Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 28th February / 11th Adar 5786

HOLY CLOTHES 

There was once a philosopher born in Trier, of Jewish, indeed rabbinic, ancestry: Karl Marx. He was baptised as a child, at the age of six, and as an adult he rarely showed much warmth toward his Jewish origins.¹

And yet he had an intuition: that the value of a commodity corresponds to the amount of time it takes to produce it. Economists, of course, will point out that prices and value are shaped by many factors, scarcity and demand, bargaining power, risk, and so on. Still, the underlying instinct is striking: time matters. Time is never neutral; time is life.

And yes: time can be an offering. Our daily prayers are fixed to the very hours when, in the days of the Temple, our ancestors brought the tamid offerings, morning and afternoon, and when the service of the altar continued into the night.² In that sense, we offer God what we could have used for something else: working, producing, investing.

From this it follows that the synagogue, using the language of the Gemara, is a mikdash me’at, a “little sanctuary,” a small Temple.³ And when we pray in synagogue, we are invited to think of God at the very times when the kohanim were thinking of God as they served in the Temple.

For this reason, the Sefer Torah, the holiest object in our synagogues, is clothed. It is dressed in garments which echo the sacred garments described in this week’s parashah: the vestments worn by the priest as he served in the Temple. In other words: clothes can be holy.

That is why I have asked Ralph (thank you!) to hold a Sefer Torah close to me while I speak. And that is why, inside your information sheet, you will find an illustration of the Kohen Gadol wearing his vestments. We will go through them one by one, and see what each item corresponds to.

But there is a point that matters even more: the garments of the Kohen Gadol are not accidental. The Talmud makes an audacious claim: just as sacrifices brought atonement, so too the priestly garments brought atonement.⁴ And it goes further, linking particular garments to particular kinds of moral failure.⁵ In Temple times, repair was expressed through the sacrificial system; today, we seek repair through what we offer instead: our attention, our discipline, our speech, our choices, and, ultimately, our time.

The first element that catches our attention is the rimmonim (רִמּוֹנִים), the decorative finials, on top of the Sefer Torah. They call to mind the tzitz (צִיץ), the golden plate worn on the forehead of the Kohen Gadol (כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל). The Talmud links the tzitz to atonement for a sin committed “with the forehead”: azut metzach—brazen, hard-faced arrogance.⁵

Exodus 28:38 makes the spiritual logic explicit: the tzitz “bears the guilt” connected with holy offerings.⁶ Meaning: it atones for the ways sacred gifts can be brought carelessly, thoughtlessly, or in a compromised way. At its core, that can be an act of arrogance: saying to God, “Here I am, rules or no rules. I’m doing it my way.”

The second element is the tas (טַס), the breastplate-like silver plate, which corresponds to the choshen (חֹשֶׁן), the High Priest’s breastplate. On the Kohen Gadol it carried the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and it therefore calls us back to an obligation: to be fair and just in judgment. The Talmud explicitly links the choshen to the rectification of justice.⁵

And it is not only “on the heart.” The choshen was fastened by chains and rings to the ephod (אֵפוֹד), and the ephod carried the names of the tribes again on the shoulder-stones (אַבְנֵי־שֹׁהַם). Those shoulders matter: they are the shoulders that bear the Sefer Torah when we lift it for hagbah (הַגְבָּהָה). They are the shoulders of justice and responsibility, bearing the weight of our shared memory.

Another element we notice is the me’il (מְעִיל), the mantle. It covers the Sefer Torah, just as it covered the body of the Kohen Gadol. The Gemara teaches that the me’il atones for the sin of malicious speech, lashon hara (לָשׁוֹן הָרָע).⁵ It had little bells attached around its hem, making noise as the priest moved. The homiletic parallel is almost unavoidable: sound and gossip; noise and slander.⁵

We no longer have bells on the me’il itself, yet in our tradition we have something similar: the sounds are now attached to the rimmonim, and they can serve the same purpose. They remind us to beware of lashon hara.

And once the scroll is opened, we see the binder, the fascia, that tightens it, corresponding to the avnet (אַבְנֵט), the sash or belt of the Kohen Gadol. The Talmud links the avnet to the inner world of intention: the discipline of the heart and mind as we draw near to worship.⁵

And here I need to explain a German–Ashkenazi detail. In Yiddish this binder is often called a wimpel, and traditionally, in many communities, it was made from the cloth used at a baby boy’s circumcision, the cloth placed beneath him during the brit milah (בְּרִית מִילָה).

Circumcision is called a brit (בְּרִית): a covenant. And our relationship with the Sefer Torah is a covenant too, a covenant with the Almighty that helps put our intentions in order, teaching us priorities, and reminding us what we are here for.

This parallelism, so intricate, and (to my mind) remarkably precise, between the garments of the Kohen Gadol and our recurrent moral failures, between the sacrificial system and what we place around the Torah, is one of the most compelling features of rabbinic literature.

And it answers a question I often hear: why study sacrifices at all? Why read those repetitive, painstakingly detailed sections, sometimes even disturbing, about blood, death, and burning flesh on the altar? Haven’t we “evolved” beyond this?

It is the task of philosophers to answer that question, which is, in the end, a variation on the question all of us ask sooner or later: “Why be Jewish?” One year I could even teach a whole course on it: a wonderful session of group psychology. “Meet at 9:15, before the Shabbat service, and we’ll discuss: why do we keep being Jews?” I can’t promise the answer… but the croissants are excellent.

To be honest, I find Rav Soloveitchik’s answer among the most convincing. The discomfort, sometimes even disgust, that accompanies talk of guilt, transgression, and atonement is not accidental: it confronts us with an uncomfortable truth, namely that we are not perfect. And no one enjoys being reminded of that.

Soloveitchik explains these ideas in a work I genuinely recommend: On Repentance (Al ha-Teshuvah; Hebrew edition 1979; English translation edited by Pinchas Peli, 1980).⁷ There the Rav describes how, when God seeks to draw a person toward teshuvah, He awakens not only moral awareness but also something almost visceral: revulsion, shame, and astonishment at oneself, because repentance begins the moment we stop telling ourselves that everything is fine.

Two generations have passed since that book appeared, and in today’s cultural climate it feels, if anything, even more relevant. We live in a society in which people are often treated as guilty by default: because of where they were born, because of their gender or sexual identity, because of their social class, and so on.

Robert Hughes, writing about what he called a “culture of complaint,” described an “all-pervasive claim to victimhood” capable of producing a “juvenile culture of complaint.”⁸ Today, however, the dynamic often seems to have radicalised: whereas collective identities were once built around shared grievances, the prevailing assumption now is that there is always someone “more oppressed” than us, and that therefore we must always, in some measure, be oppressors. And not infrequently this logic is applied even to Jews, despite the historical rupture of the Shoah, six million murdered.

In a society that offers inherited, endless guilt, Judaism reopens the space of moral freedom. It does not deny responsibility, but it refuses condemnation without a way out. Its grammar is concrete: to acknowledge, to repair, to ask forgiveness, to begin again. That is why the synagogue, with its symbols, its vestments, its memory, is not a museum of identity but a school of complexity and hope. To enter it today, and to learn to read its language, is a quietly countercultural act: to insist that a human being is more than a label, and that history is not a court of law from which there is no appeal.

1. Karl Marx’s childhood baptism at age six is noted in standard biographies.

2. On the correspondence between daily prayers and the Temple’s daily offerings: b. Berakhot 26b.  

3. Mikdash me’at: Ezekiel 11:16; applied to synagogues and study halls in b. Megillah 29a.

4. “Just as sacrifices atone, so do the priestly garments atone”: b. Zevaḥim 88b. 

5. The mapping of specific garments to specific failings (including me’il ↔ lashon hara; tzitz ↔ azut metzach; choshen ↔ justice; avnet ↔ sinful thoughts) is stated in b. Arakhin 16a (and appears in the broader discussion in Zevaḥim 88b as well).  

6. Exodus 28:38 (“bear the guilt” connected with holy offerings). 

7. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, On Repentance: In the Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed./trans. Pinchas H. Peli (Jerusalem: Oroth Publishing House, 1980),

8. Robert Hughes, “The Fraying of America,” TIME (3 Feb 1992); expanded as Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (Oxford University Press, 1993).