Podcast #55: Parashat Tetzave

This is a podcast recording in a remote setting. They discuss Parashat Tetzaveh, which is about the Kohanim and their clothing. They question why Moshe is not mentioned and why the priests are introduced. They discuss the role of priests and mediators in our lives. They also talk about external and internal Torah and the importance of translating our knowledge into action. They mention the lack of religious action in the current government and the need for a balance between Torah Moshe and Torah Aharon. They discuss the shift from socialism to capitalism in Israel. Good morning. It's the first time we're doing a recording of this podcast in a remote setting. You're at home. I'm at a seminar center at Nevis Shalom. It's 6.30 in the morning. Sitting outside. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful after weeks of rain and gray skies. What's it like in Zichun Yaakov today? It's a beautiful clear morning and from our window we look out toward the sea and we see the beautiful clouds and sky and it's a lovely day. Perfect. Perfect setting for a podcast. Absolutely. So Elisha, today we're discussing parashat Tetzaveh. We're in a leap year. It's Yud Veth Adar Aleph. And parashat Tetzaveh in your drashah begins with a big question. Let me quote. Moshe stars in the Torah. He's in every parashah from the time he's born and discovered floating in a little basket on the Nile until his death except for one parashah, except for parashat Tetzaveh. And we don't even know where Moshe is buried. So the question is why? And parashat Tetzaveh is kind of strange. It's a big fashion show. It's about all the Kohanim and they have five different changes of dress. So suddenly we go from the heights of Mount Sinai and the Torah and the Ten Commandments to a chapter where Moshe disappears. It's all about Aaron and the priests, the Kohanim, and about what they should wear and how they should dress. Now, Elisha, what's going on here? Right, right. And it's the very first parashah also that the Kohanim are mentioned. So it's almost like it's a time for Moshe's brother to shine. And let's remind ourselves Moshe is on Mount Sinai right now. Aaron doesn't even know that he's appointed to be the high priest and that his descendants are going to be priests and he's going to have a whole new set of clothes. Who would have guessed? So Moshe is listening. I think there are a lot of things we can say about parashat Tetzaveh. We could talk about clothes. We can talk about Moshe's absence and we can talk about Moshe's ability to listen. Listening is a tough one. He's not speaking right now. He's just listening and even his name is not mentioned, as you said. And almost suggesting, you know, what is this life really about? We're so sure as we carry ourselves through the day, through our lives, that life is about us. And it's not. One day we're not going to be here. So what is life all about? Moshe's not even mentioned here. Who is this life all about? So what do you think we should talk about in this parashat this morning? Oh, there's so much. But first I have a cynical comment, Elisha, and in your drashah you specifically warn us against cynicism. But I've got to say, as an economist, I'm reading this parashat, Elisha, and I'm thinking, okay, the Kohanim have slipped in a parashat into the Torah as a job description and in order to attain some job security. And maybe all of parashat Vayikra, the next book, has to do with that. Is that terrible, Elisha? Well, yes. I think that being cynical is terrible, yes. Well, you know, what you're saying is, if we remove the cynicism, and you're not truly a cynical person, the last thing I could say about you is that you're a cynic. But if we read the Torah from the spectacles and the glasses of research, then we can say, yes, whoops, oh, the Kohanim got the better hand on the Torah right now. And as you said, they inserted their job description into the Torah. It's how the academia calls it, a priestly text at this point. Since we usually read the Torah more in the traditional fashion, then we can be cynical about it. And we can say, yes, for some reason, a priestly parashat was introduced here. Why do we need a priestly parashat? Why do we need priests? Why do we need worship? Why can't we just believe? Why can't we just have faith? Why do we need to pray, worship, you know, in the good old days, sacrifices? And today we pray instead. So why do we need all of that doing, all of that worship? And we could also ask ourselves, vis-a-vis the priests, we can ask, who are the priests in our lives today? Who are the people who connect us to God? Besides the obvious, besides the rabbis, let's say, who, that's their maybe job description partially, but the priests were kind of mediators. Who are the mediators in our lives? You're a professor of the Technion, and you're teaching this class every Tuesday about creativity and entrepreneurship. And you're being kind of a mediator. You're connecting people to their creative forces, to their entrepreneurial juices, so to speak. They need your class in order to access those realms in their lives. And they actually even bring sacrifices. They sacrifice their time. They come to Technion. They sit there and they listen. They listen and they do the homework and they do whatever is required. You are their creativity priest, so to speak. Wow. So this is leading us, as usual, to discussing Torah and creativity, Lisa. And let me quote from your drashah, because the title of your drashah is external Torah and internal Torah. I think this is a crucial distinction. And you write, the external Torah deals with the realm of what is evident, the pshat, which is the simple meaning of the exterior of things, as we see them, the story, the outer garment, the garments of the internal Torah deals with the hidden layers, the depths, the essence. And of course, we are seeking this internal Torah and we find it not in the heavens, but inside us. But I find a real paradox here, Lisa, and I'll explain. I absolutely agree that God is inside us. It says so in the Torah. God said he is dwelling within us. He has a mishkan, he has a place, a physical place, but he is within us and not just in a specific place or a holy temple. So this internalizing of the Torah values is crucial. But there's a Chinese saying, Lisa, that I use a lot. And it says, I see, I pay attention. I hear, I consider. I do, I understand. So there is a problem here, Lisa, called the knowing-doing gap. The internal Torah is about looking inward and knowing ourselves, knowing who we are. But until we do something, until we translate that into action, it doesn't really mean a whole lot. I think we really judge people by what they do rather than what they say. And relating to politics as they are now, I prefer not to talk about politics, but this is heavy on my heart, Lisa. We have the most religious Jewish government in the history of Israel in the past 75 years. We have a minister of housing who is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi with a long beard and many, many others. And, Lisa, I'm sorry to say we have the least religious action in a government we ever had in 75 years, with a small example, the way they treat the Arab neighbors in the West Bank as a small example. So, yes, the internal Torah is crucial, but we have to translate that into action. And I think that's what the mitzvot are all about. And we see that in the instruction, you do things, you internalize it, you understand, and that brings you, the external brings you to the internal, but action is crucial. Yes, yes. And maybe that's, it's very interesting what you're saying. The Torah is split between two agendas. There's like Torah Moshe and Torah Aharon in a way. And I'm not talking about the research point of view of the priestly and the like E, J, P, etc. And I'm referring to there are two main types of doing in the Torah. There's one doing, which is really all about morality, which we love, and we love to love that. So, for example, the Book of Deuteronomy is going to be all about, not all about, but much about how we treat the orphan, the widow, the stranger in your midst. How do you treat your fellow human being? And also in Vayikra, which is a very priestly book, we have, you know, Parashat Kedushim, the Parashat about holiness, where we're commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, to not put a stumbling block before the blind on many ethical behaviors. So we have that, and that's, in a way, that's like Torah Moshe. And then we have Torah Aharon. And Torah Aharon is worship. It's between man, human being, and God. And perhaps what, if we're translating what you just said now about our government, maybe right now our government is, oh, before I say that, I think it's important to say perhaps we need both. We need both Torah Moshe and Torah Aharon. We need a relationship with our fellow human being, and we need a relationship with God. Now, at the depth of it, it's really one and the same. If God is within everyone, then your relationship with your fellow human being is also your relationship with God, because God is within everyone. And you need to treat the other person with dignity and et cetera, and be there for them, because there's God in them, because they're divine too. And so the separation between the mitzvot in God and humans, and humans to other humans, is a bit of an artificial split. But we need that split for the purpose of education, and for the purpose of clarity. But perhaps we could say that the government right now has swayed way too far to the commandments between humans and God in the most narrow, narrow sense of the word, worshipping God, and in the process, totally ignoring the plight of the stranger in your midst, of the other, of the other person. And with Israel in its early years, it was a very socialist country. And with the rise of the Likud to power, it gradually lost its socialist, social welfare agenda, and it's become a very capitalistic country. A friend of mine who used to live in Israel, he's, I'm not going to mention names, although he's, he's a good chance that he's going to be listening to the podcast. He reads, he reads the Dosha every week, and he comments on the Dosha every week. He's an economist like yourself. And I think unlike yourself, his original perspective was very capitalistic. He was very close to Ronald Reagan. And it was the victory of, Ronald Reagan brought the other victory of capitalism over the communist world and the socialist world. And one thing he told me a few, a few years ago, two years ago, I think, not more than that, he said, you know, Israel is a country where people are expected to go to the army, sacrifice their lives for this country. And this is the case right now. I'm sitting in this very pastoral place right now, and you're in Zichon Yaakov, a beautiful place. And our young men and women are out there on the front line going through hell. And they need to know that when they come back, this country is going to take care of them 100%. It's going to take care of their wounds. It's going to take care of their emotional welfare. If they're going to be shell shocked for a while, they're going to really have all the resources at their disposal to deal with, you know, those who left a small business and put it on hold for four months. It could even be longer. The business went down the drain. Will this country, will this state be there for them fully, fully and even, you know, and even beyond that? That takes socialist awareness and social welfare. It doesn't have to be a socialist system, per se, but a strong, strong social welfare. And Israel has lost its central social welfare. And what this economist was saying, Israel is the kind of country that cannot be a capitalistic, a fully capitalistic country. It has to make sure it takes care of its citizens. And that is Torah Moshe. Torah Moshe is how you care for your fellow human being in the most social welfare, basic social welfare sense of the word. And if you do your sacrifices and you pray three times a day and you keep kosher, that's not going to take care of those in need. So we need both. We need Torah Moshe and we need Torah Aharon. And summing up what I try to say, what you're claiming, what you're lamenting is how this government, who is the most Jewish religious government ever, as you said, the most religious, not the most Jewish, they've all been Jewish, is leaning, has forgotten in the way Torah Moshe and is just simply heralding Torah Aharon. And Elisha, we're learning what you just said about love of country and sacrifice from a generation that many of us old people criticized from Gen X, from the young men and women who come home from South America and Thailand, went off to the army, have been there for three, four months and who are sacrificing for their country. And Elisha, I know that you, by the way, the numbers are awful. We've lost 600, almost 600 soldiers in battle, but we have 20,000 who have been injured severely or moderately or lightly, 20,000. And in terms of their psychological well-being, I would say perhaps 40,000 have suffered some degree of trauma. We have a huge problem. And this brings up the issue of how we deal with trauma, Elisha. And I know you do a lot of spiritual counseling. I know that you know a great deal about psychology. Elisha, I think the Torah 2,500 years ago is a forerunner of a very powerful therapy that we can use for our soldiers and for all of Israelis. Israelis have undergone trauma as well, even if we haven't been in battle. And this is something developed by a psychologist who rebelled against Freud and psychoanalysis, which is sort of long-term therapy, getting the devils out of us. And he says, no, let's do acceptance and commitment therapy. Let's look inward, the Torah Moshe, let's look inward and discover these devils, these traumas, these bad things, and recognize them and accept them. They're part of us. They're part of us. And then according to our values, according to Torah Ahavon, the external part, where we want to head, we leverage this thing that's in us and accept it and then commit to using it in order to achieve our long-term values. And this is modern therapy, this is modern psychology. And it's in the Torah, I think, and it's even sort of buried in Tetzaveh and this fashion show of the Kuanin, but it's in there, the interaction between the internal and the external. And I have a question, Elisha, I have to ask you this. Well, before we move on to the question, unless maybe that's where you're taking us to, but I'm really curious about what you said right now, like how you connected it to the garments, correct, what you just said now? Yes. Can you say a bit more? How do you see that connection? So the connection is, look, you mentioned my course, my entrepreneurship course. I've lived an academic life, the ivory tower, and the ivory tower is all about the internal world, all about knowledge. We had a speaker at my course who mentioned that she had a very hard time in her faculty. She wrote a thesis and then she told her advisors, no, I want to take this out into the real world, into the external world, not the world of thought, and I want to apply this and use it. And they said, don't go there, don't go there. So she left that. In other words, we need the passion show, we need the koanin, we need the attention to detail. There's a saying, God is in the details. That's absolutely true, especially when you start a business. And it's an essential part of our internal life. The internal life alone is insufficient. But question, Elisha, this is a hard one. So we have a powerful metaphor in the Torah. The heavens are God's and on earth, we have free will. And that's lovely. We have free will. I like that. But wait a second. God is in the heavens. He is in the sky. He is in a distant place. How does this work? In terms of Torah Moshe, God dwells within us. There's a clash here between I will dwell among you and Hashamayim shamayim la'adonai. Yes, yeah, it's a beautiful one. So since you mentioned psychology, and we're talking about all of Freud's rivals, and another one of them is one of his students, and that's Carl Jung. I think it kind of is suggesting to us that the heavens is a metaphor. We know that, or I don't know if we know, I think we know that God is not on a cloud up in the sky. Or in other words, what does heaven mean? What does that mean? Do we even know what earth means? Metaphorically speaking. And so I would say that heavens are not the geographical skies. And even though when we often we talk about God, we kind of look up to the sky, you know, and we even say in Hebrew, in the blessing for the city of Israel, for example, God who is in heaven. Our father who's in heaven. And I think what Jung will help us see is that heavens is not a location. Heavens is an understanding, is consciousness. Heavens could be totally within. Perhaps the location that I connect with most is heavens is a place. It's not exactly even a place, metaphorically a place within. So why am I using Jung? Because Jung talks about the archetypes, and he also suggested that we are, the human beings are split between being introverts and extroverts. The extroverts tend to, would tend to view the heavens as the skies, as looking up. The introverts would see God and the heavens as within, inside. So if we're willing to see, and if we take the beautiful verse that you said from Psalms, the heavens are for God, meaning the heavenly, it could be for the extrovert, it could be the ultimate outer, the ultimate vastness of infinity. The infinite is God. And for the introvert, it would be like the inner infinite. God is in our heart. The heart being the heavens. And the earth, he gave to human beings, meaning the world of doing, the world of action, the world of the physical, the physical and the external. And it also connects to our parasha in the sense of the garments, the five sets of garments that the Kohen has, suggesting that, you know, we bring different personas with every, in every step. Like right now, we're sitting here doing this podcast, and this is not the same Shlomo who a few minutes ago was making coffee, or talking to his wife, or it's a different Shlomo, it's a different, it's a different garment, it's a different persona. Now deep inside, in the heavenly sphere, so to speak, you know, there's, there's, it's the same Shlomo, it's the inner Shlomo, it's a deep, deep, it's a divine spark, otherwise called Shlomo. But you bring yourself a different way when you are with your students, they get to see a different Shlomo than I'm sure your children see. And it's only natural. It's not, it's not hypocritical. It's natural. We have different garments, and the Kohenim are thought to bring different parts of themselves out into the world. Absolutely. And perhaps, Elisha, we can end by making a defense of the details of the Kohenim, and their five different changes of clothes. And this comes from our brilliant Rabbi Sachs, and the title of his Drashah for Titzaveh is Inspiration-Perspiration. And he makes a brilliant point that the internalization, the internal creativity where ideas come from, is almost always related to the external setting in which this happens. And that's how he links Torah at Moshe and Torah at Aharon, inspiration and perspiration. Creative people tend to have rituals. We Jewish people, we have lots of rituals. We have the blessing of the Kohenim on Shabbat, which is a beloved, beloved ritual. And Sachs somehow knows about the ritual of Beethoven, so I might mention this. The brilliant Beethoven, who was dead for much of his life, he had, it turns out he had hepatitis B. He had liver disease, which ended up creating jaundice and killed him. And we know that because we have his DNA. We've done DNA analysis, but we know about his life. He used to wake up early in the morning, as we are doing now. He would pound 60 coffee beans, one by one, grind them, make himself coffee, and then sit down to write his music, his inspiration. So he had an external setting in which he expressed his internal, internal creativity. And I interpret this as what Titzaveh is about. Creative people have rituals. Religious people with deep spiritual internal lives have rituals. And the rituals, Howard Wilkes expressed this, Herman Wilkes expressed this once, that prayer in itself is not the goal. It's what happens when we are praying and what we are thinking. It's like the seedbed when you plant little plants, little flowers. The point is not the seedbed, but what comes up out of the seedbed. The prayer, the ritual is the seedbed, but what happens, it's important, is what comes out of it. So yeah, there's a close link between Torah at Moshe and Torah at Aharon. Torah at Aharon gives us the setting, the seedbed, the flower bed, in which we can experience Torah at Aharon. That's really beautiful. That's really beautiful. Yeah, it's really beautiful how you connected the two together. I love that. And yeah, and that's what ritual is all about. And anyone who's gossiping at ritual, we don't need all this external ritual. And ritual, again, it goes back to Jung and to archetypes, et cetera. Ritual is a very powerful realm. And I often say, like, in couples who I have the privilege of marrying them, that we're going to do all the explanations in my office, in my study. At the wedding, we're going to simply do the ritual. The ritual is supposed to be the basis from which people are going to have to find meaning. So everything we do is going to be ritual, but in people's minds, the ritual is going to evoke so much more than just the ritual itself. We do very little explaining. We simply go through the motions of the ritual, and voila, the couple is married in the deepest sense of the word. Ritual is very powerful. Absolutely. So we've run out of time, Elisha. Let's wish our listeners a rich internal spiritual life, and leading from that, good deeds externally, acting on what you believe. Beautiful, beautiful. Yes, indeed. It would be like, you know, the inner and the outer, you know, the inner and the garment, may it all be in harmony. Exactly. So, Elisha, enjoy Kenes Rabbanim, where you are in Neve Shalom. Have a good day, and we'll see you next week. Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Bye.