Join Mark Call of Shabbat Shalom Mesa fellowship for a look at parsha “Vayakhel” (Exodus 35:1 – 38:20) and some of the beauty, and vital importance, of ‘redundancy’.
This parsha begins Moses “assembling” the entire congregation of the ‘sons of Israel’ to hear something, that at least in part, they’ve heard before. And therein lies much of the story!
In the Erev Shabbat review of what that means, Mark points out again just how often we might think that “we’ve heard all of this before” (and yet, there really is “no idle word in Scripture”) — and that’s kinda the whole point. At least, if we are “wise-hearted,” “willing hearted,” and have hearts that are stirred up when they need to be.
During the Sabbath Day teaching, Mark goes in a “whole ‘nuther direction”, based on the idea that while cycles in history and prophecy repeat, SOMETIMES we are on the ‘opposite half cycle.’ Like today.
Vayakhel is about Moshe “assembling” the people of Israel together, so that those who were “wise-hearted, willing-hearted
and those whose hearts stirred them up to create a place where YHVH would dwell among them were able to come together to create set-apart, “holy” works of beauty and literally ‘return to Him’ after the failure of the ‘golden calf’.
Today, in a polar opposite contrast, hard-hearted people who literally HATE the God of the Bible come together to destroy His house and all that is beautiful in His creation. And there’s a lesson there, too, in several ways.
“Vayakhel: and the Opposite Half of the Cycle!”
The combined part 1 and 2 files for both sections are up here, and available for download and off-line listening:
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