This past week in studying Parashat Tetzaveh, the Torah portion which means “you shall instruct”, we encounter God telling Moses to instruct the Israelites how to put the finishing touches on the construction of the tabernacle, that portable sanctuary in the wilderness that would serve as the symbol of God’s presence in their midst. This included instructions regarding how to garb those tasked with the tending to the sanctuary—the priests, including the High Priest himself, Moses’ brother Aaron.
Exodus 28:2 reads: v’asita vikdei kodesh l’aharon akhikha l’khavod ul’tifaret, translated commonly as “make sacral vestments for your brother Aaron, for glory and pride.” The Hasidic Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polonne (1710–1784) noted the association of pride with Aaron; contrasted this with the description of Moses as humble, (see Numbers 12:3 – “Now Moses was a very humble man, more so than any other man on earth”); and teaches us that we should, “use both of these attributes.”
He goes on to teach that “If the Evil Urge [note: traditional rabbis have, for thousands of years in Jewish tradition, believed that we all contain a Good Urge and an Evil Urge, in relation to which we aspire to generate good] debases humanity [by convincing us] that we are unfit to become holy, then we should hold up against it in the attribute of pride, namely, pride that [we have a] soul that makes us worthy of becoming holy. But if the Evil Urge glorifies us and tells him that we are already holy and pure,” then we should hold up the attribute of humility.
Rabbi Jacob Joseph doesn’t want us to imagine that we, for whatever reason, are incapable of achieving holiness—that it is only certain pious souls who are capable of performing divine service. Rather, he wants us to tap into our prideful instincts—what we might call our ego—and channel that ego, that sense of pride, into the sense that we, like every human being on this planet are capable of holiness, capable of divine service.
He goes on to say that we should invoke our humility, the attribute of Moses, around matters of “wealth and honor”—earthly matters, but that our ego, our pride, is a fact of our existence and there is an opportunity to channel this ego for good, namely into a personal belief that we are all capable of great things when it comes to service of the divine.
I have always been impressed by the way rabbis of days gone by are able to wrestle with inner demons which many of us seem to experience and come out the other side with a sense that we are capable of more than we can imagine.
May we all experience just the right doses of Moses’ humility and Aaron’s pride.
