By Anya Friedman Hutter

This week’s parasha continues God’s instructions to Moshe about the Mishkan (the holy booth holding the commandments that the Israelites carried through the desert) with information about the priests who will worship there. God names Aharon and his sons as the first priests and then launches into an incredibly detailed description of the clothes they will wear when they enter the Mishkan. Next come instructions for how to ordain priests. To sum it up, God explains that worship will be done through two animal sacrifices every day at the Mishkan.

So, priests, fancy garments, and dead animals. Exciting stuff, right? Actually, yes!—this parasha lays out the way the Israelites related to God for the next few hundred years, until the destruction of the Second Temple. A system of priests and sacrifices defined holiness and worship for many, many people for many, many years.

I’d like to focus a little on these priests. In selecting Aharon as the High Priest and his sons as the successors, God creates a new ruling class of sorts where leadership is passed down from parent to child, or more accurately, from father to son. The priests are the only people who can perform ritual sacrifices and enter the Mishkan, and because this is the way to worship God, the priestly class has a unique access to holiness that is closed off to the majority of the Israelite people. This definitely does not seem to reflect the equal and non-hierarchical relationships we try to create in the tnua….what gives?

In Habo spaces, we grapple with the idea of authority. We educate our chanichim about rebellion and work to share responsibilities fairly on our tzvatim. Yet, hierarchy exists—without a mazkirut, machaneh probably wouldn’t run smoothly; if there are no point people for ken events they often fall through the cracks.

As madrichim, we choose to take a position of relative authority over our chanichim and hope that we are doing it kindly and responsibly.

My favorite piece of clothing the priest is commanded to wear is the “breastpiece of decision” (Ex. 28:15). A woven rectangle of blue, purple, and red yarns, this garment also has twelve stones arranged in four rows, each next to an inscription with the name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. “Aharon shall carry the names of the children of Israel on the breastpiece of decision over his heart when he enters the sanctuary” (Ex. 28:19). Though the priest is part of a hierarchy of leadership and access to God, this leader carries his people on his shoulders. This Shabbat, I want to offer the wisdom that when we take positions of leadership and hadracha, we keep our peers and chanichim close to us. In creating tochniot and resources to lead each other, let’s hold our chaverim like the priests carried the Israelite people, pushing each other when we need to out of love and shared commitment.

I want to close with this: at the beginning of the parasha, God introduces the ner tamid, an “eternal light” outside the Mishkan that burns all day and all night without going out. The Israelites of the Bible and Jews in synagogues all over the world today tend a ner tamid to represent God’s presence, to remind us that there is always a guiding force in our lives. So I ask you all—what values do we want to light as a ner tamid in our lives? What is so important to us that we want to keep it from dimming even for a minute? And most importantly, how can we take care of it together?