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The following is an excerpt from here, which I came across in response to this and hence this post should be in merit of on R’ Yisrael Noach ben Hinda for a quick and complete recovery:
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The Ba’al HaTurim points out that in the second verse of this week’s Parsha, Ki Sisa, which speaks about giving, the word ונתנו is a palindrome, teaching that what a person gives to charity will come back to him.  ”He will not be missing anything as a consequence of the giving.” (see Gittin 7b)

 It is also noted in the Artscroll footnote that the trope (the cantillation marks) over this word form a mirror image of each-other, despite it being otherwise uncommon for a word in the Torah to have more than one cantillation mark – also alluding to this concept.

In this week’s parshah, Exodus 25:1-27:19, Terumah, we find an elaborate description of the Ark and Tabernacle to be built to house the Torah. With gold-coated sweetwoods, silver plate, and solid gold covers, as well as woven curtains and three layers of containment, it is a housing for the Torah that is likely symbolic of many things. The first par that caught my eye was the arrangement of containers around the Torah, layered with gold, then wood, then gold. More specifically, three boxes are to be built inside of each other, sort of like Russian dolls, in that order, with the innermost to house the Torah. The wood is a specific type of wood, acacia, which I mentioned to Jeff. The hebrew root word for acacia is similar to the root for unproductive idleness, eitz shitim and shtut, respectively. One train of thought is that this is supposed to represent the good side of idleness, namely that it can be used to do good things. I drew a parallel there to our idea of Shabbat. The acacia wood is also, among other things, a sweet, fragrant wood that may have been a principal component of incense in Biblical times. It also exudes a sweet sap that can be made into a gum-Arabic substitute and is used extensively in the food and drink industry. Furthermore, acacia trees do grow in the desert, so it is likely that that might have been the logical choice based on availability to us as we were living in that environment. However, its sweet fragrance and antioxidant-rich sap would also chemically stabilize the wood, possibly making it an ideal choice for construction that is supposed to last for a very long time, and for ornamental purposes.

In this belated post about the Parsha of Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1 – 24:18), we read a description of commandments which contain what we normally consider the Ten Commandments, as well as other mitzvot and a rich body of legal precedent. One point of discussion I had with Jeff was the variation in the punishments described for some transgressions. In those verses, the sentences did not seem to have a logical order in how the transgression and then the punishment are mentioned, but instead seems to, in the sense of prose, “skip a beat”. Since these anomalies usually catch my eye before anything else, I asked why there is a non-random pattern to the mentionings of transgressions and punishments.

As one example, consider the sins of cursing at one’s parents and striking one’s parent, which are given the punishments of stoning and strangulation, respectively. As Jeff explained, cursing is a greater sin than striking, because it is a double transgression, both disrespecting one’s parents and invoking the name of God in vain, and therefore is deserving of a more severe punishment. In a side note, kidnapping is partially an enabling sin – by kidnapping a small child, one allows the possibility of him/her growing up without parents and coincidentally striking his own parents or cursing at them later in life, due to not recognizing them.