The Tabernacle of the Covenant is a tent, a kind of portable sanctuary, whose name is meant to remind people of God's constant and unseen presence. Its bright colors set the tabernacle apart against the desert landscape. Wherever you were, the blue and purple colors of the tent raised above the people would always refresh your understanding of how, why, and for what purpose this exhausting journey had been undertaken.

Closeness to God, on the one hand, defined and regulated the whole life of the people. On the other hand, this closeness required constant sacrifice, a renunciation of oneself and one's own desires for the sake of being able to live under God's protection and blessing. This difficult path required a special courage and a special attitude toward the outward appearance of the Tabernacle and everything connected with it. More about the meaning of each of its required attributes can be read in V. Sorokin's book (RU).

From the description it is clear that the Tabernacle is nothing other than a portable sanctuary. It is a tent that, if necessary, could be moved comparatively easily to another place; for nomads such transportability was fundamentally important. The word "tabernacle" itself literally means "place of presence."

The point is God's presence, the very presence revealed to Moses at Sinai as a shining cloud, which from a distance he took for fire. It seems strange: how can God, even if the question is only of His presence, be contained in some human-made receptacles, whether the most splendid Temple, like the one that would later appear in Jerusalem, or the simplest tent? Pagan gods were another matter: they were neither omnipresent nor omnipotent; they were limited in space and time, remaining only a part of the universe, though a special part.

In essence, the gods and spirits of the pagans did not differ so radically from human beings, though their nature was entirely nonhuman. Such beings, limited in space and time, could very well have favorite places on earth or even dwellings where they lived; and if so, a person too could in a sense "tame" a god or spirit, "domesticate" them by offering them a house and food, that is, sacrifices, somewhere near his own home. But when the discussion turned to the God of Abraham and Moses, many questions immediately arose. How could God, even if we are speaking only of His presence, fit into any house built by human beings?

The only answer here can be what theologians usually call kenosis, God's self-emptying, by which He relates His fullness, His being, and His life to the dimensions and forms of human being and human life. God does not need a sanctuary, but a human being needs one, and therefore God is ready to fit within the limits created by a human being. With one condition, however: those limits must be created by the human being according to God's instruction, according to God's plan.

This is not only because God knows better what the place of His meeting with humanity should be, but also because the very building of the sanctuary under God's guidance prepares a person for the meeting with God and builds between God and the person those relationships without which no sanctuary will give a person anything. Without relationships, no techniques or methods by themselves bring a person closer to God; they remain only something like magic in religious form. The sanctuary is built in the process of building a person's relationship with God; only then does it have meaning.