Rome, the Pantheon, and Why Jerusalem Needs a Bigdei Kehuna Shop

We just got back from Rome, and I have to say, the city gives one a little déjà vu when you live in Israel. Not in a bad way. In the way where you keep doing double-takes, looking at a crumbling wall or a worn stone staircase and thinking, wait, how old is that exactly, and then realizing it is roughly contemporaneous with the Second Temple period, and suddenly your whole sense of “ancient” gets reshuffled.

Also amazing how stone, 2,000 years old, looks the same there and here. Quite a few times I thought we were looking at more spoils taken back from Jerusalem.

Rome is remarkable. You walk out of a perfectly normal cafe where you just had a coffee or a soda, and there is the Pantheon, just sitting there, two thousand years old, holding itself together with a confidence that would shame most modern buildings.

People are milling around in front of it, taking selfies, pigeons are doing their thing, a guy nearby is selling umbrellas because Roman weather was 35 Celsius, and none of it feels strange. That is just Tuesday in Rome, like a Monday at the shuk.

Half a block from the Pantheon, tucked between a leather goods shop and what looked like a nice pasta restaurant, there was a store selling priest clothing. Actually, most of the block was selling holy clothing.

Full vestments. Cassocks(robe), chasubles(outer clothing), stoles(band/scarf), the whole production. I had to look up some of those items’ proper names.

These were not costume shops.

An actual retail establishment where actual clergy come to purchase the items they will actually wear while doing actual religious work. Professionally displayed, neatly arranged, clearly doing enough business that more than one shop exists. And some other locations sell similar stuff nearer the Vatican. I guess for the priests that forget something at home.

I stood there for a moment and thought: we do not have this in Jerusalem.

It struck me as one of those small, sideways observations that opens into something larger. Rome is a living religious city layered on top of an ancient one, and it has figured out how to make the sacred and the commercial coexist on the same block without either one canceling the other out. You want to connect to your religious heritage in a tangible, wearable, functional way? Here is the shop. The church never went away, so neither did the infrastructure around it.

Jerusalem has the Old City, obviously. You can buy a shofar, a mezuzah, a hamsa in hundreds of different sizes, a kippah hand-embroidered by some guy from the shop, and a shawarma when you are hungry.

What you cannot buy, because there is currently no practical reason to buy it, is bigdei kehuna, the priestly garments worn by the kohanim (priests) in the Temple service. The linen tunic, the belt, the special garments of the Kohen Gadol (the High Priest), the whole magnificent, detailed items of the ensemble.

Naturally, this is the problem. Only the Kohen Gadol wore the special vestments, and the regular ones, while wearing simpler items, only used them while performing a service in the Bait Hamikdash.

Some organizations in Jerusalem have actually produced replica bigdei kehuna, because they are serious about Temple preparation in a way that makes most people uneasy if they stop to consider the geopolitical implications. But you cannot simply wander off the Cardo (the main street of the Jewish Quarter) and buy yourself a set the way a Dominican friar could pop into that shop near the Pantheon and walk out with a new cassock.

Should we have such shops? I think yes, and not for the reasons people might assume.

Not because I am expecting the Temple to be rebuilt next Tuesday, though stranger things have happened in this region on shorter notice. But because there is something to be said for a living civilization maintaining a tangible connection to its own sacred past.

The Catholics have kept an entire industry of religious material culture alive and humming.

You can walk into that world.
You can touch it, wear it, participate in it.

Jewish tradition has preserved the knowledge of these garments in extraordinary textual detail for two thousand years. The Torah describes the exact threading, the specific colors, the precise construction of each piece with an attention to detail that would impress an Italian tailor, after all, where do you think the Church got its inspiration from anyway?

There is something both funny and a little poignant about the comparison. Rome built an empire, converted it to Christianity, lost the empire, kept the church, and now tourists photograph priests buying work clothes between lunch and the Pantheon.

Jerusalem has been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, and conquered again, spending two millennia holding onto the memory of a Temple service in text and prayer alone, waiting for the day when memory becomes practice.

As we daven about it, discuss it, and remember it as we roll into Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Maybe a shop in the Jewish Quarter selling historically accurate, beautifully crafted bigdei kehuna, the way that Roman shops sold vestments, would not be a provocation or a political statement. Maybe it would just be a civilization saying: we remember what we wore, we remember who we were, and we are keeping the skills warm.

I know, no Jews are looking to buy this, even the ones that proclaim Moshiach is coming.

Ah, but Tourists, well,  they don’t know, do they?

No idea what Jews would buy these, or wear them, aside from Purim, after all, who gets dressed to do Bircat Kohanim?

But think about how it would look at the Kotel on the day of Chol HaMoed Sukkot and Pesach, when there is the large Bircat Kohanim, if all the Kohanim wore the proper vestments.

That would be an impressive flash mob thing for Kohanim to do.

The press would go crazy. Lots of discussions would ensue. Maybe it would become a thing to do going forward. You know, if it wasn’t going to piss off someone, someplace.

Standing outside those vestment shops in Rome, I did not feel envy. I felt something closer to recognition.

Rome is not embarrassed by its continuity.

I am not sure we should be either.