Timeless Torah

One didn’t just walk into the Temple unprepared. Even the priests who were trained from an early age for this sacred calling, made final preparations before actually serving. In the words of this week’s Biblical reading, “Make a basin of copper for washing…. And Aaron and his sons should wash their hands and feet from it, when they enter the Tent of Meeting.”

More than nineteen hundred years have passed since the destruction of the Holy Temple. Some things however never change, including this law. To quote the Halachic codifier Maimonides, “Every morning, a person should wash his face, hands and feet before praying.”

While there may no longer be a true House of G-d or kohanim who offer sacrifices upon the altar, yet the Holy Temple and the service performed therein remain to this very day the vehicle for our relationship with G-d. It is only that today they exist in a more spiritual form.

Many examples of this transference from Temple life to modern times are well known to all of us. For instance, our daily prayers were instituted in the place of animal offerings. At the beginning of our meals, we dip our bread in salt because salt was part of every offering placed upon the altar which is now represented by our tables. Obviously the washing ritual has similarly spanned the ages. But what was its original purpose?
. Although the Torah instructs us that “all your deeds should be for the sake of Heaven,” one must still distinguish between the world outside the Temple walls and that which is the exclusive domain of the Divine. Therefore when entering the Sanctuary of G-d, one must cleanse himself of the materiality of everyday life. This is the spiritual significance of the law that obligates the kohen to wash his hands and feet.
. What is important to note, however, is the subtle change in the law. In its post-Temple incarnation, the Jew is instructed to wash his face, hands and feet prior to the morning prayers. The question is why.

King David, the consummate Jewish poet proclaims, “If you eat of the toil of your hands, fortunate are you.” Chassidic teaching explains that this verse is telling us to invest only the most external of our faculties in the pursuit of material livelihood. Our higher talents should remain free to devote themselves exclusively to our spiritual goals.

Our Patriarchs were shepherds, and the Jews who settled in the Holy Land were tillers of the soil. Many of the greatest Talmudic sages, whose teachings are a source of guidance and wisdom to us to this very day, were manual laborers: Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar was a cobbler, Rabbi Joshua a blacksmith, Shammai a bricklayer. Among them were also merchants and shopkeepers, but business was free of the obsessive preoccupation that characterize it today.

Scholarship and teaching were not professions but holy callings, not to be sullied by the remuneration of material reward. Earning one’s daily bread was a matter for the hands and feet and the most rudimentary of mental exercises, not something upon which to expend the mind’s ingenuity or the heart’s devotion. These were reserved only for life’s higher aims.

That world is no longer. Today, we not only invest time and energy to procure our material needs; we give it our all; our keenest mental capacities, our strongest passions, our most forceful will. Our careers consume our days and nights, our minds and hearts, indeed, our very identities. Isn’t it interesting that we don’t ask each other, “What do you do to make money?” We say, “What do you do?” /
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This explains the difference between the two laws quoted. In the time of the Temple, only the hands and feet, the externalities of human life, were involved in material pursuit. Thus only they required purification before being devoted to the service of G-d. In contrast, the face of man, symbolizing his higher prowess and inner self, required no such cleansing, for it was not sullied in the first place.