Parashat “Tetzaveh” (Exodus 27:20-30:10)
for the week of February 12^th, 2011

This week’s Torah portion expands upon instructions concerning the mishkan (“tabernacle”)—the portable sanctuary that was used during our years of wandering in the wilderness.  In Tetzaveh, however, the primary focus is on the people who will serve in the mishkan rather than on the building itself.  There are elaborate instructions for the vestments the kohanim (“priests”) are supposed to wear and about the ceremony in which they will be consecrated to God’s service.  The purpose, emphasized many times in this portion, is to make the priests holy (Heb., “l’kadeish otam”).  But how can wearing certain clothes or participating in rituals make a person holy?

It’s worth noting that for our ancestors, “holiness” wasn’t so much an abstract idea as a definite quality that could be attained.  As one commentator explains:  “…holiness could be acquired through ritual acts by people, animals, places, and things; only then could they approach the powerful sanctity of God, which paradoxically could be dangerous as well as beneficent because of its extreme power.”*  In this context, the special garments and ceremonies of consecration were designed to protect the priests as they worked in close proximity to the powerful and sometimes dangerous mystery of God’s presence**.  To understand this older idea, we might draw an analogy to the special garments, training and preparation that astronauts must receive before they can safely venture out into space.

But how might this idea (using special clothes and rituals to ‘make someone holy’) translate for our own time?  For us, to call people kadosh might be to suggest that those individuals seem to embody a special connection with God or, as human beings created in the Divine image, that they reflect aspects of God in unique and powerful ways.  If these qualities are innate, giving the person special clothes to wear or performing certain rituals doesn’t necessarily guarantee the person becomes “holy.”  In fact, the daily headlines suggest that sometimes, people who wear these special religious clothes or participate in these rituals behave in ways that most of would describe as distinctly unholy and immoral.  So, there’s clearly no religious magic in putting on these robes or going through the ceremony of consecration that guarantees the participant will be a good person (let alone a holy person).

No, for us, the clothes and rituals are symbols.  Like all symbols, these practices are meant to point to meanings beyond themselves.  The garments and the rituals point to the idea of service.  They emphasize the priests special responsibility to God and community.  In their distinctiveness, the garments and rituals emphasize the idea that the priests’ work is not supposed to be ordinary or casual.  Their work is to be set apart from the mundane.  The clothes the priests wear and the rituals of consecration remind them and their community that these priests will be engaged with something mysterious, beautiful, extraordinary and powerful.  Paradoxically, the clothing and the rituals also suggest that the locus of the priests’ holiness is not entirely innate or under their control.  It is a gift and an honor placed upon them from outside themselves.  In other words, ideally, one function of these symbols is to promote a sense of humility.

Still, we know that symbols are slippery.  By definition, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways.  So, we have to choose carefully which meanings we attach to our symbols.  We decide which meanings to dismiss and which meanings we’ll embrace and rehearse over and over again.  Sometimes, we can forget that a symbol points to something beyond itself and we turn the symbol into a kind of idol that we worship.  But the priests’ ultimate authority is not found in magic, holy clothes or even in special religious ceremonies.  The priests’ authority, like all meaning, is ultimately rooted in the One who weaves tapestries of meaning within and between our hearts.  The value—positive or negative, helpful or destructive—of our symbols depends upon the degree to which they deepen our attachment to the Truths at the heart of our tradition and enable us to live holy lives.  And in that sense, putting on special clothes or participating in powerful rituals still can help to make us holy.

*Dr. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi & Rabbi Andrea Weiss in The Torah:  A Women’s Commentary (New York:  Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2008), pg. 482, commentary to Ex. 29:1.

**Regarding the dangerous aspect of this priestly work, see, for example, the story of the death of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu (Leviticus 10:1-3).