It’s time to get a move on.

For the whole book of Vayiqra — and, indeed, for the better part of the book of Shəmot, too — the recently freed Israelites have been camped out at the base of Mt Sinai. Now, in the book of Bəmidbar, they’re going to pull up their stakes and start trudging around the wilderness in earnest.

But first, of course, they have to learn how to pack up the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary where the very Presence of G-d resides.

Between all the lists of census results, this parsha explains the procedure, explaining how things are to be broken down and deputizing the Levites to do the actual schlepping once the Holy accoutrements are all packed up.

This job is not without risk. At various points, the Levites are instructed to take great care with their duties lest they inadvertently transgress and die. Indeed, that’s the note the whole parashah ends on: Bəmidbar 4:20 warns: וְלֹא־יָבֹ֧אוּ לִרְא֛וֹת כְּבַלַּ֥ע אֶת־הַקֹּ֖דֶשׁ וָמֵֽתוּ׃ | Vəlo yavó’u lir’ot kəvala et haqódesh vaméitu. | “Don’t enter to see, when the Holy is being swallowed up, and die.”

Your nearest Tanakh might not translate it exactly like that. This week’s word, כְּבַלַּע | kəvala, is subject to at least two interpretations that I know of. The root בלע | BL‘ has a core meaning of swallowing up or devouring, and thence destroying (chewing up). The little כְּ | kə on the front is a prefix that flags similarity. Sometimes this is very direct: After crossing the Reed Sea, the Israelites rhetorically ask G-d מִי כָמֹֽכָה | mi khamókhah | “Who is like You?” (Shəmot 15:11). But this sense can be extended: When Yəshayáhu reassures his people that כְּשׇׁמְעָתוֹ עָנָךְ | kəshom’ato anakh | “when [G-d] hears [your cry], G-d will answer you” (30:19), it’s the same little prefix that means “when” — you might catch the more literal force in translation with something like “the moment G-d answers you will be just like the moment when G-d hears your cry”, a similarity of time, not kind.

So our verse in Bəmidbar 4:20 warns the Levites against seeing “like swallowing”. One interpretation takes that “like” in the temporal sense: Don’t look when the swallowing of the Holy accoutrements is going on. Another interpretation understands the looking and the swallowing as being compared actions: Don’t let your looking at the Holy accoutrements be like swallowing — which is to say don’t look at them even for a moment.

I prefer the first of these, tho I freely confess it’s a preference based more on poetic sensibility than scholarship. In my experience, swallowing can take quite a while, actually, and there’s something beguiling about keeping the literalism of the root: We’ve just read about various pieces of sacred furniture being wrapped up in protective cloths, and there’s something deeply resonant about imagining them being literally swallowed by their swaddling, like a sock disappearing into a fitted sheet in the laundry.

But the destructive side of this root also helps answer a question: Why shouldn’t this process be observed? It’s one thing to eat in public; it’s another to be chewed up in public, to fall to pieces in the public square.

You may have seen, over the years, a number of campaigns aimed at ending the stigma against talking openly about mental illness. It’s OK to not be OK. Let’s talk about it. That sort of thing.

Generally, I support these efforts and their ends. It is OK to not be OK, and society is better when we make room for the full range of human experiences instead of forcing everyone into a constant display of flat, suffocating positivity. Sometimes your brain decides to eat itself, and being able to talk about that openly and without shame can, if nothing else, often help alleviate the crushing isolation of feeling like you have to hide your suffering to keep up appearances.

And yet, when it comes to myself, I absolutely do not want to talk about it, especially publicly. For all the time I spend on social media, I’m an acutely private person, and I guard that privacy fiercely. If I must go thru periodic mental agonies, at least spare me the additional tsuris of having the whole world watch. Grant me, if nothing else, the dignity of keeping my inner life to myself. You can help carry me when I’m being chewed up, I guess, but please, don’t stare.

What it amounts to, I think, is the presumption of intimacy. There are people in the world that I am close with, where I share the intimacy of of full accountings. But I am not intimate with everyone who follows me; I am not close to every person that reads my words. And I flinch from the idea of performing the intimacy of sharing all my struggles outside the context of that long-built closeness. If we’re not confidants, don’t ask me to confide in you.

(And there is textual support here, too. Kəvala is a very minor anagram of כְּבַֽעַל | kəvá’al | “like a husband”. He can see my everything; it would be presumptuous for a stranger to expect the equivalent access.)

Is G-d so different? The Mishkan is an elaborate structure built for a complicated purpose: bridging the gap between the earthly and the Divine. It’s a delicate act, fraught with peril. If things go wrong, the results can be catastrophic. G-d is not like the Israelites. G-d is strange, reserved, reluctant to be approached. G-d commands things without giving all the reasons in the background; G-d forbids anyone but Mosheh, the trusted prophet, from climbing Mt Sinai for the fullness of Revelation; G-d demands a chamber within a chamber blocked from the outer world by fabrics and skins and ritual demarcations — a chamber that only one person is authorized to enter, and only once a year at that. Don’t look when G-d’s room — the one place on earth that is G-d’s alone, a private domain without the pressures of public performance — is coming apart. It’s a parasocial intimacy that Heaven cannot bear.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]