What is honor and what is glory?
Photo: Moshe Milner, GPO
Parshat Tetzaveh: Honor and glory
The priestly garments are spiritual conductors. Modern rabbis should reclaim the art of love
The majority of this week's parsha describes, in elaborate and beautiful detail, the vestments of the priests. The cumulative effect of these elegant garments was to allow the priest to serve as a channel for glory and splendor.
God tells Moses, "You shall make sacred garments for Aaron, your brother, for glory and splendor" (Ex. 28:2).This is a powerful idea, and one virtually lost on the modern rabbinate.
The priest is the original, biblical model for the rabbi. However most of today's rabbis have forgotten how to be priests. A priest is a spiritual teacher who incarnates honor and glory in his very being.
What is honor and what is glory?
Honor
The biblical notion of honor does not mean honor in an external sense, but rather is weightiness – called "koved" in Hebrew, or gravitas in English.
Gravitas is an expression of depth. The vestments of the priests are called the holy garments. Holiness is closely related to depth and gravitas. The great chassidic master Mordehcai Lainer of Izbica taught that the opposite of the holy is not the unholy or the impure. Rather, the opposite of the holy is the superficial.
Similarly, the opposite of weightiness is lightness, a phrase used by Milan Kundera in his 1984 novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
So the holy garments are spiritual technologies used by the priest to channel honor and depth into the world for the sake of the people.
The danger in of the holy garments, however, is the danger inherent in every garment. The word for garment in Hebrew, beged, is closely related to the word begidah, betrayal.
Holiness or betrayal
Clothing can be an expression of "holiness," or it can be a betrayal of true depth and honor, serving instead to cover up the emptiness underneath the clothing.
The very source of clothes in biblical consciousness is connected to such a betrayal of the holy - the fig leaf worn by Adam and Eve after their mythical fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
Too often today, our rabbis lack depth and gravitas, and try to cover up for that lack with the "right" clothes. But black hat, black clothes, white shirt does not a rabbi make.
Moreover, the clothes which reek of betrayal are paradoxically the storehouses of information that modern rabbis use to set them apart from the people. Rabbis must be wise, and wisdom comes from knowledge.
Wisdom and information
But rabbis today often replace knowledge and wisdom with information. According to one chassidic master, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piacezna, this was precisely the sin of eating from the tree of knowledge, again in the Garden of Eden. This is the tendency of organized religion to replace wisdom with information.
The priest represents a deep and profound wisdom. His clothes must express that wisdom, rather than betray the people by merely papering over emptiness with information or fancy clothes.
It is in this sense that today's rabbis must once again become priests. They must do deep spiritual, psychological work as well as real training in movement and body. This is in addition to deep knowledge of Jewish textual sources and law. Only the combination of all these elements can begin to reveal holiness.
Glory
The second purpose of the priestly garments is glory. In kabbalistic (mystical) literature, glory represents the heart. And so according to the Zohar, the priest must not only be a channel for gravitas; he must be a channel for love.
The Talmud says that if someone sees a priest blessing the people and does not see God, he loses his vision. The reason is that when a priest blesses the people, he recites a separate blessing before the actual benediction in which he thanks God for commanding him to perform this mitzvah. That preliminary blessing ends with the words "to bless His people of Israel with love."
It is a blessing of love which cannot be merely external – it must well up from the deepest heart-space of the priest.
The priest literally becomes a channel for divine love. His ritual garments are a spiritual technology to help him access that love and transmit it to the people.
If, however, those garments serve to set him above the people whose deference serves his ego and need for recognition and power, then the beged (garments) are once again guilty of begidah (betrayal).
Rabbis as lovers
Here again we need to ask ourselves –are our Rabbis today lovers? To be a lover is not merely about making legal decision –Piskei Halacha, or even giving great legal or textual discourses. Being a lover is about love.
Rabbis need to be priests in the sense that they palpably feel a throbbing love for the people. That love must pulsate inside and animate every word and gesture. It is only when our rabbis once again become priests- enlightened spiritual teachers – who are channels for love and gravitas that we will be able to offer the Torah of Israel as a balm to the deep wounds of our generation.
It is in this spirit that the Talmud explains that several of the key vestments of the priest were meant as safeguards against the prohibition of slander.
Slander represents the image of the rabbi/ priest who is caught up in political intrigue, maneuvering and machinations. It is the very opposite of the rabbi whose spiritual authority derives from his genuine spiritual center, love, gravitas and charisma. I use the word charisma here not as external rhetorical skill but in the sense of it's original meaning, the overflowing of the holy spirit.
In the language of this week's parsha, "And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they make Aaron's garments to sanctify him" (Ex. 28:3). The garments of the priest are meant to be spiritual technologies whose purpose is to actualize the spirit of wisdom in the priest.
Our modern rabbis must reach back and reclaim the sacred destiny of the priest and priestess.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni - Teacher and student of Torah; Leader of Bayit Chadash Spiritual Community and Movement; Chair of Integral Kabbalah at Integral Institute of Ken Wilber
The "Bayit Chadash" website: www.bayitchadash.org
