An Honorable Disguise
On Clothing in Exodus and Esther
“Conceal me what I am…” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)
“Make sacral vestments for your brother Aaron, for honor and beauty.” (Exodus 28:2)
Haman entered, and the king asked him, What should be done for a man whom the king desires to honor? Haman said to himself, “Whom would the king desire to honor more than me?” So Haman said to the king, “For the man whom the king desires to honor, let royal garb which the king has worn be brought, and a horse on which the king has ridden and on whose head a royal diadem has been set; and let the attire and the horse be put in the charge of one of the king’s noble courtiers. And let the man whom the king desires to honor be attired and paraded on the horse through the city square, while they proclaim before him: This is what is done for the man whom the king desires to honor!” “Quick, then,” said the king to Haman. “Get the garb and the horse, as you have said, and do this to Mordecai the Jew, who sits in the king’s gate. Omit nothing of all you have proposed.” (Esther 6:6-10)
On Purim, we are permitted to see and say what on other days is more elusive. When the world is turned upside down, we are afforded vistas whose perplexity is clarifying and whose clarity is perplexing.
One odd vista that opens up for us today is the parallel between the Book of Esther and the weekly Torah reading, parashat Tetzaveh (Ex. 27:20-30:10). Both texts describe the sovereign (king) commanding an important person to honor someone else by clothing and adorning them.
In Exodus, God tells Moses to make priestly garments for Aaron. In Esther, Achashverosh tells Haman to clothe Mordechai in royal garb. In both texts, the word honor (kavod) appears. What should we make of the parallel?
It seems strange that Moses would find his analogue in Haman, the enemy of the Jewish people, and that Aaron would find his parallel Mordechai, the people’s savior. But, let’s roll with it, and ask, how is Moses like Haman? How is Aaron like Mordechai?
The first thing to note is that prophets tend to be critical and priests tend to be conciliatory. Moses kills an Egyptian taskmaster in a flash of righteous anger. That same quality follows him when he shatters the tablets upon learning of the people’s turn to idolatry. Aaron, by contrast, is known in Jewish tradition as a “rodef shalom”—a pursuer of peace. You’ll never find a priest saying a bad word about the people. Cynically put, that would be a form of biting the hands that feed them.
Prophets tell us we can do better, but to do that effectively they need to see what’s wrong with us. Priests, meanwhile, reflect back to us that we are already great, which can be motivating, but can also be a form of flattery or false consciousness.
Prophets like Isaiah note that it is not enough to give animal sacrifices if the context in which they are given is an unjust one. But the priests are specialists—they have to focus on the mechanics of the sacrifices, which obstructs their capacity to see the bigger picture.
So Mordechai is a kind of prophetic character in the sense that he foresees the potential destruction of the people. But he’s a priest in the sense that he seeks to save them unconditionally and unequivocally.
Haman—who seeks to destroy the people—is wicked not because he threatens destruction per se, but because his reasoning and motivation are incorrect. Haman wants the people destroyed because they refuse to engage in idolatry. Ironically, many of the Hebrew prophets tell the people they will be destroyed because they engage in to idolatry. Haman is a photographic negative of the Hebrew prophets.
The parallel between Haman and Moses reveals a psychological dimension to the Biblical protagonist—there is a sense in which Moses’s act of dressing his brother is an acknowledgment of the fact that he isn’t—and can’t be—the high priest. If Haman feels foolish and sad clothing his nemesis, he makes plain a subtle sense of loss that Moses might feel in giving honor to his brother. As I’ve written here the Torah affirms the necessity of “divided powers.” In Tetzaveh, the principle of separation of powers is elevated from a necessary measure to a holy design.
Finally, the most radical point of the parallel between Esther and Tetzaveh is this: just as Mordechai saves the life of the king, so, as it were, does Aaron save the life of the King of Kings (God). What does it mean to save the life of God? It’s not literal, of course—but metaphorically, to save the life of God means to preserve the relevance and power of spiritual life, of religious experience.
The analogue to the king’s would be assassins—Bigtan and Teresh—are all the forces that would tell us we’d be better off without the holy. Mordechai doesn’t simply help Achashverosh dodge a proverbial bullet—he overhears the plan and foils it. The best priests don’t simply engage in “ritual”; they understand the opposition to it. They can respond to the skeptics because they’ve overheard them; they know their own inner skeptic and have overcome it.
Moses knows the truth, but does not know the skeptic. Prophets say what is right; but they don’t often know what it’s like to be on the other side. This, Aaron knows. This, Mordechai knows.
Prophetic courage is the ability to say a hard to truth to an unwilling audience. Priestly prudence is the ability to be relatable and in so doing to inspire receptivity.
On Purim, a day of inversions, we celebrate not the cutting nay-saying of the prophet, but the affirmative thinking of the priest.
Purim is a holiday of costumes corresponding to a Torah that is, as it were, God’s costume. In reading a text about Moses, the prophet, making a costume befitting Aaron, a priest, we recognize the need for a plurality of garments, hides, scrolls. There is no one-size-fits-all mask by which the great mystery can be revealed. But the realization of this pluralistic principle should not make us indifferent to the costumes we wear. It should strengthen our love for those outfits and ideas to which we are drawn and those to which others are drawn. Both Exodus and Esther teach us that it is in our costumes that our kavod (honor, dignity, presence) is to be found.
On Purim, we recognize costumes to be a way of revealing-while-hiding. In so doing, we come to appreciate the study of Torah and the practice of Jewish life as an infinite game of hide and seek.
Shabbat Shalom and Purim Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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