Today in shul we read Pekudei. Most years we read Pekudei along with the previous parshah, Vayakhel. This year is a leap year, and that means there are several extra weeks to fill up with parshot, and therefore we read Pekudei all by itself.
Pekudei tells a lot about the priestly wardrobe. As usual, I find it tedious on first reading. Also on my second and third readings. Who cares what the priests wore? Jews don’t have priests anymore. I had nothing to say about the priestly clothes, and then last week at work we interviewed a job candidate and at the debrief I noted that the candidate had not dressed as one would expect someone to dress for an interview. He wore jeans and sneakers. He did not bring a notepad or a pen to take notes with. He wrote nothing down. This was not the only thing that bothered me about him; if I had been impressed with him otherwise I might not have cared. But I was otherwise not bowled over, and the clothes bothered me.
My colleagues thought I was petty and weird to bring up the clothes. “We’re engineers,” they said. “We don’t care what people wear.” And yet each of them, when asked, would admit that when they had come to interview they had not worn jeans. Maybe they did not wear a suit, but they did not wear jeans. We’d interviewed someone a couple months ago who was covered in tattoos and pierced in a million places. Still, he wore a suit for the interview. That’s what people do.
I said I thought that someone who wanted the job would have worn something besides jeans. No one wanted to make a hiring decision on the basis of jeans, of course. It annoyed them that I kept mentioning it. But it kept bothering me. I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew all the things it might mean. It might mean that the candidate didn’t really want the job, and was interviewing with us for the hell of it. It might mean that the candidate didn’t think that he had to make any effort to impress us -- that would signal arrogance. It might be that the candidate wore jeans and sneakers because he had a rebellious streak and was damned if he would conform to anyone’s expectations of what appropriate interview attire was -- that would suggest someone who might not play well with others, and who is still struggling to find himself and assert himself as his own person, i.e. it suggests immaturity. And it might have been that he was one of the few people who are simply sartorial deaf-mutes. Some people do not know how to speak with clothes and they do not know how to read other people’s clothes. But his haircut and his tattoo made me think that was probably not true for him. Even if it had been true, it would have been a red flag for me, because sartorial deaf-mutes are often deaf to other forms of non-verbal communication, and that tends to lead to difficulties for them working with teams.
So those are the options as I saw them: a candidate who didn’t want the job, or didn’t think he needed to follow the rules because he was so good at what he did, or who was still locked in a rebellious immaturity, or who did not understand that humans speak through many channels, including through what they wear. Any way I looked at it, it was not a person I wanted to hire.
But I might be wrong.
I don’t know the guy personally. I don’t know his history. We share a country and a profession but there are bound to be many things we do not share, and any one of those things might lead to my reading the wrong things into what he wore that day. I asked a friend in San Francisco what engineers wear when they come to interview with him. Jeans, sure, he said. Maybe a t-shirt, maybe a collared shirt. Engineers are in high demand right now. Not enough of us to go around. So maybe the dress code slipped downward when I wasn’t looking. ( When the dress code for engineers at job interviews slips down to cutoffs and flipflops, sell your tech stocks, stat. That thar’s a bubble.)
What’s this have to do with the priestly costume? Well, it’s about costumes.
( Purim is coming up. Purim is also about costumes. I’d like to dress as Vashti, too proud to be paraded about for the delectation of her husband’s drunken guests. Vashti, who dressed for herself and the women of her community, who dressed for the harem, and danced when she pleased and not when she was told to. Vashti, who had to be put in her place, because what would the men of Persia do if like Vashti their women decided they had right of refusal? King Ahasuerus wanted a more docile wife, and picked Esther. Esther seemed docile enough and turned out to be quite a ball-busting Jewess who wasn’t going to sit there looking pretty while her people were slaughtered. Some men, it seems, are just attracted to strong women. )
Here’s the thing. We say that what someone looks like doesn’t matter, that it’s what is inside that counts. We know that isn’t true. What we mean is “it seems wrong that what someone looks like should matter, so we would like to pretend that it does not.”
We want clothes to be irrelevant, and yet we cannot help but tell stories by what we wear. We can pretend we aren’t telling stories, or if we are telling them they do not matter. We can say one thing with our eyes and another with our mouths and yet another with the shoes we wear. Today I went to shul in jeans, rolled up to show my black leather boots with the buckles on the side. When we got there I put on my uncle’s bar mitzvah tallit, 50 year old silk with thin blue stripes. I did not wear a kippah. I don’t know why. I always wear a tallit at shul, and I hardly ever wear a kippah. So there I sat and stood and sang and prayed in my edgy boots and my rolled up jeans and my prayer shawl. What was I trying to say, exactly? I’m not sure myself. Sometimes our clothes are like prayers that way, or poems or dreams: they have a sort of incoherence to them. I’m feeling incoherent, the last few days, and insecure, and dreamy. I got a haircut a few days ago: it’s short again, like I kept it when I was younger, before I had children. I keep meaning to buy my own tallit, a nice wool one -- I’ve already got the yarn I’ll need to tie my own tzitzit. But I can never decide what tallit I want, so I never get around to buying one. I don’t even like the silk one so much. It slips off me. It doesn’t have enough heft to it. Of course it reminds me of my uncle, but I didn’t know him when he was thirteen, wearing that tallit. I knew him later, in his grown up tallit, the one he was buried in. We bury our dead in white shrouds, and we wrap the men in their tallitot. Plain wood boxes. In death we are all equal, is the idea. We cannot carry our wealth or poverty with us there. We all go the same, plain shroud, plain box, and yet, like ancient pharoahs, with our own prayer shawls.
I’m ranging rather widely, I apologize. It was important that the priests know precisely what to wear. It was important that all that be prescribed, in detail. That it be beautiful, and that it not be individual. A priest was a representative. A priest did not act on his own behalf. He did not speak on his own behalf. He could not be telling his own stories, more or less coherent, more or less conflicted, with the clothes he wore. All the channels we humans speak on -- he had to speak the same things on them all. A priest should not be a candidate for inclusion in The Sartorialist. He did not serve his own desires, he was not meant to project his own anxieties and his own hopes and dreams. So of course what he wore must be completely prescribed, in all its detail. That is how you ensure coherence.
A priest could not be incoherent. A prophet, a holy man, a faith healer, a rabbi -- they can afford to be incoherent. A priest must speak with assurance and knowledge, in all the ways that humans talk. We want priests we can understand. The enormity of what’s behind the priests, what gives them their power -- surely that is mystery enough for us.
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This morning I went for a walk and thought again about the developer we interviewed, about how we judge people. It bothered me that I judged the developer the way I did, on the strength of his jeans. As I said above, I could be wrong about what the jeans meant. I reminded myself that as a Jew I have a duty to judge fairly.
Then I remembered what the first verses of Pekudei were about. They were an exact accounting of the silver and gold that were provided by the people Israel to be used in the making of the tabernacle and the priestly garments and all their accoutrements. My Chumash comments that this detailed accounting was necessary because some of the Israelites, knowing that they themselves would be tempted to embezzle from such funds, were bound to assume that Moses, like them, would do so. Therefore the funds were dispersed and accounted for with absolute transparency. Although it was incumbent upon the people to judge fairly and not to make assumptions, it was equally incumbent upon Moses to ensure that he gave the people the information they needed to judge fairly. Leaders must avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Carefully prescribing the priests’ ritual clothing also provided clarity and made it easier for people to judge their priests fairly. There could be no argument about whether a priest was inappropriately self-aggrandizing by wearing garments that were more precious or jeweled than were called for. Because the uniform was the uniform, and that was that, no one had to question the intentions of the person who wore the uniform.
There used to be such a uniform for job interviews. There isn’t one anymore. I have to use my powers of judgment whether I like it or not. I wish that our interviewee had made it easy for me, by doing what I expected. He did not.
So I turn to Joseph Telushkin, who is writing a three-volume Code of Jewish Ethics. In Volume I he offers guidance for judging others fairly. Here is a summary of some of the most important points he makes that are relevant to my own dilemma -- how to judge a candidate for a job who has seemed to do something inappropriate.
He says we must judge others on their intentions, rather than on their actions, if their actions are annoying to us. But if they act well, we should judge them on their actions, and not impute ulterior motives that ‘explain’ their good actions. If someone does something we think is wrong or inappropriate, we should, if we can, politely ask them to clarify why they did that thing. If you cannot ask someone to clarify why they did something, you should try to imagine a reasonable explanation. Choose the most charitable explanation for someone’s behavior of the several options available. Do not condemn others on the basis of hearsay, and of course, do not pass hearsay on to others. See each person as a whole, judge them in light of their background and the context of their actions, do not hold others to higher standards than you hold yourself. Pay more attention to another’s character than to their appearance or accomplishments. Judge strangers as compassionately as we would judge those we love.
Help me, God, to learn to judge others with fairness and compassion. Help me to remember also to make it easy for others to judge me fairly, to make it easy for others to understand what I am telling them in all the ways I speak. Help me orient my life toward You, to strengthen the spark of the divine inside me, so that rather than being scattered and confused and difficult to read -- even for myself -- , I can be clear and obvious and straightforward. I suppose it’s a kind of holy simplicity I am seeking, an Ehyey Asher Ehyey, I am what I am, I shall be what I shall be.
This holy simplicity I am speaking of, it is not a foolish consistency. Rather, it is an order that surpasses human order. I want a constant sense of what is truly important in life, I want to remember to order my life around that, I want to clear away all inner conflict that is driven by my own selfishness and fears and anxieties and confusions. Of course I won’t succeed, entirely. And certainly this does not mean that I should not question myself, or change my mind, because I’m afraid to appear inconsistent. In fact I must always be questioning myself, always questioning whether in my actions and my thoughts I am creating more holiness in the world, or less.
My center may not always hold. But being unable to hold the center is different from having no center to hold. There is a center to this life. As I’ve said before -- grab hold any way you can.
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