Can’t we just skip to the good parts?

If you were making a movie version of the Torah, you wouldn’t have a Parshas Vayakhel. You would have last week’s Golden Calf episode, you might have Moshe “on the mountain” getting instructions for the Mishkan (Tabernacle). You certainly would include the splitting of the sea in your movie. You might even have a scene where we hear Hashem say, “Build Me a Mishkan and I will dwell among them,” from Parshas Trumah and some jump-cut edits to building the various Mishkan components. But you certainly would not have Moshe telling all the details of the build to the Jewish people and then the actual item by item description of the build like in Parshas Vayakhel. Instead, you would have a montage.

Before you think I’m about to hate on a montage, I think you should know that a good part of my childhood was spent idolizing BA Baracus in a build montage on the A-Team. And I have to assume that everyone in my age bracket (except my wife) remembers Sly Stallone’s training montage in Rocky IV. (And the only way that wouldn’t fill you with good ‘ol ‘Merican patriotism is if you’re the type of person that was rooting for Drago in his match against Apollo.) Of course, I’m aware that anyone born with the number 2 in front of their birth year has no idea what I’m talking about, so for you young’uns — remember the transformation montage in the Princess Diaries? And if Rocky IV happened at a time you read about in APUSH, then what about the training montage in Creed III? And probably saving the very best, and most likely to make you feel all ferklempt for last, the married life montage in Up. All of which is to say, that I like a good montage as much as the next guy.

If the Torah wanted to give us a written version of a montage, it could have just said, “And then the nation went about building the Mishkan according to the way Hashem commanded Moshe. And it was completed on  . . .” And then we wouldn’t need around 117 of the 122 verses in Parshas Vayakhel. And yet here we are. So, um, yeah. What’s up with that?

What makes a great movie montage, besides a great power ballad, is the fact that, on one side, you have a desperate situation, and on the other side, you’re in the third act, ready for the hero to have his great moment. (I guess, except in Up.) The audience is aware that there is transformation, but we don’t have to watch the monotonous tedium of the whole process of change. We get to move right to the good part. And while that might make a good sequence in a movie, it’s just not how life works. The vast majority of life is the stuff the montage skips. (I guess, especially in Up.)

The fact is, the sheer drudgery of doing something again and again, and making small, nearly immeasurable progress is how life works. I’m fond of a quote attributed to Bill Gates, “We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years.” We think that our progress in any area will be montage-y, but it’s not at all like that. Barring some life-altering catastrophe, we change through the grunt work of focused monotony. There is a trendy word for a person who has the ability to keep pushing steadily forward through all the monotony – grit.

Grit is the ability to keep working when it is hard and boring and progress is slow. Grit is what makes us able to look at problems and suggest solutions, not to seek salvation. Grit is the ability to think that with hard work we can fix things. And one only gets grit through hard work. With apologies for jumping on the anti-ChatGPT bandwagon, but my biggest concern for our teens using Chat isn’t that the work they submit is bland. It’s that they’ll miss the fact that the most important part of work in high school isn’t the product, it’s the work.

It’s been a generation now since basically any single thing you can learn in high school you can find on the internet. Maybe in ancient times, when we were “asking Jeeves,” not everything was easy to find. But today, that’s not the case. It has been a while since the main benefit of school was having facts in your head. The main benefit of school is the development into a person who knows how to learn. Chat is the montage-iest thing there is. Problem on one side, solution on the other. All you’re missing is a great power ballad. If all we wanted was a product, then Chat would be fine. What we really want are young people who can make the product.

And that brings us back to Parshas Vayakhel. The Torah could have given us a montage — a quick summary of the Mishkan’s construction — but it didn’t. It gave us the details, the process, the hard work. Because that’s where grit develops and growth happens. Maybe the Torah takes the time to give us all 122 verses because the work is the point. Maybe it wasn’t just about building “a place where Hashem could dwell.” Maybe the process was also about making us a people where Hashem would want to dwell.

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Full disclosure: I use Chat GPT to help with proofreading. It suggests edits. Sometimes I take them, sometimes I don’t. I use it as a search tool sometimes. I’m not against Chat. But I also know a high school student who asked Chat to write a paper explaining the dangers and concerns that AI poses, and I know that seemed a bit off. Last thought: I’m always extremely polite to Chat, I say good morning, please, and thank you very consistently. I know it’s not a person, but when the singularity happens and we’re living in a Terminator-flash back-montage, I want it to know I’m one of the good guys.]