The reason that the Mishkan, or Tabernacle was in the center of the Israelite camp in the wilderness was to teach the Jews that the Torah is their constitution. That they are on a mission from God.
Now for a quick devar Torah.
This week’s parsha, of course, continues with all the counting in the wilderness. Every time we turn around there’s another census. And the obvious question is: why all the counting? Doesn’t God already know how many people there are?
But the counting is not for God. It’s for us.
The Torah is teaching that every individual counts. Nobody is extra. Every person matters. Every tribe has its role, every family its mission, every individual their contribution.
But at the same time, the Torah is teaching something equally important: individuality alone is not enough. A nation cannot survive if it is only a collection of individuals with no common purpose.
And that is really the challenge facing the Jewish people in the wilderness.
Remember, these are former slaves. They lived for generations in Egypt under a system where human beings were expendable. If a slave died, nobody cared. You simply replaced him with another slave.
God takes these former slaves out of Egypt, but now they must become a nation. And you cannot simply take people out of slavery and instantly expect them to know how to build a free society. Freedom requires education. It requires responsibility. It requires a mission.
History shows this problem very clearly. In the early nineteenth century, there were movements to return freed slaves from America back to Africa, in places such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. But many of the societies they established ended up imitating the plantation systems they had known in America. People often reproduce the systems they grew up under.
The Torah is trying to prevent exactly that.
The Jewish people are not supposed to recreate Egypt in another form. They are supposed to build something entirely different: a society where every human being has value because every human being is created in the image of God.
That is why even an eved — often translated as a slave — still possesses rights in Jewish law. In fact, the Hebrew word eved can also mean servant. The Torah does not accept the Egyptian idea that human beings are disposable property.
And that brings us to the structure of the camp itself.
The Mishkan, the Tabernacle, stands in the center of the camp. Why?
Because the Torah is teaching that while every tribe is unique, and every individual matters, the nation must still revolve around a common center. The center is not power. It is not wealth. It is not a king. The center is God, the Torah, and the covenant.
That shared covenant is what turns a group of former slaves into a nation.
Interestingly enough, you can even see a similar idea reflected in the Hebrew name for the United States. In Hebrew, America is not literally called “the United States.” It is called Artzot HaBrit — “the Lands of the Covenant” or “the Lands of the Agreement.” It’s a conceptual translation emphasizing the constitutional bond that unites the states.
And remarkably, that Hebrew term already appears in the 1790s.
That is essentially what the Torah is doing in the wilderness. God is creating a constitutional people. The Torah functions as the constitution, the covenant that binds the tribes together into one nation.
Everybody counts. Every tribe matters. But the nation survives only when all those individuals unite around something higher than themselves.
Something to think about.
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