The instructions given on the making of the priestly vestments in T’tzavveh are so extraordinarily detailed, a tailor and metalworker would have no problem following them. Interestingly, so many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century worked as tailors in the East End of London, in Glasgow and elsewhere. It is as though a shadow of the Torah passed by. Why was God so particular in what He wanted made and in how he wanted to be honoured? Perhaps one reason was because, in this way, He also honoured the Israelites. To be a priest dressed in magnificent robes and carrying on his person the engraved names of the tribes of Israel was a sacred duty. It was also a sacred honour.

This two-way honour continues in Ki Tissa with instructions on making the washstand, the anointing oil and incense. It is focussed on the persons of Uri and Ohaliev, the architects blessed with wisdom, understanding, knowledge and craftsmanship. They are joined by other talented and creative people, all blessed with God’s wisdom. And then what happens? From the heights of divine inspiration we plummet to the sin of the Golden Calf. It is curious that, when Aaron had all the gold given by the people to make a god melted and cast, what came out was a calf. A calf! Not a bull or a lion of power, not a mythical, inspiring beast like a sphinx, or a human body topped with an animal head, as one might expect from a people recently parted from Egypt, but a baby cow. What a pathetic falling is this.

Yet Ki Tissa does not end in pathos. Having started with the creative divine, it rises again to the sublime. Moses witnesses God’s presence. A second set of tablets are made and the parsha ends with a description of Moses’ face filled with divine light. A parsha packed with drama and resonance. To experience more, come along this Saturday at 10.30. Pat Lipert, who has an eye for a good story and two for an excellent one, will unpack some more drama and resonance for us.

We are not very far into the Book of Shemot, when the laws begin to come thick and fast, as though there were an urgency to setting the foundations for a just society and a nation holy to God. The Ten Commandments given in Yithro are followed almost immediately with the lesser, but still important, rules of Mishpatim. These range across the treatment of slaves, manslaughter, murder and kidnapping, cursing a parent, treatment of animals, loans and borrowing, the rectitude of those in authority and the administration of justice. Then Moses ascends the mountain and, while the people can see the “appearance of God’s glory on the mountain top”, God begins to give instructions for the building of the Tabernacle and its accompanying furniture and trappings.

Rabbi Lord Sachs has pointed out in Covenant and Conversation how the building of this small but beautiful home for God (though, of course, God needs no home in the way we can conceive of it) parallels God’s own creation. There is, too, a broader theme. One can see the Torah as a great and multi-level work of architecture. It begins with the creation of the world, while this week we are given the blueprint for the Tabernacle. As mentioned, the rules for building a new society have also begun. The architectural motif applies on other levels too. The theme of sibling rivalry, often referred to, opens with an opposition so strong it leads to murder, develops in different ways, through Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, displaying a little more growth of understanding and reconciliation, until it culminates in the story of moral change, repentance and forgiveness in the story of Joseph and his brothers.

There is a pattern. The creation of things itself has an overarching design. The grandeur of the creation is followed shortly by the building of Noah’s ark, a relatively small construct which carries the seeds of life on vast, stormy waters. The hubris of Babel follows. For its builders it is a grand and aggrandising tower, but it is toppled by God as we might topple the play-brick tower of a toddler. Much later, in Egypt, the Israelites are forced to build the ambitious cities of imperial Egypt, but then escape into the desert to live in flimsy, ephemeral tents. Yet they build there a small, but intricate, dazzling house for a presence which is beyond all presences.

There is, too, an architecture of language in the Torah, but this is enough already. I will leave the last to a gentile with rather a way with words:

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

And to listen to another man with a way with words, come along this Saturday at 10:30, when Adam Feldman will be leading the service.