Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, we read in the Torah about the details of the construction of the Tabernacle and the significance of the materials and colors that went into it. In discussing the parsha, I focused on the importance of aesthetics in life in general, but also on the spirit of seeing the magnificence of creation — and the human element that goes into creativity.

This week, the Torah continues with the visual. The parsha devotes chapters to the clothes that the high priest was expected to wear when he served within the Tabernacle, and later, of course, in the Temple.

“The apparel oft proclaims the man,” was Shakespeare’s Polonius’ advice to Hamlet. And the idea goes back to the Greeks.

But clothes can be a mark of arrogance and ostentatiousness, as well as dignity. We see today how people are judged for better or worse by the clothes they wear. Surely, we shouldn’t be judging people by externals, but we do.

In religion, too, what we wear sends signals of who we are and what we believe in and represent.

After the Sinai revelation that gave the Children of Israel the constitution, the Torah then goes on to spend chapters on the visual and the aesthetic. Was it just to glorify the institution, or was there not a deeper meaning?

Over the last few weeks, the Torah has repeated the word ve’asita — meaning to make or create. It is a commandment to do, not just to be. We exist. But the challenge is how to exist. Is it only in the externals? Or should it be internal too? We have to do, to make and to be. But we have to do it with honesty and concern for others.

We can speculate about the significance of the institutions and conventions of our tradition. I’ve always wondered why it was so important for the Torah to devote so much space to constructions and clothes. But perhaps it’s a command to human beings to build and to decorate in the mystical world as opposed to the rational. Such things were important because the Torah wants us to think about and act in the small things as well as in the large things. It is one thing to have a great constitution and magnificent institutions and buildings, but it’s another thing to understand how we should be behaving within them in our daily lives and value the beauty that surrounds us.

Clothes and ceremonial have their uses and importance, but they are only a means to an end.

The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.