Bells on Their Robes & Blood on Their Hands: Tetzaveh

Since reading this week’s parsha, I’ve been wondering what I carry on my heart.

Last week we got the detailed instructions for building the Mishkan, the sanctuary to be carried through the desert.

This week it’s detailed instructions for the priests. We learn all about the special robes and layers Moses’ brother Aaron and his sons are to wear in order to serve as priests. There are even bells along the bottoms of the robes.

The priests are to serve God on behalf of the people, and they must live up to certain standards and live by certain norms in order to be worthy. This is very sacred work.

As part of the fancy clothing, they are to symbolically carry all the tribes of Israel over, or on, their heart.

And there are instructions for the sacrifice of animals and how to use the blood, with their hands, putting it on the edges of the ears, splashed around the sides of the altar and dashed onto their sacred clothing, covering them the blood.

What’s that about, I ask?

On the Radio Lab podcast last week, they played the very first episode from fifteen years ago. One of the stories I heard really had an impact—on my heart.

It was a young boy and his best friend playing “Journalist” for a week, interviewing family, friends, neighbors, teachers. They were from a very poor Black neighborhood in Chicago. One lived in a house that had been in his family for decades, and the other lived in the low-income housing projects close by. Both lived in overcrowded, dilapidated conditions. They describe a neighborhood of high crime, drugs and extreme poverty. The public housing is infested with cockroaches.

These boys are good students, the best, trying to figure out through their interviews why some people, like the sister of the one in the house, who had once been an A-student, give up and lose hope, and some are able to get through it.

The sister interviewed is seventeen at the time, with a baby, and so depressed she barely gets out of bed. Others take care of her baby.

Her brother asks her, “How many of your friends have been killed over the years? Fifty?” “No,” she says, “not fifty.” “Forty? Thirty?”

“Yeah, maybe thirty.” Thirty people around her age!! That’s enormous!!

“Do you know who killed them?” “Some of them. But I’m not gonna tell you who.”

The boy talks about finding dozens of firearms in various people’s houses. He talks about the drugs and alcohol and the addictions in his family alone. His grandmother has lost two out of her ten children to killings. She describes the changes the neighborhood has gone through since the family bought the house generations ago.

They are, I guess you might say, among the lucky ones, just for having a house.

I was counting the years, and I realized that these boys, if they are still alive, would be my older daughter’s age now. Completely different lives and experiences. Completely different prospects.

And I wondered: if they are alive, have they lost hope? Did they continue to be honor-roll students? Did they make it out?

And if they are still alive, what scars are on their hearts?

If not, who has blood on their hands: the neighbors, or the politicians? And what was the purpose of their sacrifice?

I think it’s important to hear stories like these first-hand, as Radio Lab did so beautifully in this case, so we can be witness to the struggles of the poor, the Black, the disenfranchised. It’s too easy to think only of “our own tribes” and say, “Those people just need to try harder. They’re lazy. My people made it. Why can’t they?”

It’s too easy to think only of our own tribes, to carry only our own people and their struggles on our hearts. It’s much harder to understand other people’s circumstances and history. And those holding the power don’t really want us to understand. They want to keep our tribes separate.

Maybe that’s what the blood is all about: to remind us that all life, everyone’s life, is sacred. Blood is life-giving. And it looks the same, no matter what tribe you’re from.

And we should be of pure heart to serve God on other people’s behalf. To take that a step further, our politicians should be of pure heart to serve the people. They should not be allowed to serve if they have blood on their hands.

That’s the negative stuff.

It’s also true that there’s a shortage of workers now because, since Covid, people are not willing to sacrifice their entire lives for a big company’s gains.

I get courage from the fact that workers are gaining control and power because of this shortage. People are organizing to unionize in places like Starbucks—and they’re winning. People now know what their priorities are.

They know what is sacred to them.

As we come out of the pandemic, whenever that happens, may we stay in touch with what is sacred to us, keep our priorities straight, carry those things on our hearts, and draw strength from each other to create the sacred world we want to live in.

This is my hope and prayer.

And say Amen.