[I’m organizing a livestreamed reading of the first act of my new opera this May! It’s a queer, Jewish reworking of The Merchant of Venice and I’m real excited about it! Check out the event page to learn more and sign up for a spot!]

Several years ago, during one of the early plague Passovers, I decided to watch as many filmed versions of the exodus story as I could find. In addition to my yearly viewing of The Prince of Egypt, this meant hunkering down for both of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments movies, the one from 1923 (with its emphatic insistence that dancing on the Sabbath leads inexorably to matricide by construction fraud) and the one from 1956 (with Charleton Heston and also approximately ten thousand other people). In addition to the artistic continuity — there are shots here that persist nearly frame for frame from one remake to the next to the next — I was struck by the narrative choice of just when to end the story.

The book of Shəmot doesn’t map neatly onto a Hollywood three-act structure, and in every adaptation, you can feel the strain of trying to arrange an excerpt in a way that’s narratively satisfying while still being in conversation with the source text. The Prince of Egypt takes us across the Reed Sea and then jumps to only the most briefly sketched wordless giving of the Ten Commandments (with no hint of trouble as Moses carries the tablets down the mountain). Both DeMilles take us further, up to the catastrophe of the golden calf, the 1923 one cutting out just after the calf’s destruction and the 1956 one tacking on a little coda of Moses passing the torch to Joshua before wandering up Mt Nebo to die.

None of them, in other words, includes the building of the Mishkan, the portable worship-tent that the Israelites will carry for forty years thru the wilderness and whose construction takes up most of the last two parashiyot of Exodus.

It’s an understandable choice. The Mishkan-construction sequence is largely a rehash of the Mishkan-instruction sequence where G-d tells Mosheh what to do when the time comes to get building. It’s dense and technical, with many jargonic terms whose precise meaning is lost to time. Reading an unillustrated technical manual badly translated from Tamil gives a similar effect.

And yet I can’t help feel that the omission of this sequence is a loss for the films that include the smashing of the first set of tablets. If the golden calf incident is a rupture, the construction of the Mishkan is a repair, one made lovingly, tenderly, and with exacting care for every smallest detail. Each kind of dyed fabric, each minuscule golden clasp, each carefully weighed construction of copper and silver serves as a stitch in the fabric holding G-d and Yisra’eil together; each little addition helps make whole that which was rent asunder.

The work of healing a relationship that has gone sour is often long. It often requires great attention to the smallest things. But it’s work that is also often wonderful, that can, in some mysterious way, lead to a new world of experiences on the other side. Things won’t necessarily become as they were before, but they can become good in a new and beautiful way.

There are mysteries in the Mishkan sequence, too. One of the big ones: G-d is often understood as filling the world, as being present in every place at every time. Yet here the Israelites are building a special place where G-d will especially be. It’s almost like they’re building a microcosm, a world within a world, because only an entire world is big enough to contain G-d’s presence.

There’s more than a conceptual link between creating the Mishkan and creating the universe; this parashah contains numerous textual references to the first creation story in Bəreishit. (In fact, given the relative lengths, it may be better to say that the first creation story makes numerous references to the Mishkan sequence.) I’d like to hone in on one of these here: In Shəmot 35:31, we read that Bətzal’eil, the head artisan of the construction project, has been filled with רֽוּחַ אֱלֹקִים | rú’aḥ Eloqim | “a breath of G-d” to help him in the work. This is the exact same phrase used to indicate the rú’aḥ that was brooding over the primordial waters in Bəreishit 1:2. A breath of G-d sets the creation of the world in motion, and that same breath of G-d sets the creation of the Mishkan in motion — a universe within a universe, a nested fractal design.

Rú’aḥ is one of those words that can have a wide range of meanings. It can be the merest puff of air let out in a quiet sigh, or it can be a mighty wind, strong enough to sweep billions of locusts into the sea all in one go. Its force in Bəreishit is ambiguous: The Canaanite myth that structures the creation story features a seismic battle between Storm and Sea g-ds, so we might imagine a ferocious tempest thrashing the depths into frothy dissipation. But Bəreishit is a pointed reworking of the older story, and one of the changes is to strip out the theomachy, to render Creation a smooth and unfraught process that unfolds logically with cadenced speech. So perhaps the rú’aḥ at the start of everything is just enough air to carry the first sentence of the Divine plan.

We can carry this ambiguity thru to Bətzal’eil. As an artist, I am well familiar with the not-to-be-denied impulse that pushes me to make things. It feels not unlike a wind, a wind from some other planet [a]. Sometimes it is a quiet, whispering wind, a wind that insists like the whine of a mosquito. Sometimes it is overwhelming, tumultuous — I must sit down now and write or my head will simply explode. (Once, I was on a panel with other writers, and one of them opined that they always hesitate to start taking a new project out of their head and putting it on the page, because words are so fixed next to pre-verbal ideas, and they were always worried about getting it wrong. I can’t relate — I must write, I must get the ideas down on paper so that they leave me alone; the howling is to loud in my ears otherwise.)

[a] I am here thinking, as I am so often thinking, of Schoenberg’s setting of George’s “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” in the former’s second string quartet. If you don’t know it, it’s worth a listen, the marginal tonality of the first movements boiling away into an unsettling new musical landscape and then into the silence of the infinite.

Roaring or whispering, it takes a constant wind to see a project of any size thru to completion. There’s a common notion that most of the work of creation involves coming up with a really good idea. Once you know what your show or book or painting or movie or whatever is about, the rest is just a sort of tedious, mechanical setting down of the work that already exists in your head. But it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.

Ideas are easy. I don’t know any artists who are short on ideas for projects they’d make had they world enough and time. But the artistry doesn’t live in the land of ideas, it lives in the fussy little details you only dive into when you’re in the thick of actually making the thing. Coming up with the basic plot framework for The Quality of Mercy — my queer, Jewish operatic reworking of The Merchant of Venice — took a few minutes walking back from the grocery store one day. Hammering out all the details to make it good — picking just the right words to explain Jessica’s convoluted plan clearly, selecting just the right dissonance to convey Shylock’s wordless despair — has been the ongoing work of years. Ideas are easy; making them live in the space held between the richness of your materials and the craftiness of your skills is where the real work lies.

And it can be terribly tedious work. You sit at the piano from lunch until dinner and come away with only a handful of bars. You weave the shuttle of thread thru row after row until your entire body aches and you’ve finished barely six inches of the 42 feet this panel calls for. You work at your canvas until you lose the light and come away with a square inch or two of background tree. To get anywhere at all, you have to have an irrational, almost supernaturally determined willingness to wade thru tedium towards a final product you may regularly find disappointing, flawed, not quite right.

No wonder people often want to skip all this. No wonder people want to jump right from “I have an idea for a thing” to “the thing exists in the world”, from breach to repairedness, from the golden calf to the next dramatic narrative beat.

I’m glad we don’t in Torah. I’m glad we have two whole portions here dedicated to the work of creation, the work of repair. It’s long, and difficult, and tedious. It’s also tender, and patient, and life-giving. No wonder it takes the breath of G-d to complete.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]