"And they shall make me a sanctuary," God tells Moses in this week's reading, "And I will dwell among them." (Exodus 25:8) With these words, the Bible launches into a description of the Tabernacle (mishkan), the sole venue of worship for the Israelites on their march through the desert. Here, and here alone, the priests will perform their sacrificial rites, the Levites will sing, and Moses will talk to God.

The text is full of details. The Tabernacle is intended to host all of the basic furnishings necessary for the different rituals. There is a gold-covered table, along with solid-gold spoons and bowls, for the bread the priests will leave out as a tribute to God. A solid-gold seven-branched candelabrum-destined to become one of the central symbols of Jewish peoplehood-will remain lit at all times. Inside the Holy of Holies, where once a year the High Priest will offer incense on Yom Kippur, rests the new Ark of the Covenant, again inlaid with gold and meant to house the two tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. In future weekly portions, still more details will be devoted to the magnificent clothes worn by the High Priest during services, to the incense and sacrifices, and to the exact provenance of the various materials employed.

All this grandeur must have clearly impressed itself upon the eyes and consciousness of ex-slaves surviving only on manna and the occasional miraculous spring of water. Yet alongside the skins, the spices, the precious stones, and the other dazzlingly ornate things they might have expected to find in the Creator's sole sanctuary, something else about the Tabernacle must have seemed wildly amiss: its size.  

It is very small. Compared with the shrines of Egypt, or the towering cities the Israelites built in Pharaoh's honor, the Tabernacle was a midget. Measuring just 30 by 9 cubits, or about 45 feet by 13 1/2, and standing about 15 feet tall, the whole thing would have fit neatly under the tent my suburban synagogue used to install for extra seating on the High Holy Days. As for the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place on earth, it was smaller than a modern kitchen.

Well, of course (you might say), the Tabernacle had to be small. It was meant to be portable, easily disassembled for desert portage and no less easily reassembled wherever the Israelites next made camp.

Yet if this were the real reason for its size, would we not have been given at least a hint of bigger things to come? The Israelites, after all, had not yet committed the sin of the spies--that singular crime of the spirit for which they would be punished by being compelled to wander in the desert for 40 years. At this point in the story, Israel was meant to arrive in Canaan in, at most, a few weeks' time-by which time portability would no longer be an issue.

So if it's not about portability, why so humble a home for the Master of the Universe? And why, much later, does God seem to express an actual preference for His tiny Tabernacle over the grand Temple in Jerusalem that King David proposes to replace it with? "In all the places where I have walked with all the children of Israel, did I speak a word . . . saying, ‘Why do you not build Me a house of cedar?'" (II Sam 7:7)

The answer has to do with the nature of Israelite worship-and with a particularly Jewish mode of spirituality.

Throughout history, grandeur on a large scale has been the traditional aesthetic means of inspiring feelings of respect and awe. The great soaring cathedrals, the titanic pyramids and ziggurats and coliseums of old, down to the monuments and official buildings and vast lawns of today's world capitals-all of them trigger a sense of our own relative insignificance when measured against the power and authority of higher forces.

There is a Hebraic mode, however, that cuts the other way. In this perspective, man is not dust and ashes but a potent spiritual player, an image of God, worthy of a personal relationship with the divine. Nor is worship a matter of absolute self-abasement in the face of the Almighty; rather, it is a discourse among partners. For this purpose, spiritual space can itself be measured by relative rather than absolute coordinates.

Speaking of the Tabernacle, God says: "Let me dwell among them"-not "in it."The spirit of God dwells in a sanctuary reflecting the constraints of human reality. His voice comes out from between two golden cherubim facing each other atop the Ark: a golden framework to contain and channel the divine voice. Were it not for this limitation, the immediacy of God would dissolve into the Absolute, leaving no room, or too much room, for ordinary folk. Through the ages, some of the most intense Jewish prayers have been offered not by operatic cantors in vast synagogues but in basement shtibls where ordinary individuals fill the room with their calls to God.

The problem with grandeur is that it contains a bit of a lie. Overdoing our humility, we end up focusing less on Him than on us. We tell ourselves to feel awe, but it is we who have created the awesome effect. We are told to reach beyond, to escape the bonds of the material world, to feel ourselves soaring to heaven. But man can never really escape himself. In real life, what we can hope for is that God shall "dwell among us," fraternizing with corrupt, flawed, yet nevertheless worthy souls.

David Hazony's first book, The Ten Commandments, will be published in September by Scribner.