Purity, Danger, Holiness, Order: A Tzav - Sh'mini Double Header

There are way too many big ideas floating around in my head right now. I was mulling over Tzav for a long time, and when I decided what I wanted to say about that I got food poisoning or stomach flu and I didn’t write any of it down, and then I read Sh’mini and so even though strictly speaking I should have one post for each parsha, I’m combining them. And I don’t even think this is a d’var so much as it is the beginnings of my own personal Zohar. ( Flight of ideas? Check. Grandiosity? Check. )

Tzav is Leviticus Chapters 6 - 8. There are more instructions for sacrifice. I don’t really care about those. This is what interests me:

1) About the grain offering, Leviticus 6:11 “Anything that touches these shall become holy.”
2) Again, about the purification offering, Leviticus 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...”
3) 7:19-20: “Flesh that touches anything impure shall not be eaten; it shall be consumed in fire. As for other flesh, only he who is pure shall eat such flesh. But the person who, in a state of impurity, eats flesh from the LORD’s sacrifices of well-being, that person shall be cut off from his kin.”

Then we get Sh’mini, Leviticus Chapters 9-11. In Sh’mini the Tabernacle is consecrated for what seems like, seriously, the 18th time. We also get the curious incident of the sons with the alien fire pans, Chapter 10:

Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the LORD alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the LORD and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of the LORD. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said:

‘Through those near to me I show Myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.’”

And Aaron was silent.

And then for much of the rest of the parsha we get kashrut.

So what do I want to say about all this?

First, something strange. My chumash, Etz Hayim, has a note attached to Leviticus 6:11: “The condition of holiness, unlike that of impurity, was not regarded as contagious. Thus it would be better to translate: ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state.’ Only consecrated persons may have contact with sacrificial materials.”

Well, okay, but that’s not what it says. It says ‘anything that touches these shall become holy.’ And then, point 2 above, at 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...” Now, I am aware of the ridiculousness of my arguing with the editors of my chumash about what words that are written in Hebrew I can’t read might mean. But I presume if they could have translated faithfully those words as ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state’ that they would have, and since they did not I can only assume that the words in Hebrew are closer to what I read in English than to their explanation of what those words really mean.

So there is impurity (tumah), and there is holiness (kadosh). Sometimes it seems as though holiness and purity are contagious, and sometimes it seems like it is impurity that is contagious. And then there’s the strangeness (to 21st-century me) of holiness and purity somehow being, in all of this, two ends of the same axis. Why should they have anything to do with each other at all? And where is goodness and righteousness in all of this? It seems like in this scheme we can be at the same time righteous and impure, i.e. un-holy. And vice-versa. Like there’s an entire other dimension of goodness and badness that is orthogonal to the holiness-impurity dimension. And again, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

In college I read Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo:

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.

[ ...]

In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience. If this is so with our separating, tidying, and purifying, we should interpret primitive purification and prophylaxis in the same light. (p2)

We can re-concieve the axis of impurity-holiness as disorder-order, and doing so helps it make sense to those of us who have this specialized idea of sanctity in which, frankly, impurity seems beside the point. But this does not mean that holiness then shrinks to being about getting organized or imposing our human ideas of order on the world. (Well, I think a lot of people do worship ‘order’ -- worship an idea that somehow we can get everything under control if we just use the right system or keep our email inboxes empty or have the right kind of calendar or mind hack or whatever.

When we, as humans, turn disorder into order, it’s a small, lower-case kind of order. That’s important, that order. But in itself it is neither truly achievable, nor is it holy. Without a higher-level Order toward which we orient our efforts to make little-0 order, we are just sweeping the outdoors.

So the Torah gives us many rules about little-o order, but it gives them to us as a means to bring big-O order into the world --- in the service of perfecting the material world, in order to bring about Olam Ha-Ba, the world-to-come. The creative movement is toward God, the Source of Order in the universe.

( The prophets were constantly railing against the Israelites for forgetting that the little-o rules set out in the Torah were little-o rules, and behaving abominably but performing perfectly ordered sacrifices in the Temple. God spits on your perfectly-ordered sacrifices, said the prophets, because you are not truly directing your hearts toward the Source of Order in the world. You are worshipping a system for bringing Holiness, that is, God’s Order, to the material world. But to worship the system is misdirected. It is just a system. It does not tell you where it’s meant to lead.
)

Now we are in a position to understand what happened to Nadab and Abihu. They thought that they could make their own little-o order and elevate it to Big-O Order. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel, they forgot Who the Real Source of Order was. The Real Source of Order did not take kindly to that.

But actually, we’re not in a position to understand this at all, just as Job was not in a position to understand why God afflicted him, and we are none of us able to understand death, or love, or music, or even one person’s brain. Big-O Order does not stay in its little categories, in little boxes or little words or our little minds. Big-O Order bursts out all over in a profusion, in a burning fire, in absolute mind-boggling absurdity and grandeur and mystery. Before Big-O Order, we, like Aaron, must be silent.

God wants our little human orders too, don’t get me wrong. We must serve God with what we are, and we are little and we are human, and God loves our little human orders. I would say we should try not to forget that our human orders are just human, but I think in our heart of hearts we hardly need reminding. We are just as likely to flee in terror and confusion from God’s Order as we are to rush toward it as a beloved Home. It is too big for us, and it is everywhere apparent that it is so. We are just as likely to see a forest as a dark and confusing place, full of lions and tigers and bears, as we are to see it as a beautiful and intricately rendered example of a Higher Order. Sometimes we are able to catch a glimpse of that Higher Order, and even to enter into it, to become part of it. And sometimes even seeing it from the corners of our eyes will burn us right up. That is why ahavat hasham and yirat hashem always go together, they are two sides of the same coin: the love of God and the fear/awe of God.

( Incidentally, this helps explain for Christians why Jesus could claim both to be affirming the Law and yet regularly ‘break’ it. Jesus saw himself as being part of the Higher Order, and thus like his father, could not be subject to little o-order as others were. Rather, little-o order was subject to him. That is the meaning of miracles, after all -- they are an explosion of Divine Order into the Natural Order, which is an order greater than our human order. And really, when you think about it, what sense could it make to complain to Jesus that he broke the Sabbath by healing someone? Wouldn’t you rather complain that Jesus healed someone? To complain that little-o order (even that in the service of the Holy, such as the Mitzvot are) is being broken when the Natural Order is also being broken seems remarkably small-minded. Which was after all the point, right? Small-minded Pharisees, small-minded Sadducees, and then Jesus, bursting out all over the place. No, husband, I am not converting to Christianity. I do have Christian readers, though, and I do read Christians, and understanding what Christians think is so important about Jesus is not the same as believing that Jesus was who he said (or is said to have said) he was. It’s just explaining why, in all the stories, he is so spectacularly unconcerned with keeping the Mitzvot while at the same time insisting that they are still to be kept. Also bringing up Jesus reminded me that actually the axis of order should look like this:

disorder - little-o-order (human order) - Natural Order (often looks like disorder, but see chaos theory or something) - Divine Order/Holiness.

But then there is tragedy. Is tragedy just disorder? Or is it just part of the Natural Order (earthquakes) ? Or is it sometimes, like the tragedy of Aaron’s sons, a Divine Order that we cannot understand? Or does it come about when we worship our human order instead of the Divine Order? ( c.f. Nietzche, who figured any order you wanted and could make happen was just the best sort of order there could be, and Godwin’s Law says there’s your Nazi Superman right there.) Or when we attempt to impose our little human order on the Natural Order in ways that will make the Natural Order uncongenial to humans (global warming, nuclear power)?

But there I go again, hoping that my little brain can tidy all this up with some well-chosen words. Derrida would tell me how deluded that is. This life is a terrifying proposition, especially since it is not a proposition but a fact. God speaks out of the whirlwind and what can I say in response? But the odd thing is that God does not want me to remain silent, at least not all of the time. God wants me to respond. God wants my little brain’s attempts at order. If God did not want what order we humans could make, then why would God have bothered with us humans at all? God has given us each a divine spark and we can use it to bootstrap our little order into Holiness, to elevate our offerings. Neither I nor God need Derrida to point out all the cracks and imperfections in the work. Never mind. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

C.S. Lewis: “Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?” (from Mere Christianity).

And Lewis again: “[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.” (ibid)

I do not know why Lewis thinks this is only a problem for Christians, although perhaps it is because Christians, unlike Jews, do not have a set prayer meant to be said each morning, just upon waking, to remind them of exactly the thing he says they need to be reminded of. (snark.) It’s a human thing, that prayer, a little-o human technology, just some words in an ancient language. It’s called Modeh Ah’nee, and in English it reads: “I thank You, living and eternal King, for giving me back my soul in mercy. Great is your faithfulness.” I would like to say it every morning when I wake, because I’d like to come in out of the wind. I would like to say it, but I don’t. New habits are hard.

But here’s good news about habits: In 2010 our household gave about 3 times more money that the IRS considers to be charitable donations than we did in 2009. Some of that is because we joined a synagogue and synagogues, like churches, are nonprofits. But most of it is because I decided I wanted to become more generous and I worked at it, and because I worked at it my husband worked at it too, just with tiny little human systems, like every thirteen weeks is my generosity week and when organizations I care about ask me for money that week I generally give it to them, and when people ask me for money on the street I give some to them, and at the end of each day I note down how I’ve been generous (or failed to be) and what I could do better, and all these little human things add up, finally, into transformation: I can feel (and the IRS can see at least some evidence), that I have actually become a more generous person. ( Which is not to say that I am particularly generous. I am not. But at least the direction of movement is good.)

That is not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing is that I see that the direction of movement is good. I have a sense that Generosity is Good. It is Good, it is Important, and when I use little human technologies to become a more generous person, I am doing exactly what God wants me to do.

Note: I am not stupid. I do not quite understand what I mean when I talk about God this way, but I certainly don’t mean that God is some guy up there rooting for me to give more money to Tsunami relief because that is God’s Plan For My Life. And about generosity being a Good Thing, (there’s a dissertation for you: Purity, Danger, and Martha Stewart: Good Things as Secular Religion.) -- I know just as well as you do that the evolutionary psychologists and the game theorists have done altruism every-which-way. It’s just that, like my favorite physicist-cum-anglican-priest, John Polkinghorne, I don’t think they’ve been very convincing about it: “Although atheism might seem simpler conceptually, it treats beauty and morals and worship as some form of cultural or social brute facts, which accords ill with the seriousness with which these experiences touch us as persons.” (Faith of a Physicist, page 70). So with generosity. You can tell me about kin-group-reciprocity. Actually, it’d probably be the other way around -- I’d tell you about kin-group-reciprocity. But in the end it seems a more satisfying answer that I feel glad about becoming more generous because becoming more generous is actually Important, because it is moving me closer to Holiness.

Which brings me back to perhaps the original great mystery, which is how impurity and disorder can possibly be related to holiness when holiness should be all about goodness, right? And the answer for Jews is that all our little human orderings, our rituals and mitzvot, add up to More, as long as we keep feeding the divine spark within ourselves, as long as we keep the connection to God. Order and goodness and holiness are all related, in a Divine feedback loop.

Hypergraphia? Check.

Parsha Vayikira, in which instructions are issued for all manner of sacrifices

 ( Text of the parsha )

Look, sacrifice is hard to swallow. It’s bloody and gruesome and earthy and when you burn up all that animal flesh everything gets covered in sticky, smelly grease.

When I was pregnant with my daughter there was a whole neighborhood that smelled so strongly of rancid fat to me that even driving through it caused me to retch.

Sacrifice is hard to swallow, like God. God is really hard to swallow. The Christians have figured out a really terrific way to swallow God. They just, you know, swallow. That’s awesome for them.

For Jews it’s harder. You can try to slice God up and shrink God down and extract God’s essence or stone-grind or expeller-press or molecularly distill God, but God is still too damn big to swallow.

Well, God could be smaller if God wanted, too. God could dance on the head of a pin.

One way or another, God has to be smaller for humans to have any chance of even dealing with God without going blind and burning up and generally being annihilated by God’s full-on glory. God has to have little thumbnail-sized avatars of God that we can grab onto, see, swallow, taste, feel, love.

Actually, God has a bunch of thumbnail-sized avatars. They’re called people. And sure, there’s been a lot of data loss in the thumbnailing process. Everyone’s just a tiny piece of a big picture, and lossy to boot. Corrupted data and all of that. Anyway, so here we are, thumbnails of God. We have a path back to the original. It’s up to us to follow it.

Maimonides said that God specified animal and other sacrifices to the Israelites because God knew that everyone at that time sacrificed to their gods in those ways. God wanted to give the people something they’d be familiar with. A beaten path. So we cannot blame either God or the ancient Israelites for all that grease. God gave the Israelites what they needed to find their way back to God. God did not expect them to leap into darkness, into a whole new way of understanding the unseen.

Nachmanides, on the other hand, was of the mind that the destruction of the second temple was indeed a disaster, that literal sacrifice in a literal temple was the original, and still preferred, method of relating to God, and that our inability to do that anymore was a great sadness and a great disability for us.

Even today, most Orthodox siddurim still ask for the restoration of the beit ha mikdash and look forward to resuming the sacrifices as outlined in the torah.  And most other siddurim do not.  I personally have never looked forward to the resumption of animal sacrifice or to the rebuilding of the Temple. I think most of us today could not imagine such a thing. Animal sacrifice seems so obviously deficient as a way to connect with God, so obviously barbaric and obviously primitive and obviously lesser than prayer and service and acts of lovingkindness.

But really, on what do I base my opinion of sacrifice? Have i ever done it myself? Have I even ever killed a mammal myself, or seen one killed in person? I held a man I loved when he died, and one thing I can say about that is that death is primitive and intense and gruesome and strange and it is absolutely barbaric that we all must die, and that my uncle, a man I loved who had not lived out his allotted days, as far as I was concerned, died. And also that I have never felt more in the presence of the holy and the sacred as when I sat there with my uncle as he died, except perhaps when giving birth, which is also gruesome and bloody and brutal and intense and absolutely strange.

Why then do I dismiss ritual slaughter as something less likely to connect me with the divine than some nice clean praying in a nice clean synagogue with absolutely no rancid fat smell? Is it because I like to imagine that I am more civilized than that, or because I know that I am not more civilized than that and I would prefer not to understand that about myself, because if I did -- chaos? Is my knee-jerk dismissal of literal sacrifice just another way to hide from the terrifying realities of life as we know it, just as our funeral homes and our nursing homes and our intensive care units and all the beeping machines are a way to pretend that we no longer die? In rejecting sacrifice, am I rejecting the reality of death?

Then there’s the other reality of eating meat. It is messy and greasy and smelly and smoky and bloody and all meat came from something that was killed, on my behalf, by someone somewhere on a real farm, factory or otherwise. Sacrifice sanctifies the eating of meat, and probably that kind of sanctification is something we need more of in our lives. Attending a sacrifice would, at the very least, make it harder to pretend that we are not doing the things we are doing.

Too, when we give the first fruits or the firstborn of a flock to God, we acknowledge in a very concrete way that everything we have is borrowed or given to us. I mean, there's "thanks god for all the awesome you've given us" and there's "thanks god for the awesome and here's our very best sheep." Those are pretty different acts. In my family, we even have trouble at Havdalah pouring out wine to extinguish the candle in. We think "but that's good, drinkable wine! Why waste it?" It's not like we're saying "why waste it, we could give it to starving children in India who don't have anything but Manischevitz to drink." We would just rather drink the wine ourselves. If we have such a reaction to spilling a little bit of wine, I imagine it'd be pretty powerful to give up a whole actual living animal. To see all that good meat go up in smoke, for the sake of something or someone invisible, unknowable, unthinkable...

I don't want to sacrifice animals. I don't think I can hope and pray that the Mosque on the temple mount is torn down and a new Temple is built there and that I will someday go there on Sukkot and buy or bring a sheep or goat and stand there singing psalms while some guy named Cohen kills and butchers and burns up the animal I've brought.

But I can see the appeal. I can see that it might actually be the most intense experience of God I could have in this world. Just ordinary me, not great at meditating, not super at prayer, only able to feel God in fits and starts and only inklings. I can very well imagine that it would be like attending a birth or a death, only there for the taking (or giving) whenever I felt distant from God, whenever I needed to connect.

I don't pray for the restoration of the temple and the sacrifical system. But I'm not sure that I shouldn't.

Some thoughts on costumes, for Pekudei

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.

---

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.