Bamidbar 4:20
But let not them go inside and witness the dismantling of the sanctuary, lest they die.
Chizkuni
we may understand it here as meaning that if anyone wanted to feast his eyes by watching the Tabernacle being dissembled he would die doing so. … We therefore hear that the Israelites in the desert, every time when the Tabernacle was dissembled prior to the next step in their journey, kept a distance from that area.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
The transition from relating to the Tabernacle as God’s holy Sanctuary, to dismantling it and transferring it elsewhere is not simple, and it even involves danger. The very heart of the difficulty, the most dangerous stage, is of course at the point of transition, and that is why the sacred vessels must be covered when the Levites come to take them …
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As long as one stands at a distance from the sacred, as long as one does not touch it and does not deal with it, and it remains in its place in its existing condition, once can see the sacred and stand in awe of it. But what happens when one has to dismantle the sacred? How does one switch from the stage where everything is sanctified to the stage where the sacred must be carried on one’s shoulder?
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In this parasha we have, in effect, a general acknowledgement that not every mind can bear. Not everyone can deal with the fact that what was once sacred is now voided of its sanctity … The truth is that this fundamental problem is not limited to the Tabernacle; it applies to the world of learning as well — to study in general and to the study of Talmud in particular.
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The study of Talmud and Torah study in general is essentially a matter of breaking things down into their composite parts. The greater one’s ability to break things down, the greater the depth of one’s learning.
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the more he delves into it, the less he understands. As he discovers more and more questions and peculiarities, the effect is cumulative: Things become increasingly complex.
Torah study is, in a sense a kind of battlefields. One takes a page of Talmud, cuts it into pieces, and reduces it to dust and ashes. One takes a halakha, which he knows exactly how to implement in practice, and begins to demonstrate that it is built on compromises … And for one who deals with matters of faith, the matter becomes even more complex than this. … After one begins to study, and the more one learns, the world does not become simpler and smoother. On the contrary, in a certain sense it becomes more and more complicated, more and more complex. What this means is that study entails a kind of traumatic process, a process of breaking things apart.
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What happens later, when one wants to relocate the holy? How does the new location suddenly become holy? … How can one be exposed to all the questions and contradictions, and after all that, still relate to the subject with the proper awe and fear? … How can one question, take apart, demolish, and rebuild, and at the same time preserve the sense that one is in the realm of holiness?
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In the Tabernacle, as it is so often in our lives, we dismantle in order to build. Something is uprooted from its place in order to be rebuilt more fruitfully in a new place. … “The destruction of the old is building.” (Nedarim 40a).
Rabbi Yehudah Leib
The Midrash likens Torah to a wilderness: it has to be as ownerless as wilderness. … Such is the study of Torah: to negate yourself before the way that Torah leads you …
The Torah that lies before us is the garb of Torah. It is by means of study that we arouse the force that lies within it.
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Each and every Jew has a particular knowledge of God’s greatness, according to that person’s own rung. It can be shared with no other. This is what the Mishnah teaches: “… showing the greatness of God, for each person was stamped out in the stamp of Adam, yet no two faces are alike.” Rabbi Pinchas of Korzec adds that because “the difference is in minds, not only in faces,” each of use becomes excited by a different quality or aspect [of religious life]. This is the meaning of [the verse:] “There is no counting His understanding” [referring to the many ways of understanding God].