What Charity would Say, "Stop bringing money?"

 Few are the organizations we know that would say, "No more donations, we've got enough!" But that's precisely what happened in the building of the mishkan. Growing up as one of seven in an Orthodox home in America, I remember the endless demands of every school and synagogue imaginable, "The School Building Fund," "The Journal Dinner," "The Jewish Future Fund." Not only were these eleemosynary enterprises of a highly competitive nature, guided by peer pressure and the like, but they were strictly obligatory. If you sent your child to a school, as part of your contractual obligation you had no choice but to give to its building fund. Why should you only have to pay tuition, when your predecessors paid for the building fund whose benefits your child(ren) reaped?! 

And there obviously is a keen logic to that. Every investment fund puts aside money for a rainy day, every bank and public company puts aside money to pay off lawsuits against it, earmarking new funds as soon as a new scandal hits the papers; it's simply part of doing business. 

But with the mishkan it was different, the mishkan was to be a place that collected what it needed and no more. It was not to be seen as an imposition on the public, and if you sought not to give out of the goodness of your heart, commanded Moshe, you best not give. The Talmud even asks why certain fixtures in the Beit Hamikdash were not made out of gold, and the answer, was, Hashem did not want to unduly stretch people thin by asking them to pay more when a cheaper metal could have sufficed. 

The Ramban adds to this idea by saying that one of the lessons of the mishkan was to teach us how to scrupulously conduct our financial affairs. The moment there was too much, there was a reckoning, and Moshe heard about it right away, something that rings true with the financial mayhem right now running rampant in the world.