"To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.  I am not a teacher, only a fellow student."  (Soren Kierkegaard)

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A FEW PRE-SHABBAT WORDS FROM RABBI AARON

What Does Sacred Clothing Tell Us?
Among other things, parashat tetzaveh describes the sacred vestments of the kohanim.  I have to admit that because I am partial toward the texts with rich or cryptic narrative, I find myself less enthused when I revisit texts detailing sacrifice, dimensions of the sacred buildings, and the priestly wardrobe. Perhaps it’s due to my own contemporary reference toward fashion; the context in which I live is so far removed from the ancient word of the Torah...I feel as if I'm peering through a powerful telescope deep into the heavens, gazing at the stellar light from eons ago.

Still, this is the text, and if commentators before me stepped up to the plate, well...I have no excuse! After all, we just celebrated a fun and informative Word Wide Wrap [thanks to Ron Holzer's hands-on leadership!]. In the Becker Chapel teens and grownups, men and women, all learned about tefillin and put them on. What did all that mean? Tefillin have been with the Jewish people for quite some time; the Talmud describes them. Beyond the dimensions of the boxes and the specific hand-calligraphed texts, there is some rather imaginative midrash that describes God wearing tefillin [!] and praying in the morning [to God, of course!] - and the rabbis go on to to describe the texts within God's tefillin as well as the scared words prayed daily by God. The rabbinic exercise is not simply a clever diversion. These rabbinic fantasies are about sketching God's personality as well as weaving our own spiritual lives together with God's sense of spirituality. A very simple summary: tallit and tefillin resonate with several layers of meaning..

Looking back in time at the sacred vestments described in the parasha, we can understand that while we lack the ancient references evoked by the mishkan's aesthetics, the colors and patterns of the clothing may have embedded some meanings. I tried to remind myself of this notion by putting together the pdf that accompanies this drash on the rabbi page within the shul website. I basically trawled for the images that google [ah, the global oracle!] yielded for "ritual headdress," "ceremonial headdress," and "religious headdress," along with the transliterated terms "mitznefet" and "migba'at" [found within our parasha]. As you'd expect, there's a riot of color as well as a fantastic range of styles. As for meanings...each cultural snapshot opens up a rich and distinctive vocabulary that might speak to the gods, to a warrior's status, to celebrating a bride upon her wedding day, to the spiritual rank of a cleric, and on and on. 

As for the kohen, I'm especially drawn to the words which adorn his forehead, right beneath the turban: Holy to Adonai - קודש ליהוה. What did it mean for the kohen to wear this phrase on his head "at all times" [תמיד]? The notes within Etz Hayim [page 510] suggest that these words help the kohen concentrate his thoughts "...on his duties and on his accountability." Now there's some cross-cultural take-home that holds up rather well across the centuries. Imagine that each of us - Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, the whole lot; people of every ethnicity and skin color, you get the idea... Imagine that we all had that phrase translated into our mother tongue. And imagine that we wore it at all time in order to focus our hearts and minds upon our responsibilities as well as our accountability - sacred clerics, serving God, all of the human beings on our planet! What a world, everyone serving Something larger than themselves! We'd all have to take our shoes off!

So May It Be Thy Will
כן יהי רצון

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Aaron

Click any of the images below to view as (larger) pdf

Please click image above to view as separate pdf