Dear Rav Kornfeld,

Is the midrash recording the miraculous nature of the Aron Kodesh recorded anywhere in the gemara?

Even better, is there anything documented that would be useful toward my explanation of a possible similarity to the middle bar of the Mishkan, as cited on the daf on Shabbos 98b?

Decades ago my chavrusa told me that if one measured from the inside wall of the Mishkan to the one side of the Aron Kodesh, and added to it the measure from the opposite side, it added up to the exact same measurement as between the Mishkan walls - as if the Aron Kodesh took up no space at all.

The way the middle bar of the Mishkan is described, apparently from the phrase "from end to end" meaning 1 bar passing through all 3 walls as one very long single bar gives me several concerns.

If I understand the daf, a boraisa is brought with this understanding. Tosfos brings another boraisa with a different understanding.

I would have expected to see:

1) a claim that if this were so, then technically it would only be 13 bars total, not the 15 required by the Torah's specifications

2) perhaps a note from Rashi of the length of this very long middle bar or a mention that it is the single Mishkan component with the longest dimensional measurement - even if it had been built with two bends

3) noting how Rashi comments on Chumash (per Metsudah) that the corner beams did not enclose the Mishkan but more than 1/2 ama each - clearly Rashi envisions the Mishkan from an insider's perspective. And similarly he would reckon the corner beams as exclusively part of the short wall. And accordingly Rashi would have to explain "from end to end" as ending prior to the 1 1/2 amos "face" of the corner board, with the "end" of the short wall being on the corner board's 1 ama side. And thus a single middle bar would not penetrate into the corner board at all (similar to his comment about the shape of the Aron's "carrying" poles and the paroches). And Rashi should disagree with the daf's cited boraisa on those grounds.

And more of course, to clarify how Betzalal bored out the center hole of the corner beams, if they were bored out other than a straight hole, but one with an elbow corner to facilitate a single long straight wooden bar being fit through it and bending, according to the boraisa.

Perhaps somewhere there might be a creative resolution revealing to us something common to the Aron Kodesh and the middle bar (proposed by me with no known source):

Perhaps just like the fact that the Aron was out of this world (measurements), normally in this world two solid (wooden bar) objects cannot occupy the same space. This is unlike how a flowing liquid or gas could flow through intersecting pipes or holes. But the cited boraisa is revealing to us that, counter to Rashi's view of the long walls ending short of the corner boards, the middle bars did penetrate into the corner boards, and Betzalel precisely bored open the centers so that the orthogonal center bars had to miraculously pass through each other to fulfill "end to end" in the specifications of the passuk. And this could be what the boraisa is trying to describe.

If the middle bar was to look like it served a structural purpose at the corners it should pin the long wall to the corner beam.

But if the corner beams were completely separated from the long walls with no penetration of the long middle bars, then there might be a much simpler solution:

Of course the Mishkan could use two pairs of half-length bars for the upper and lower bars, but the long middle bars of 30 amos length needed to be placed in from the open side until they touched the face of the corner beam without penetrating it. If the middle bars were two half-length bars the deeper one would not be reachable to be pulled back out when it was time to disassemble the Mishkan the way the other half bar would be.

This too would be somewhat of a similarity to Rashi's description of the paroches draped over the tips of the Aron's poles. And I would have expected Rashi to mention it.

Is the Gemara really silent on these points?

If there is any place in Shas where the Aron Kodesh measurements is documented, perhaps there too might be a link to clarify the middle bars.

That is what I am seeking.

--Chaim