Why did Hashem command a Mishkan if He never wanted a physical place?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau explains that the command came at a particular moment: after the golden calf. The people “got all excited about a physical, material” thing: “look, here is the golden calf.” They wanted something they could see and touch.
So Hashem met them there. “Then I'll make you a Mishkan,” Rabbi Landau says. “I'll give you a physical location where you're going to find me, because that was the matter of the time.” Hashem's real wish, he teaches, was different: “God never wanted a physical place. He wanted to be inside in you.”
In A Soul at Peace, he describes the Mishkan as Hashem's answer to a human weakness, “full of love and full of respect for people,” and points to the verse “Let them make Me a Sanctuary, and I will dwell within them,” within them, not within it.
Related concepts: Spirituality
In A Soul at Peace: The Inner Temple That Was Never Destroyed
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
The physical Mishkan was given after the golden calf, in answer to the people's wish for something physical.
Underlying need or longing
People wanted a Hashem they could touch, and Hashem did not leave them empty.
Deepest human truth
Hashem's first wish was to dwell inside each person, and that never changed.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: The Cycle of Renewal: Elul, Holidays, and Light · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz