Shabbat Zakhor
Tetzaveh
Exodus 27:20-30:10
Deuteronomy 25:17-19
I Samuel 15:2-34
I remember sitting next to my father in synagogue, playing with the fringes of his tallit. Even now, thinking about the fringes of a wool tallit brings back to me some of the emotions that I felt then, as a small boy.
My mood included some tension at maintaining my most formal behavior, and some warm security at my father’s proximity, also some boredom. Meanwhile I soaked up the sounds and sights of the synagogue service.
I remember the smell of the old books in Rabbi Grozalsky’s shul in the Bronx. On long summer Shabbat afternoons, my friend would instruct me from those heavy old volumes. He had the skill to make sense of the Hebrew words, the patience to explain them, and the insight to make them exciting to me, a teenager only a couple of years younger than him. Even now, after all these years, when I open a decaying volume and get a whiff of that fragrance, I also smell something of how I felt then, years ago, as a beginning student with an inspired teacher.
It seems likely that my experience of Judaism has matured since those years. I hope so. Yet everything I know now rests on the foundation of what I learned then. Beyond that, without a Judaism that spoke to me at those times, I could not have reached this point or the Judaism that speaks to me now.
Thinking about this process brings me to a story recorded in the Talmud:
A non-Jew passed behind a synagogue and heard the voice of the reader saying: “These are the garments which they shall make, a breastplate, a vest, a robe …”(Exodus 28:4).
He said, “These are for whom?”
They said to him: “For the High Priest [Kohen Gadol].”
He said to himself: “I shall convert in order that they should appoint me High Priest.”
He came before Shammai, one of the rabbinic leaders of the generation, who worked as a builder, and said: “Convert me on condition that I become High Priest.” Shammai drove him away with a builder’s measuring rod.
He came before Hillel and said: “Convert me on condition that I become High Priest.” Hillel converted him and said: “Do they ever appoint a king who does not know the royal ceremonies?”
He went and read Torah. When he got to “and the stranger who draws near [to the temple service] shall die” (Numbers 1:51), he asked: “This is said about whom?”
Hillel answered: “Even about David, king of Israel.”
He then figured out on his own that if David could not serve as a common priest, he himself certainly could not become High Priest.
He went before Shammai and said: “Am I really qualified to become High Priest? For it says, `The stranger who draws near shall die!'”
He went before Hillel and said, “Hillel the humble, let them rest a blessing on your head, for you have brought me under the wings of the Divine presence” (Shabbat 31a).
The protagonist of this talmudic tale felt drawn to Judaism by his love of finery. He originally wanted to become a become a Jew so that he could wear the splendid apparel of the High Priest. Judaism as a fashion statement seems a childish motivation.
He himself came to understand that. In retrospect, he valued becoming a Jew because he felt that converting had brought him into a relationship with God.
Each one of us has outgrown certain childish motivations in reaching our current, more mature understanding of our Judaism. We once got our satisfaction by playing with the fringes of a tallit, or the equivalent. We should not regret those childish motivations. We once needed them. Now we have matured.
Of course, a truly sophisticated student of Judaism might look at our current understanding of Judaism, at the satisfactions that we now draw from our practices, and think that we, too, act like children, that we still have a lot to learn.
We do still have a lot to learn.