Exodus 38:8 Meaning He Made the Basin of Bronze

In the wilderness, the craftsman Bezalel makes the great bronze basin where the priests will wash before they serve, and its stand as well. He does not make it from new metal. He makes it from the polished bronze mirrors of the women who served at the entrance of the tent of meeting.

Those mirrors once showed a face back to itself. Now they are melted down to hold water for washing. This is the soul's turning. The self that kept checking its own reflection, how it looks and what others think, is given up and changed into something that cleanses. You cannot come close to God while staring at your own image.

When the ego stops mirroring itself, the soul becomes a clear surface where God can be seen. Washing at that basin is the inner cleansing that comes before any real service.

In the desert at the foot of Sinai, the camp is busy building a tent for God, and the women who serve at its doorway bring the craftsman their mirrors: round discs of polished bronze they have used to see their own faces. It matters that a mirror is the gift, because a mirror has no other work than to show a face, and the world itself was made for that. The treasure was hidden and loved to be known, so it brought forth creation to look at itself in it. Before the human being arrived, the world was like bronze not yet rubbed smooth. And it matters that women give these, since God is witnessed most fully in what receives and brings forth, not only in what acts.

The craftsman melts them all down into one basin with one stand. Many mirrors, each showing a different face, and not one of them was showing something false: the One appears to each person in the shape that person is able to hold. Melted together they are still the same bronze they always were. Only the separateness is gone, not the substance.

The basin is set between the tent and the altar and filled with water, and no priest may step inside or offer anything until he has washed his hands and feet there, or he will die. Every living thing is made from water, and mercy reaches wider than anything else. So the one who comes to serve bends over the basin, and the water holds his face while it cleans him. He never sees the mirror, only the form looking back, and that form is his own. Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.