These are the reckonings of the Mishkan, the Mishkan of the Testimony.
Rashi identifies the reckonings referred to here as the sums of metals donated for the construction of the Mishkan, as well as the listing of the vessels fashioned from them. There are two problems that we should raise about this: What is Rashi trying to accomplish with this comment? Furthermore, in fact, not all of the vessels are listened in our parashah; absent are those made of gold, such as the Aron, the Shulchan, the Menorah, and the Mizbei’ach ha-Zahav?
Rashi continues his explication of this verse by citing a midrashic allusion contained in the double usage of the word Mishkan, that the two temples would be seized (i.e., destroyed, a play on the reading of this word as mashkon, a collateral) on account of the sins of the Jewish People. And the Mishkan is described as one of “Testimony” on account of its bearing testimony to the forgiveness of the nation for its sin with the Golden Calf. Rashi – who frequently professes his commentatoral commitment to the straightforward sense of the Torah * – is seemingly avoiding a far more grounded rendering of this verse. As the Midrash Rabbah ** relates, upon seeing the surplus of supplies that remained after the Mishkan’s completion, Moshe inquired with Hashem as to what should be done with it. The answer was that a second Mishkan, a repository for the. Tablets, should be fashioned, namely the Aron. Hence, when Moshe made an accounting with the nation over the usage of the donations, he reported, אלה פקודי המשכן, these are the accountings of the Mishkan proper; and משכן העדת, these are those of the Mishkan of the Aron, which is referred to as the Aron ha-Eidus. If we would co-opt this midrash for the straightforward meaning of theverse, we would have a far more elegant explanation of both the “double Mishkan” and the term Mishkan ha-Eidus. Why, then, did Rashi opt for the more forced reading?
The resolution to all of this can be found in a comment of Ibn Ezra. *** He cites the Gaon as wondering (as we did above) why the Torah itemizes what was done with the donated silver, yet not with the gold. The Gaon’s answer is that we are expected to extrapolate from the stated weight of the Menorah and its accessories as a single kikar that the same was true of each of the golden vessels. Ibn Ezra rejects this, as it is implausible that the mere coatings of gold which most of these vessels contained amounted to a kikar. Yet, he adds, therein lies the correct answer: because it is difficult to accurately measure the amount of gold used for coating, such a reckoning was impractical, and so the Torah avoided it.
This, we contend, is the hole in the aforementioned approach of the Midrash. For if the amount of gold used was immeasurable, Moshe could not be saying with the words אלה פקודי... משכן העדת that the following is the accounting of the gold used specifically for the Aron. As such, Rashi declined to utilize it in his commentary.
In fact, Rashi alluded to this stream of consciousness in his very remarks. When he prefaced that this passage lists the amount of material donated as well as the items formed from them, his intention was to point out the glaring absence of the golden vessels. This leads us to the conclusion that this must have been impossible due to the aforementioned difficulty in measuring the gold used for each vessel. As the Aron is one of those vessels, Rashi continues, we are precluded from adopting the preferable approach to explaining המשכן משכן העדת, that of the Midrash. We are thus compelled to look elsewhere for Peshat, leading us to the two ideas cited in practice by Rashi.
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1 See Bereshis 3:8.
2 51:2.
3 Shemos 38:24.