NOTES for Exo 36:1-38
The Tabernacle, judging by the description, was a tent with a sanctuary inside it. This was a common practice of the era: access to the sanctuary was limited, and only the initiated could enter it, in this case the priests. In the pagan world such a practice was connected with ideas, widespread there, about the power of those gods or spirits whom the pagans worshiped and honored.
This power could be useful to a person and, as a rule, really was, but it could also prove dangerous if handled incorrectly. The very people who knew how to handle it correctly were the initiated; they had been specially trained for this. Manifestations of power in the human world were usually connected with artifacts, sacred places and objects that were its conductors, so the initiated first of all had to know how to act properly in the sanctuary and how to handle sacred objects properly.
As for everyone else, the nonspecialists, so to speak, it was better for them to stay away from the sanctuary and not touch the sacred objects. They too, however, wanted to be near the source of power; this was the purpose of the sanctuary's outer court, whose role in the case described here was played by the courtyard of the Tabernacle. Meanwhile everything in the Tabernacle was different: the issue, after all, was the One God, not pagan gods, and here what came to the fore was not God's power but God's love, so relationships in any case were more important here than any instruments or techniques. The problem was something else: the people's unreadiness to meet God face to face.
This unreadiness became especially obvious after the story of the golden calf, when Moses' absence became the cause of the appearance, in essence, of an image of God, the very thing directly forbidden by the second commandment. The people were not ready to build their own relationships with God and answer for them; it proved simpler to rely on the leader and, in his absence, on old pagan instruments transferred into the space of relationship with the One God.
It is no surprise that the relationships themselves then slid down to the pagan level, to the level of collectivism and magic that is incompatible with full communion with God. The Tabernacle was the way out of the situation described here. It placed between God and the people not a barrier, but a transparent veil through which one could still see what was happening there, beyond the veil, where God was. This, of course, is not full communion with God, but it is still better than its absence or distortion.