When I was a kid, my friends and I read a book series called Captain Underpants. In the story, two kids unwittingly transform their school principal into a superhero. By day, Mr. Krupp is a grumpy, intimidating authority figure. By night, he is a superhero who wears little more than a cape (hence the name, Captain Underpants).
The comic irony of the book for us kids was that teachers, principals, doctors, politicians — as far as we knew, these grown-ups had no such thing as an inner life. Principals don’t have personal lives, or hobbies, or feelings that can be hurt. They certainly don’t wear underpants.
Except the thing is, they do.
A more traditional colleague of mine told me that rabbis should never be seen in a swimsuit, or barefoot. It sets a bad example of immodesty, he said, and people need a healthy distance from their Jewish leaders.
Maybe that’s true. No matter how much I try to be myself, people don’t relate to me as a regular person. When my beard goes untrimmed and unkempt, instead of calling me a hippie, people say I look “rabbinic.” Perhaps there is a value to seeing our leaders as more distant, more refined, more proper than everybody else. The rabbi is the grown-up’s grown-up. As far as many people are concerned, my work is mysterious and important. It’s hard to know where to begin.
So, in spite of my colleague’s advice, I think it’s important for me to share that rabbis wear underpants, too. In fact, I wear underpants.
There reaches a point where we all realize that the person behind the desk — the rabbi, the cashier, the nurse, the mail carrier, the waiter, the flight attendant, my boss, my teacher and my assistant — they all have inner lives. We all do. And the sooner we make an effort to understand what we all have in common, the sooner we can break down those mysterious boundaries between “us” and “them.”
The Bible knew this. That all of our leaders, all of our practitioners, all the people we keep at a distance — we are all human beings. That is why in this week’s Torah reading, Tetzaveh, we read pages and pages of the priestly fashion catalog. Every single piece of clothing the priests have to wear while doing their Temple service. The robe, the headdress, the tunic. And then God says, “Make sure the priests wear underpants.” (Translation is mine, but trust me, Exodus 28:42). Now, why does the high priest have underpants that are worth writing about? Because in the eyes of the Torah, the clothing and the duties of our leaders are not meant to be a mystery. Religion is not meant to be a mystery. It’s meant to be something that all of us can take part in and understand.
In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh was not simply a king, he was a deity. He was infallible. He was meant not to be understood, but to be worshipped.
Our religion demands that these qualities are reserved only for God. Even in our earliest days we knew, our leaders have always been human. King David was a womanizer. Moses had anger issues. Noah had a drinking problem. Rebecca was a manipulator. Expecting our leaders to be flawless only sets them up for failure. They are not meant to be mysterious and hide away their imperfections. Instead, the wisdom of our tradition has been to give our leaders space to share what makes them human.
When a grown-up makes mistakes and admits they were wrong, it empowers the rest of us to do the same. When a public figure loses a loved one, they model what that looks like to the rest of us. And when a leader lets us witness how they value their family, their health, their commitment to serving the people, we learn how to balance caring for the people we love.
The job of a leader is not something reserved for the superhuman. It’s for someone with the courage to share their broken humanity with the world.
We all have those “grown-ups” in our life who we keep at a distance. The Torah encourages us to approach those people with a desire for relationship and transparency. And as Jewish leaders ourselves, we are challenged to share a bit more openly about the clothes we step in and out of, and the things we are struggling with. Each one of us is somebody else’s “grown-up.” The more we know about each other, the more we can replace mystery with understanding. From the days of the Torah onward, grown-ups have always had feelings that can be hurt. We have always made mistakes. We have always been held accountable. And yes, we have always worn underpants.
