RABBI DR. TZVI HERSH WEINREB THE PERSON BY OU Executive Vice President, Emeritus IN THE PARSHA
Happy and Proud of its Many Colors
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t is an animal. But then again, some say it is a colored dye. Many translate it as a dolphin, whereas some render it “blue-processed skins.” Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in his The Living Torah offers this footnote to “clarify” the matter. Always one to do his “homework” thoroughly, Rabbi Kaplan offers us this dazzling variety of definitions of the term tachash, which is listed among the materials necessary for the construction of the Tabernacle near the very beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19): “Blue-processed skins—others have ‘black leather;’ that is, leather worked in such a manner as to come out dark and waterproof. Other sources identify tachash as a species of animal. Some say that it is the ermine, a member of the weasel family. Others state that it is a member of the badger family... Others say that it is a colorful one-horned animal known as a keresh. Some say that this is a species of wild ram, possibly an antelope, okapi, or giraffe. Some see the 12
TORAH TIDBITS / TERUMAH 5781
one-horned creature as the narwhal, which has its left tooth developed into a single long horn-like appendage. This animal, which can grow to be over 16 feet long, is occasionally found on the southern Sinai shores... In Arabic, tukhush denotes the sea cow or dugong, an aquatic mammal which is found on the shores of the Sinai. Some say that the tachash is a type of seal, since its skins were used for the Tabernacle’s roof, and seal skins are often used for this purpose.” Suffice it to say that whatever the true identity of the tachash, it was such a multifaceted creature or object that it couldn’t be definitively identified by anyone who hadn’t actually seen it. As usual, I find Rashi’s definition most reasonable. Here’s Rashi on the verse in Exodus 25:5 where we first encounter the tachash: “It was a type of wild animal which only existed for that moment in history. It had many different colors and is, therefore, translated by Targum Onkelos as sasgona, a composite of the Hebrew phrase ‘she’sass u’mitpaer b’gavanim shelo,’ ‘which is happy and proud of its many colors.’” In short, it is a multifaceted creature which rejoices in the range and diversity of its many colors.
