Three of my happiest moments as a parent have come at our local men’s clothing store, as I have taken each of my sons to find a suit for his bar mitzvah. For starters, the trip strikes a deep chord of familiarity, as I remember shopping for a suit or a sport coat with my own father at the long since closed Ann Arbor Clothing. That’s a warm memory. For another, it has generally marked a milestone, as we don’t live in a community in which kids (or even adults) are expected to wear fancy clothes to shul. Thus, in all three cases, this was the first time they had worn something more upscale than an oxford and khakis. 

That’s seemingly part of a generational shift (likely multi-generational) away from formal dress. These days my youngest will sometimes wear pajamas to school, and when I protest he just gives me the side eye. It’s as though asking him to put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt was the equivalent of ordering up a top hat and tails.

And yet clothing still makes a difference. Developing a wardrobe has been part of the young adulthood of each of my older children, and while my youngest is only 13, he is now equipped with a full line of t-shirts, sweatshirts, and sweatpants, courtesy of his friends’ b’nai mitzvah. In my own life, I find that, even when we’re not going out or having company over for Shabbat dinner, I still feel a need to put on bigdei shabbat, clothes that remind me—or, even better, help me inhabit—the spiritual zone of Shabbos. (In my case that means a white button-down shirt and dark trousers. A suit is still reserved for more rarified occasions.) To me, that’s an interesting marker, because it signifies that my clothing isn’t only about performing a role for others, but also about performing for myself and/or for the Holy One—which is a fascinating idea.

Commenting on Parashat Tetzaveh, Rabbi Avrohom Bornsztain of Sokochov (1838–1910) observes, “The priests require their special clothes, and if they aren’t wearing their holy garments then their sacred service is invalid.” Yet the Levites have no such special requirement. Why so? Because unlike the Levites, whose service was externalized through song, the spiritual work of the kohanim was penimit, internal. “For everything which is internal requires covering: The soul, when it comes into this world, requires a covering—the body. An angel that is sent to this world likewise needs to wear bodily garments.” And, he continues, this is the very notion of wearing special Shabbat clothes, “for Shabbat is itself internality.” He cites the midrash’s gloss on the story in which Naomi tells Ruth, “Wash and anoint yourself, place your garment upon you, and descend to the threshing floor” (Ruth 3:3). “Was she not already wearing clothes?” asks the Midrash. “Rather this is to tell you that she put on Shabbat clothes.” At this moment of her spiritual conversion, the Sokochover teaches, Ruth accessed a new inner life and thus required new clothing—not just physical garments, but spiritual covering. So, too, with the priests—and with all of us (“You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” as God says in Exodus 19:6).

At the same time, we can’t ignore the social dynamics of clothing. Rashi (on Exodus 28:3) notes that Aaron becomes the High Priest by virtue of the clothing he wears, i.e. if he doesn’t wear the uniform, he simply can’t inhabit the role. With spring training underway, Rule 3.03(c) of Major League Baseball comes to mind: “No player whose uniform does not conform to that of his teammates shall be permitted to participate in a game.” If a player refuses to wear the “garment,” even if it’s Shohei Ohtani hitting a 500-foot home run, they essentially cease to exist in the eyes of the game. 

All of which raises questions about authenticity and a critique we hear invoked frequently these days, performativity. These questions are present for anyone, but they are more acute in the age of social media, in which it’s not always clear—even to the person posting—whether and how these dynamics are at play. Am I sharing this beautiful photo of my family because I feel good and warm and want to invite others into that sensation, or am I not so subtly saying, Look at me and my wonderful family (which, as Tolstoy reminds us, is either just like every other happy family or unhappy in its own special way)? Or, if I’m making a political statement, am I doing that because I genuinely believe it, or to conform to some expectation I sense from others to say something? (And, I might add, we can add an additional layer of questions: What, if anything, is wrong or right in either of those?)

Purim, which always follows Parashat Tetzaveh, invites us even further into these questions not only with its tradition of costumes, but in the deep ways in which Esther’s story plays with dynamics of concealment and revelation, authenticity and role-playing. Those dynamics are perhaps embodied in Mordechai’s pivotal question to Esther, “Who knows if it was not for just such a moment as this that you became Queen?” (Esther 4:14) In response, Esther not only musters her courage—that is, tends to her inner life—but, critically, puts on her royal clothing to plead for her people before the king (5:1). She would seem to be both authentic and performing at the same time, a model for all of us to study.

For Reflection & Conversation

• Noting that this can be a very intimate question for some folks, please handle it with care: When, if ever, have clothes helped you feel more “like yourself?” What changed about you as wore those clothes? How did it affect your sense of yourself?
• When, if ever, do you think about being authentic or genuine versus being performative? What, if anything, helps you to stay grounded and true to yourself?

Conventional wisdom tells us you shouldn’t make too many big life changes at once. Two weeks after I finished rabbinical school in the summer of 2005, Natalie and I welcomed our second child. And two weeks later we moved halfway across the country so I could start a new job. We bought our first home, we bought a new car. All to say that we made a lot of big life changes all at once. Sometimes, it seems, you just can’t abide by conventional wisdom.

A lot goes into furnishing a new place. Up until that time, we had eaten our Shabbat meals at a desk-cum-table from Ikea that could seat six in small folding chairs if you really smushed. But knowing that we’d be hosting students from campus, and generally just feeling like it was time, we splurged and purchased a beautiful chocolate brown dining room table and eight chairs (with leaves in, it seats 12). Over two decades later, it’s still the table we gather around for Shabbat and holiday dinners, for playing board games and making craft projects, and, in the age of Zoom, for a good chunk of my workday. 

Yet of all the memories that have been formed around our table, the most lasting one is the earliest: when we sat down to our first Shabbat meal there and I looked around at everything—our family, this new place that was ours, this life that now felt less precarious and more secure, and this table that felt solid and real and lasting. I sighed, and said out loud, “Now I feel at home.” (My mother-in-law, who was there, likes to remind me of this story whenever she visits. I can’t blame her.)

Beginning with Parashat Terumah, the Torah invites us into an extended reflection on many of these same themes: furniture, yes, but more generally objects, place, the material world, home. Numerous commentators point out the significance of the verse, “And they shall make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8)—among them, not it. From the very outset, the Torah is clear that we avoid the delusion that the Holy One resides inside the Mishkan or the objects within it. Its ultimate purpose is to help us recognize and manifest the Divine in our midst—something, perhaps, like my experience with our Shabbat table.

This meta issue of spiritual orientation reflects the story hovering in the background, namely that of the Golden Calf. While Nachmanides and many others follow the chronological order of events and thus understand the Mishkan as God’s original plan, Rashi draws on a midrashic tradition that inverts the sequence. This sees the Golden Calf as having taken place before the commandment to construct the Mishkan. If that’s the case, then the Mishkan can be understood more as a concession to our human need for physical places and objects through which to experience the divine Presence. 

Yet according to either reading, the calf represents a profound warning about the spiritual and moral dangers that lurk in our relationship with material things. Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin writes, “The temptation of idolatry is strong—one need only remember the golden calf, made right after the Revelation; it is the temptation of appearances, of Presence… The idol… reassures; the idol brings things closer.” In a similar vein, Avivah Zornberg quotes Jacques Derrida, who writes about the notion of caressing, i.e. holding neither too tightly nor too loosely, somewhere between seizing and letting go: “The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible… The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form… in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible.” 

There is a profound seductiveness at either end of the spectrum: The seeming permanence of physical objects can offer the reassurance of presence in a world in which presence is fleeting; the non-physical nature of an entirely spiritual life can offer transcendence from a world mired in physicality. Zornberg rightly suggests that this registers the depth of the human struggle. Reminding us of the Israelites’ cry at Massah (Ex. 17:17), “Is there (yesh) God in our midst or not?” (literally, “or else nothingness [ayin]“), she writes, “Beneath all the fluctuations, the myriad shapes of desire, this is the radical question.” At root, she suggests, it is our desire to both hold the Divine and be held in the Divine embrace that drives us—and, potentially, consumes us.

My last two reflections have named specific issues and people in the news. Regular readers will know that that’s a bit unusual for me. Following the halakhic principle that three times makes a hazakah, i.e. a presumption, I’m going to avoid directly commenting on current events this week for fear that that will become my default M.O. But I would certainly suggest that we can and should read current events through this lens. Because I think Zornberg, and our larger tradition of Torah, are so profoundly helpful in offering this understanding. She writes that we seek lives of density or meaning; I say something similar, that we seek to feel profoundly at home in the universe. Given that we are this glorious and messy combination of both bodies and heart-mind-spirits, we engage in spiritual practices to help us do that—to avoid desecrating our “home” through our need to seize and hold, and simultaneously to avoid escaping the demands and joys of “home” through not engaging in the housework. 

For Reflection & Conversation

When, if ever, have you felt a profound sense of being spiritually at home? Do you feel that way in a place that’s also a physical home for you? Why or why not?

This week I remembered an event from many years ago when I was a young Hillel rabbi. I was in a session at the annual Hillel staff conference led by Rabbi Jim Diamond z”l, the sagely longtime Hillel director at Princeton. Jim was sharing some of his war stories, one of which went like this:

One year, the president of the student body turned out to be Jewish. Jim didn’t know this student, but he managed to get word to him that he would love to meet him. The student got word back to Jim that he had no interest in meeting. (It happens.) The student, unsurprisingly, went on to an illustrious career in state politics. But ultimately, he resigned in scandal. “And so,” Jim said, “I’ve been wondering whether history might have been different had Elliot Spitzer said yes to my offer to meet.”

I’ve been thinking about that story this week as more and more of the Epstein files are revealed to us. Not so much because I think meeting with the Hillel rabbi at Cooper Union or NYU would have changed history (Epstein attended both but didn’t graduate from either), but because I find it hard to ignore the Jews involved in the story, from Epstein himself and Ghislaine Maxwell to Howard Lutnick, Leslie Wexner, Ehud Barak, Noam Chomsky, and countless others. While Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes are horrific on their own, the presence of so many prominent Jews in the story compounds my sense of revulsion.

In the case of Wexner, I experience a deep personal sense of implication. Like over a thousand other Jewish professional leaders, it was the Wexner Graduate Fellowship that put food on my family’s table while I was in rabbinical school. The fellowship community has been an enormously important source of wisdom, companionship, and professional support throughout my career—as it has been for two generations of Jewish professional and volunteer leaders. The idea that all of that was, in significant measure, built on a core of moral rot is nauseating.

But for the moment, what most preoccupies me is this deep feeling of offense, anger, sadness, and even shame at the reality that so many Jews were, knowingly or unknowingly, part of this horrific web of rape, abuse, and dehumanization. Last fall I wrote about the culture of detachment and rootlessness described in the Epstein files. But this week I’m really feeling a sense of disgust at the idea that so many landsmen, fellow Jews, were not only part of that jet-setting culture, but seemingly turned a blind eye to profound injustice in their midst.

Because I feel like we all know we’re supposed to be better than this. “These are the laws which you shall place before them,” begins Parashat Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1). “Just as the preceding words [i.e. the Ten Commandments] were given at Sinai, so too were all of these laws given at Sinai.” So says Rashi, quoting the Mechilta. Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa adds, emphatically: “before them—the Torah teaches here that the civil laws, the commandments about how we treat fellow human beings, come before everything else, including the commandments about our relationship with God. Derekh eretz kadma latorah: Common decency comes before religious law.”

In another comment, Simcha Bunim goes further: “Mishpat tzedek, our basic sense of fairness and justice, must precede everything: every thought, every discernment.” And, he adds, this is foundational to what it means to be Jewish: “The rest of the world may teach that all law is established by human beings and thus may be changed, depending on the time and place, in response to various pressures. But we are taught, ‘Justice is the Lord’s’ (Deut. 1:17)… Just as we don’t change the Ten Commandments in response to the contingencies of our time, we also don’t change the fundamental laws of how to treat human beings.”

I hear this voice in my kishkes crying out: Even if one doesn’t know Reb Simcha Bunim or Rashi or the name of this Torah portion; even if one hasn’t been to shul in decades; even if you’ve eaten a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur every year, how is it possible that you don’t know the most fundamental elements of goodness and decency?! “You shall not oppress the stranger, as you know the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9), or “Stay far from falsehood” (23:7), or “Do not pervert justice” (23:6), and “Don’t take bribes (23:8).” Beyond the horror of the crimes themselves, the seeming absence of these most basic elements of ethics from the hearts and minds of so many Jews in this story leaves me speechless.

Of course, these are not the first nor the last Jews to seemingly suffer from this moral malady. The violent abuse of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank by Jewish Israelis, too often with a similar lack of disapproval or enforcement by the authorities as in the Epstein case, is yet another moral stain on our people. And again, my heart is a jumble of anger, sadness, and shame.

We can, of course add to that list. While Reb Simcha Bunim’s teachings may reflect a centrality of ethics that we like to think of as a distinguishing feature of Torah and Jewish life, our tradition is replete with counterexamples: Abraham allowing Sarah to be taken into Pharaoh’s harem; Shimon and Levi murdering the defenseless men of Shechem; King David abusing his office to bring about the death of Batsheva’s husband so he could marry her. When we recite the confessional at Yom Kippur (whether we ate that ham sandwich or not), we join a long list of Jews who have come up short—some of whom have been held to account in court, many of whom have not.

That is not an excuse, it’s an essential reminder. The emotions surrounding the Epstein case are powerful. To me, that makes it all the more important to rely on our spiritual practices grounded in mindfulness: so we can be aware of how those emotions may be activated within us; so we can look clearly at the wrongs and injustices; so we can have the clarity and courage to offer healing to the victims and rectify the harm; and so we can try to avoid falling into the same morally and spiritually vacuous pits ourselves.

For Reflection & Conversation

• In your own life, who is a model of a person with a strong ethical core? What lessons of theirs have you tried to embody?
• How, if at all, does your Jewish spiritual practice support your ethical life?