Shabbat 24 February 2024 TETSAVEH

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 4 March 2024

People occasionally ask me why I wear such an unusually coloured tallit? Sometimes I tell them that only extremely important rabbis are permitted to wear a tallit with this colour blue; sometimes I tell them about the qualities that Jewish mysticism sees in the colour blue. But in the end I just ‘fess up and tell them: “I simply liked the colour.” There’s an idiom in modern Hebrew tallit sh’kulah techelet, “a tallit that is completely blue.” It used for something or someone who is completely perfect – though it’s also used sarcastically of somebody who is imperfect and hypocritical……

I’m reminded of this by our sidra this morning. Last week’s Torah reading was a DIY enthusiast’s manual: 3 chapters, 97 verses, detailing how to build the mishkan, the Tabernacle in the desert. The Creation account only takes one chapter; the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, just 22 verses; while the Ten Commandments are done and dusted in a mere 14 verses. And today’s sidra continues last Shabbat’s pattern: lots of detail about the clothing and accoutrements that Aaron and the priests are to wear.

One of the advantages of advancing years is that it gives a certain perspective on things. You can look back over time and see the quite remarkable way that things have changed over time, often imperceptibly.

So when I began in the rabbinate, standard clothing for rabbis conducting services, weddings, funerals and so on was canonicals: a black gown, often with white tabs hanging down from the collar; some also wore a black hat a bit like a crown. It was copied from Protestant practice, which was, no doubt, the idea: “you see,” it seemed to be saying, “we’re not all that different – our clergy wear canonicals just like yours.” Indeed, into the 1960s, it wasn’t unusual for rabbis to wear dog-collars on weekdays.

Sometime in the late 1970s, I decided to ditch the robe and just wear a tallit. I had come, increasingly, to feel that robes created an inappropriate distinction between us rabbis and – how can I put it – you ordinary human beings. Seriously, whatever claim to authority I might have as a rabbi, it wasn’t – as with Christian clergy – because I was an intermediary between you and God. Looking back, it was part of a general move towards a certain ‘democratisation’ of Jewish life, certainly in our part of the Jewish world: greater equality between men and women; choirs began to come out into the community, rather than being sequestered away; increasingly, anybody who was competent – not just rabbis – conducted services, read Torah, did the sermon and so on.

That said, what we read in the Torah this morning set people and priests apart. They really were intermediaries between the people and God. Worship in the Temple feels like it was a spectator activity: you brought your sacrifice and then watched while the priests performed their arcane rituals at the altar. Christian clergy, with their intercessionary role, can be said to have taken up the mantle of the Biblical priest.

Clothing is, of course, a basic part of every culture. 19thC explorers described the ‘uncivilised’ peoples they met as ‘naked savages’ – the mere fact of their nakedness somehow proving that they were culturally and morally inferior to the clothed Westerners who discovered them.

Clothing is first mentioned in the Torah in connection with Adam and Eve. They were in the Garden, naked, but they felt no shame (Gen 2:25) Then they eat the fruit, become aware of their nakedness, hide and make something to cover themselves with (Gen 3:7) Nothing has changed in their physical state: they were naked before eating the fruit – and still are after eating it. But their perception of their unclothed state has now radically changed.

One clue about what this really means is in the particular word used for ‘naked.’ It is ‘arom’ which is not the usual word used to denote nakedness in a sexual sense. It only occurs about 20 times in the whole Tenach and the thread linking them is not sexuality but vulnerability. Adam and Eve didn’t hide because they suddenly became sexually aware but because they felt vulnerable – hence fashioning coverings for themselves.

Nakedness is an attitude of mind as much as of body. Think of the idioms we use. It’s the language of exposure, of being stripped. We talk of feeling ‘stripped of our dignity’ – as if dignity were a physical item of clothing that could be taken from us.

It’s always struck me as strange that the word for ‘clothing’ in Hebrew is ‘beged.’ It does mean clothing but also means ‘deceit,’ ‘treachery,’ ‘lying.’ Maybe it’s not really that strange because it’s easy to make judgements about people based on what they wear. The world of fashion and advertising relies on the way we tend to judge a book by its cover. Confidence tricksters dress smartly because they know we somehow don’t expect a smartly-dressed person to be deceitful.

Clothing can reflect, then, our mental state. Armies, prisons, schools, hospitals insist on uniform. Apart from utilitarian reasons of being able to identify those involved with them, a uniform – as the name implies – makes everybody uniform. Depending on the particular style of uniform being worn, it establishes a hierarchy of power, even becoming an agent of social control.

A midrash asks why the Israelites deserved to be redeemed from Egyptian slavery. It answers its question by saying that they didn’t change their language, their names, their sexual mores or their clothing. The author of that midrash, writing centuries after the Exodus, obviously had no idea of the truth of any of those assertions. But the mythic reality is more important than any historical truth: they deserved to be liberated, it’s saying, because they didn’t assimilate into Egyptian life and culture. Those four things – language, names, sexual mores and dress – are ways in which we might establish and demonstrate our identity – or lose it.

Some minority groups argue that you are what you wear. It’s a sign of how much you have or haven’t assimilated, how much or how little you have lost your specific identity. It’s unlike the other ways mentioned in the midrash – language, names and sexual mores – for clothing identifies your group, even before you open your mouth and begin speaking – be that a pin-striped suit, a Rastafarian hat, or a Chasidic streiml. But while it may well identify what group that person belongs to, it tells us nothing at all about what sort of person they are.

Sometimes of course the group imposes self-limitations to identify itself to others and to maintain its separateness and identity. For Jews it has also, sadly, been the other way round also. We have often been forced to wear distinctive, identifying items of clothing both in Moslem lands as well as in Christian Europe. The Yellow Star of the Nazi era has a long pedigree, merely the 20thC instalment of a more-than-a-thousand years old practice.

Whereas contemporary Jewish practice is to break down the barrier between rabbi and congregant, the elaborate clothing described in our reading works entirely the other way. One writer suggests that the mishkan is, as it were, God’s earthly palace. “The High Priest is the palace servant and the garments he wears are intended not merely to clothe him in ‘glory and beauty’ (Exodus 28:2) but to call the King’s attention to His subjects and their needs.” (Barry Schwartz the torah.com.)

Patterns change and clothing has become much more informal since I started in the rabbinate. And that gets reflected in what we wear when we come to synagogue. I remember being quite shocked when somebody came in an open-necked shirt to a funeral I was conducting. It felt in some way disrespectful. In the mid-1990s there was a time when a bare midriff was the fashion among teenage girls. Sometimes one would come up to open the ark. Some of my members were shocked: “why don’t you do something about it, rabbi!” they would demand.

Maybe what all this is about is simply an awareness of self and place. There are no more priests. We’ve been told that we are “to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6) but we’re not there yet.

Is it inner kavannah, devotion and correct attitude, that are important or is it outer forms? Clearly it’s not an either-or thing and there’s obviously a delicate balance between them. Maybe the two words used to describe the priestly garments in our sidra can be some sort of guide: l’chavod ul’tif’aret ‘for glory and beauty’ (Exodus 28:2, 40) – words which you may recognise because they’ve been taken into the blessing after reading the haphtarah.

May that be the goal to aim for – l’chavod ul’tif’aret – not just in terms of the mundane question of what we wear when we come here – but in terms of all we do when seeking ways to express some inner meaning. May the outer form be an appropriate expression of the inner meaning.