Enduring Lesson of the Upright Acacia

 One of the building materials of the Mishkan mentioned in Parshat Terumah is atzei shitim, acacia wood. Midrash Tanchuma explains that when Yaakov and his family moved to Egypt, he planted acacia trees. He told his family that one day in the future, after the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people would be commanded to build a Tabernacle that would require acacia wood. At that time they should use these trees. When Hashem commanded Moshe to build the Mishkan using acacia wood, God also told him that he should use the trees planted by Yaakov. This Midrash teaches us a number of important lessons. One lesson is the importance of “planting seeds” for the future. Had Yaakov not planted trees centuries earlier, the Jewish People would have had a more difficult time sourcing wood for the Mishkan. The Midrash takes this idea even further by explaining that these trees had even greater Yichus, pedigree. Yaakov got the seeds from trees planted by Avraham Avinu in Beer Sheva. The pasuk actually refers to the wood as (26:15) “Atzei Shittim Omdim” which literally means “upright acacia wood”. What does this mean and what is it meant to teach us? Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky explained this term by way of the Talmud in Sukkah (45b) in which Hashem commanded Moshe to utilize wood in the construction of the Mishkan that would last forever, ie it would never warp or rot. It would stand up to the test of time and exist forever. Moshe wondered how this was possible, when the status of the Mishkan depended not on anything Moshe did but on the worthiness of Bnei Yisrael. If the Jews were worthy, then the Mishkan would exist forever, but if they sinned then the Mishkan would be destroyed. The answer lies in the Yichus, the origins, of this wood. This wood traces itself back to the trees of Yaakov and Avraham Avinu. Any items and efforts embarked upon for a holy and noble purpose are guaranteed to last forever. This powerful idea helps to explain a passage in the Talmud (Baba Metzia 85b): Rabbi Chiya bragged that he ensures the perpetuity of Torah and Jewish life by creating Torah scrolls from scratch and teaching both the Written and Oral Torahs to students who then teach it to other students. “I go and sow flax seeds and twine nets with the flax, and then I hunt deer and feed their meat to orphans. Next I prepare parchment from their hides and I write the five books of the Torah on them. I go to a city and teach five children the five books, one book per child, and I teach six other children the six orders of the Mishna, and I say to them: Until I return and come here, read each other the Torah and teach each other the Mishna. This is how I act to ensure that the Torah will not be forgotten by the Jewish people.”  The question remains: How can Rabbi Chiya be 100% sure that his students, and their students after, will not become distanced from Torah? The answer is that while people might forget what they were taught, they will never forget what was done for them, nor how they were made to feel. Rabbi Chiya’s Torah would be remembered because it was accompanied by much care and effort. He didn’t merely teach his students; he made nets that were used to catch deer in order to use their hides to make scrolls of Torah. While he was at it, he donated the kosher deer meat to those less fortunate. The lesson of the upright acacia wood is that while we may forget lesson taught to us through words, we will never forget lessons taught to us through actions.