And you shall make a menorah of pure gold. The menorah shall be made of hammered work; its base and its stem, its goblets, its knobs, and its flowers shall [all] be [one piece] with it. (Exodus 25:31)
It is arguably so that one of the most important aspects of our avoda (service of God) as Jews and humans being in general is our ability to comprehend God's absolute Oneness. While God takes care to relate His Oneness to us in explicit terms in the Torah, it nevertheless seems that humanity has historically struggled to fully accept and apprehend this concept.
The above verse is an interesting and useful metaphor to aid us in understanding the correct way to ascertain God's absolute Oneness, perhaps even a meditation. When God instructed Moses to build the original Menorah to be placed in the Mishkan (tabernacle), He said that it must "be made of hammered work." Rashi explains "hammered work" to mean that it must be constructed entirely from one block of gold, without constructing each piece individually and then assembling them together into a unified whole.
Rashi explains that Moshe Rabbeinu found it difficult to understand how to build the Menorah from one piece of gold. It is curious that a prophet on the level of Moshe's caliber found it difficult, and impossible, to construct the Menorah according to God's specifications.
Nevertheless, God promptly solved the problem by telling Moshe to throw the gold into the fire and that He Himself would form it into its required shape. This is evidenced by the Torah's use of the passive verb (it shall be made - תֵּֽיעָשֶׂ֤ה) in contrast to the active verb (you shall make - וְעָשִׂ֨יתָ) used earlier in the chapter, indicating that Moshe did not make it on his own.
Perhaps Moshe's struggle to understand how to construct the Menorah from one piece of gold speaks to the majority of humanity's struggle to understand God's absolute Oneness. The human mind tends toward complexity, being a complex object itself composed of many separate domains. And nevertheless God reveals His true nature to use as a unified whole Who cannot be correctly apprehended as an assembled composite of separate elements.
As with Moshe, the solution to this conundrum required him to throw the gold into the fire, and God Himself constructed the Menorah in its correct unified form. We must likewise resist the temptation to form our understanding of God as a complex unity. We can do this by subjecting our finite understanding to the purifying fire of God's superior understanding, and He will produce for us the correct understanding of His absolutely unitary nature.
As a side note, notice the eerie similarity between the method used to construct both the Golden Calf and the Menorah. In Exodus 32:24, Aharon says to Moshe, "I said to them, 'Who has gold?' So they took it [the gold] off and gave it to me; I threw it into the fire and out came this calf.'" Both were made by throwing gold into a fire, indicating the apparently thin line between an incorrect and correct understanding. The people were convinced that they were doing the right thing, but alas, they were in error.
If you find yourself struggling with God's Oneness, recall His reassurance to Isaiah, "'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,' says the Lord." (Isaiah 55:8) It is as if God is saying, "Just as you may seek to understand Me as you would from the perspective of a finite and complex human, recall that I am an Infinite and Simple Being."
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