encampments and journeys. At the very end of the Book of Exodus, there's a textual difficulty

so slight and subtle that it's easy to miss, and yet, as interpreted by Rashi, contains one of the

great clues as to the nature of Jewish identity, moving testimony to the unique challenge

of being a Jew. The setting is this, The Mishkan, the tabernacle,

is finally complete. Its construction has taken many chapters to relate. No other event in the wilderness

years is portrayed in such detail. But now, on the first day of the month of Nissen,

exactly a year after Moses told the people to begin their preparations for the Exodus.

He assembles the beams and hangings of the tabernacle,

puts furniture and the vessels in place,

and no sooner has he done so than there is an epiphany,

a majestic disclosure of the Shina, the divine presence. The text says,

then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and Kvod Hashem, the glory of the Lord, filled

the tabernacle. There is, in other words, the sense of an ending. The story has reached closure.

After a tangled tale full of setbacks, the Israelites have made a home for God

and his presence is now constantly in their midst. However, in the Torah nothing is as simple as it first seems.

The text tacks on the following brief paragraph. Listen carefully, when the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, the Israelites went

onward bechal masahem in all their journeys. But if the cloud didn't lift, they didn't set out

until the day it lifted. So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day and fire was in the

cloud by night in the sight of all the House of Israel

B'hul Masahem in all their journeys. Now, the plain sense of this paragraph is clear that

tabernacle was constructed in such a way as to be portable. It could be quickly dismantled and

its parts carried as the Israelites made their way to the next stage of their journey.

...