Holy Hot Pants

Yes, I have several Mormon friends, and yes, they do make fun of each other for wearing what the more playful adherents of their religion have dubbed holy underpants.

The link between ritual undergarments and religious purity didn't start with Joseph Smith. In this week's Torah portion, Tetzaveh, there's an extensive description of exactly what clothes -- material, color, and otherwise -- the High Priest should wear:

Exodus 28:2 And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, for splendour and for beauty. 3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they make Aaron's garments to sanctify him, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 4 And these are the garments which they shall make: a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a tunic of chequer work, a mitre, and a girdle; and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 5 And they shall take the gold, and the blue, and the purple, and the scarlet, and the fine linen.

The Torah goes even further, and actually discusses what type of undergarments the High Priest should wear. Earlier this week, when I was reading the daily Torah portion, my mind was blown, and -- as per norma -- I ran to my wife, who grew up Hasidic. As per norma, she laughed at me. What kind of a Jew am I, not knowing about holy underpants?

(28:42) You shall also make for them linen pants to cover their nakedness; they shall extend from the hips to the thighs. They shall be worn by Aaron and his sons when the enter the Tent of Meeting or when they approach the altar to officiate in the sanctuary, so that they do not incur punishment and die. It shall be a law for all time for him and for his offspring to come.

"What kind of pants start at your hips and go to your thighs?" I said. "That sounds like hot pants."

"They're underwear," said my wife, totally calmly, as if this sort of confusion happens to us on a daily basis -- which, by a much looser definition, it might. We don't always talk about holy underwear, but we did have a conversation the other day about why our kid frequently wears underpants on her head.

I did some digging and checked around with the commentators. They all seemed to be in agreement: this was, indeed, the Tabernacle's modernized version of a fig leaf. Rashi notes that Moses is commanded by G*d to suit up Aaron and his sons in their ritual uniforms, which includes this; a bunch of other commentators say that, because of the placement of the verse in the flow of the Torah (this particular item of clothing is listed last, after the commandment is given), Moses was not required to dress them in these particular lederhoisen. Ohr HaTorah, another Torah commentator, adds, "Were not Aaron and his sons perfectly capable of putting on their own underwear?" It's as near verbatim as the translation lets me get.

So, there you go. Jews and hot pants -- we did it first.

And, while my G-dcast co-producers and I didn't peek beneath the holy vestments, we outlined basically everything else from the parsha in this week's episode. Just in case, you know, you ever get appointed High Priest and the invitation didn't include a dress code.

The Kominas Live: The Only Jew in the Room

Last night I went to my first taqwacore concert. Taqwacore is Muslim punk rock, and what that means to you is basically that I was in a room packed full of angry young Muslims, and I was, well, the only person looking like this. Which could have been a recipe for disaster at best case and ethnic cleansing at worst, if things had gone that way. Lo and behold, though, it was a crazy, jubilant, good-natured and even sort of flamboyant affair. I was nervous and skeptical on the walk to the Bowery Poetry Club, where the concert was being held. A serious-looking muscular dude with three colors of dyed hair, eyeliner, a heavy beard and a skirt was standing there. He nodded at me as I approached.

"You here for the show?" he asked.

After a moment of hesitation -- did he mean that invitingly or threateningly? -- I threw up my arms and said, as innocently as I could, "Yeah!"

His face split open into a toothy, wild grin. He turned his palms heavenward. "'Mash Allah," he said.

Which, I knew from all the books the movement was based on, meant Boruch Hashem.

The concert was actually only half a concert: the taqwacore band The Kominas played, and preceding that, Michael Muhammad Knight read. He has a new book out, Journey to the End of Islam, and as he took the stage, people shouted requests. It's not that I've never heard requests shouted from the audience -- I have, even for writers -- but these weren't requests for pieces to perform. They were for radical performance art. Mike chuckled into the microphone and shook his head: "Nah, I can't. I didn't bring any thumbtacks this time."

He read a section in which he visits a sacred Muslim tomb, the burial site of a Muslim holy man. One way or another, he's arrested, and quirkily ends up in the office of the curator of the tomb as the man shows Knight movies on his phone of the equivalent (in Pakistani rupees) of millions of dollars being unloaded, the temple's profits from that year's pilgrimage. Knight waxes philosophical about that, and about the unrestrained passion of thousands of pilgrims crammed into a small room -- a scene that reminded me of nothing so much as visiting the tomb of Shimon Bar Yochai in Israel. Knight asks himself: does the sheer capitalist profit-making endeavor mean that the tomb isn't sacred? Does the sheer number of people visiting mean that it is sacred? He doesn't answer the question (although, sharing the experience, it does sound like he went through some sort of religious ecstasy there), but he does say this:

My mission is to make religion applicable to people, even if it's not everything you want it to be.

There was one more thing Knight said that stuck with me, even though I'm going to paraphrase it. When the guards were swarming him at the tomb, nightsticks in hand and ready to bash him in, he said: "If Allah doesn't want a guard to ram a stick up my @$$, it will be as safe as if it were made of iron. And if Allah wants a guard to ram a stick up my @$$, then no force on Earth will be able to stop it getting there."

I turned to Mike's and my editor and whispered: "That's exactly the essence of everything I believe."

I've been wanting to do a followup to the story I wrote about The Book of Jer3miah, the Mormon-LDS (fictional) web series, and the way it's been taken by the rest of the LDS church. Although, curiously, while the original Taqwacores book has become a movement, swearing by its on sets of rules, Jer3miah's validity has been criticized by the simple question: Does telling new stories inspired by the Bible invalidate the originals or lessen their power? And then they dig deeper and ask the question: is making up stories -- and twisting God's will to fit your own narrative arc -- even reverent?

This is what they came up with:

"Life isn’t reverent. If someone wants to tell a story for once that’s more like true life, it can’t always be reverent. We won’t LEARN anything. Think of Les Miserables, or The Grapes of Wrath. Also, remember that Jesus himself told parables to teach us through fiction."

I know, they dropped the J-bomb -- but replace that with Moses or Rebbe Nachman, and it totally makes sense. Just by living Jewishly/Islamically/religiously, we're changing the tradition we grew up with, whether we follow it or rebel against it or a combination. And we're putting our own interpretations on it. We just have to keep hoping -- or, at the very least, I want to keep hoping -- that I'm doing it the way God wants me to, until such time as God decides to speak up in words I can understand and reveal all the answers.

The rest of the night was fabulous, of course. I had to leave the Kominas set early so I could wake up with my kid -- and I even missed them playing "Suicide Bomb the Gap" -- but I'll be back. And next time, I'm spiking my payos.

Religious Life (the Fan Video Version)

This new video has been making the rounds. It's an Internet viral video, so I'm not going to psychoanalyze it too much; I'll just say that it's a short fake trailer that takes the underlying themes of chasteness, devotion to love (or the old-fashioned, traditional-American version of it), and religious celibacy and -- well -- blatant-ifies them.

I don't get all the jokes. I don't think I'm supposed to. It's one of those things that's less ha-ha funny and more that it resonates with a specific community -- in this case, Mormons. ("You got your mission when Howard W. Hunter was president," one of those jokes, took me 15 minutes on Google to figure out completely.)

But -- as those of us who are religious fundamentalists who hang out with fundamentalists from other religions are fond of saying -- the stigma is the same. "Twilight Years" is about Mormons who don't get swept up immediately in marriage. Any kind of not-100%-kitschy viral video about 30-plus-year-olds on the Upper West Side will have a different vocabulary of inside jokes, but, done smartly and sympathetically (and with just a bit of creepiness, just to keep things honest) would look a lot like "Twilight Years," I think.

And there are some things that just transcend cultural boundaries. Like this bit of dialogue:

"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"How long have you been eighteen?"
"Fifteen years. Are you afraid?"

This video also led me to another Mormon web video and web-storytelling series that I'm currently obsessed with, The Book of Jer3miah. The New York Times loved Jer3miah, although that didn't directly translate into hits for them -- their second episode is still languishing with a mere 3,000 hits, miniscule for a viral video. But it's geniusly composed, exquisitely plotted, and, on top of that, done by undergraduate students at Brigham Young. Who are taking classes in new media studies. Maybe I was wrong -- maybe all religious fundamentalists aren't the same. Yeshiva University and HUC, you'd do well to start up classes like this.