt, dwell here. (Gen 26:2)
Dwell here, he said, and I’ll bless you.
I wonder if we might extend that, twist it.
Don’t go down to Egypt. Don’t even go to the promised land. Dwell here, where you are, in the dailiness of your doing and being with others.
There is going to be some tension. We are going to feel unsettled. And yet, at the center, we have this dwelling place that comes to live — not inside Abraham or Isaac or Jacob — or even Moses — but literally inside us. In a pattern of words that shapes how we understand ourselves, how we behave.
We are the protagonists now. My stomach turns. And also: It feels like home.
Chazak Chazak V’Nitchazek….

















