From secular into sacred space
Shelah Lecha
Jacob Milgrom, in his masterful commentary to Bemidbar (The JPS Torah Commentary), notes that this week’s Torah portion is bracketed by two Hebrew words, tur and zana, literally “scouting” and “whoring.”
At the outset, 12 spies are sent out to “scout” (13:2) the Holy Land. Ten of the 12 return to bring a false report and the community is accused of “whoring” (14:33) after their eyes. At the conclusion of the portion, we are commanded to wear the tzitzit so that we may be prevented from “scouting” and “whoring” (15:39) after our hearts and eyes. The identical Hebrew words appear in both contexts. Of course, none of this is coincidental.
To put it another way, the unifying theme of the portion as a whole is seeing: correct seeing and wrongful seeing. All of the spies saw the same land. But two of them saw correctly, while the other 10, and subsequently the rest of the community, saw wrongfully: the sin of “whoring.” If so, then, the seeing of the tzitzit at the end of the portion is the corrective to the wrongful seeing of the spies at the beginning. If we learn how to see correctly, then we won’t repeat the sin of the spies.
The tzitzit passage specifies how this learning takes place. Note the progression: “look,” “remember,” “observe.” When we look at the tzitzit, we will remember the mitzvot, and then we will observe them.
The tzitzit are then a visual symbol. In our own day, they are tied to the four corners of our tallitot. When we recite this passage as the third of the three biblical texts that form the recitation of the Sh’ma in our daily liturgy, many of us take up the four tzitziot, hold them together, and then conspicuously look at and/or kiss them. We take the command to “look” very seriously and very literally.
The most striking piece of Milgrom’s commentary on the tzitzit is in his excursus to the passage (no. 38) where he notes the association of the tzitzit with the garments of the kohen gadol, the high priest. The kohen gadol was the ultimate in holiness among the Israelite community. Our wearing of the tzitzit, then, suggests that we all share in the holiness of the kohen gadol. The end of the tzitzit passage echoes this: Why do we observe the commandments? “To be holy to your God.”
There are significant differences between the Temple and the synagogue. Both served as centers for worship, but the Temple had to be located in Jerusalem; the synagogue could be any place on earth. The heart of Temple worship was sacrifice; the medium of synagogue worship is the word.
Finally, in the Temple the kohen gadol and the kohanim did the worshiping and the community observed. In the synagogue, every Jew does the worshiping. Every Jew becomes the kohen gadol.
In recent years, many Reform congregations have reaffirmed some of the synagogue rituals that had been abandoned during the age of classical Reform. Notable among them is covering the head and wearing the tallit.
Since I have a longstanding interest in teaching our congregants to adopt more and more of the rituals of our tradition, I recently asked a Reform rabbi colleague what language she used to educate her congregants to wear the tallit. Her answer was striking. “I tell them,” she said, “that when we walk into the synagogue and don a tallit, we are marking the fact that we have walked out of a secular space into a sacred space. The tallit says that we are no longer in the street; we are now in the presence of God.”
She might also have said that the tallit conveys another message. With its four tzitziot, the garment also proclaims the democratization of Jewish worship. Walk into a synagogue on a Shabbat morning and what do you see? Only tallitot. The fashions of the day become irrelevant. Every Jewish male — and now, in many congregations, women as well — is garbed in the same way. We are no longer observers; we have all become kohen gadol.
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