Efrat, Israel - “(Separate) your brother Aaron and his sons from among the Israelites... Make sacred vestments that are both dignified and beautiful for your brother Aaron...” (Exodus 28:1,2).

The Kohen-Priest officiates over the Sanctuary. If the Sanctuary-Temple is the forerunner of the contemporary Synagogue, then the Kohen-Priest is the forerunner of the contemporary Rabbi. A Rabbi can function as a Secretary of his board of directors, as a prophet, as a Kohen-priest, or, at best, as a combination of the latter two. Let us attempt to analyze the nature of the priestly vocation, of the prophetic vocation, and the differences between them.

Let us begin with the very first of the sacred objects fashioned for the Sanctuary, the Ark (Hebrew, Aron) the repository for the holy tablets of stone upon which were engraved the Ten Commandments. It is obvious as to why the Bible begins its detailed description of the Sanctuary’s furnishings with the ark; after all, the ark served as repository of the most sacred material in the universe, the words and writings expressing the Divine message to Israel at Sinai. Even to this very day there are organized missions, books and movies obsessed with the search for the ancient ark - as in the motion picture, “Raiders of the lost ark.” So then, why is the ark only gold plated rather than pure gold - as is the ark-cover (Kapporet), the cherubs and the menorah? Everyone knows that gold-plated is less valuable than pure gold - and the Kapporet is merely a protection for the Ark and is therefore less significant than the ark itself!

Clearly every object of the Sanctuary is invested with profound symbolic meaning, as we have attempted to demonstrate in the past regarding the menorah (the Garden of Eden’s tree of life) and the cherubs (the winged children of Israel whose commitment to Torah provides for and protects our Eternity). What then is the symbolism of a Sacred Ark formed from gold plated acacia wood?

I would suggest that wood, derived as it does from a tree, represents life, growth and development. Trees also have the capacity to reproduce themselves, thereby symbolizing fruits and future. Gold, on the other hand, expresses eternal value, a precious metal deeply buried within the earth which neither ages nor tarnishes, neither decays nor destructs. The Divine Teaching, our Holy Torah, must likewise comprise both of these crucial elements: precious eternity as well as creative advancement, timelessness as well as timeliness, the capacity to speak to the ages as well as to the age. The Holy Ark of the Torah tablets of stone must be formed by vegetative tree-wood encased by non-decayable gold.

This dialectic combination of tree-wood and gold is expressed in an equally striking manner by the two main leaders of the Israelites during the Biblical period, the prophet and the priest, the navi and the Kohen, Moses and Aaron. These two functionaries differed from each other in two very clearly defined ways: firstly, the Kohen-priest derived his exalted office and stature from his father who derived it from his father stretching all the way back to Aaron, elder bother of Moses; it was a matter of yihus, or ancestry. The navi-prophet, on the other hand, could have been born into any family at all, his position dictated exclusively by his personal charisma and spiritual passion. Secondly, the priest-Kohen wears special garb, - four unique garments for the regular Priest-Kohen and eight unique garments for the Kohen Gadol High Priest - without which his divine service was to be disqualified; the navi-prophet has no unique garb, his message and persona being the only significant aspect of his ministry.

These differences speak volumes about the specific function performed by each of these prototypical leaders. Religion in general and Judaism in particular provide two very crucial and complementary components for which humanity yearns: an intuition of the eternal, a sense of participation in eternity, which is so important in our fast-changing world of flux and mortality, as well as a sense of direction and purpose in a cosmos which too often seems to be governed by happenstance, in a life which can off-times appear to be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The priest-Kohen minister of the Sanctuary and keeper of the Traditions is responsible for the continuity, the structure, the permanence expressed by time-honored ceremonials performed generation after generation in our prayer services, celebrations and life-cycle events; hence the priest-Kohen receives the teachings from his father and bequeaths them to his son, expressing the external and eternal chain of Jewish being which existed before each of us was born and will continue after each of us will die. This external structure of continuity is symbolized by the unique external garb of the Kohen-priest, which was - and one day will again become - transmitted from generation to generation.

But continuity requires commitment, structure yearns for significance, permanence cries out for passion. It isn’t sufficient to repeat rituals merely because they were performed by our forbears. We dare not allow our religious rite to degenerate into empty, habitual performance. The structured psalms must sensitize our souls, the detailed laws must infuse us with freely-given love, the emphasis on structure must allow for spiritual spontaneity, the fealty to past cannot blind us to the challenges of the future. It was the charismatic navi-prophet who extracted purpose and pathos from permanence and precedent, who made G-d’s passion and fire infuse the laws and traditions with meaning for the moment. The Kohen-priest is the eternal gold of the Sacred Ark, and the navi-prophet is the ever-growing tree- wood of the Sacred Ark. “May the old be renewed, and may the new be sanctified.”

Shabbat Shalom.