How Was the Mishkan Actually Designed?

How much of ourselves can we incorporate into our Torah observance?

The Torah devotes hundreds of verses to describing (and sometimes repeating) the finest details required to construct the mishkan. But there's one particular passage that’s long left me curious:

…See how God has called the name of Betzalel ben Uri ben Chur…and he has been filled with the spirit of God…to calculate plans and work with gold, silver, and copper, and the carving of stone to fill and carving of wood to perform all thoughtful work.” (Shemos 35:30-33)

If all the information and skills needed to complete the construction were provided through miraculous revelation (רוח אלוקים) then why did it have to be Betzalel? Wasn’t Moshe - along with many other prophets - also available? I think it’s obvious that the Divine inspiration served to enhance the personal set of skills, knowledge, and passion that Betzalel brought with him. God undoubtedly chose someone who was already the best candidate for the job.

In fact, according to the Gemara (Berachos 50a), the candidate actually didn’t have to be Betzalel. Based on our verse, the Gemara tells us that the Jewish people were asked to approve Betzalel’s selection - just as every community must be consulted before any “parnes” is appointed. Presumably, then, the Jews could have vetoed God’s nomination and someone else would have ended up with the job.

Which presents a new question: would this “Plan B” project manager have built a mishkan that looked different than the one we got? Similarly, could a subtly altered trajectory in Betzalel’s early life have led him to create a subtly different mishkan? How much of a person’s personality can be incorporated into his Torah service?

R’ Hirsch famously draws on the strings of the tzitzis - where ideally, the eight strings hang loose for twice the distance as they’re looped and knotted. This suggests that our daily social and religious lives are certainly bound tight by the rules of halalcha but, at the same time, there should be twice as much freedom to innovate and individualize our lives.

That’s not to suggest that our backgrounds and personalities have roles to play in interpreting the Oral Torah. R’ Hirsch forcefully and convincingly rejected that possibility in the fifth volume of his Collecting Writings. But there’s a whole lot more to Jewish life than interpreting the official corpus of the Oral Torah.

Betzalel’s selection is strongly echoed in I Melachim 7:14 where Shlomo, preparing to build his Temple, called home a young Jewish coppersmith named Chiram who’d been living with his widowed mother in Tyre, Lebanon. As I wrote some time back:

Let's remind ourselves that we're talking about the golden age of Jewish history. Shlomo's Jewish nation lived in immense prosperity and unparalleled peace, free to build an ideal Jewish world virtually without constraints. If there was ever a time in our past that we could look to for inspiration and guidance, it would be the flowering of our first commonwealth.

So then why, when looking for the principal technical expert to lead the design and construction of his temple, did Shlomo select Chiram? Could Shlomo (or his scholars) not find answers to their technical questions in Torah?

Apparently not. Chiram's parents would almost certainly have set out for Tyre during David's reign. In fact, given his obsession with doing all he could do in preparation for the temple construction, it's likely that the idea for the journey was David's. We do know (see 2 Samuel 5:11) that David and King Chiram enjoyed a close relationship. It's not hard to imagine that the family settled in Tyre under the patronage of the king himself.

I believe it’s most likely that Betzalel was somehow prepared for his holy role in the mishkan construction in much the same way as Chiram. And I believe that global “best practices” in engineering, urban design, and other fields are worth knowing and applying, even if they come from non-Jewish sources.

And this is especially relevant in the days following the release of the Israeli government’s damning report on the Meron disaster.