Purple is in fashion. Queen E wears it, and so do I.

Why do I wear purple?

Hope. The Queen looks great when she wears it. Maybe I will too.

Economics. The purple palette has so many shades, I can quickly build a wardrobe of matching outfits.

Eco-consciousness. Some insects, amphibians, fish and birds are bright purple. Mammals — with the exception of the drill’s delicate body parts — are not. Working creatures of many species quietly support my mammalian life. When I dress in purple, I salute these bright species.

Wisdom. Desire for it, that is. The biblical book Mishlei (Proverbs) is a hymn to wisdom. Chapter 8 explains mythologically that Ms. Wisdom is God’s nanny, consort, and guide. Chapter 31 describes more pragmatically a modern woman who lives everyday wisdom. When she gets dressed in the morning, she wears “linen and woven purple.” Purple is the colour of wisdom; when I wear it, I express at least one quality of a wise woman!

Complexity: The Torah’s word for purple is argaman. Literally, argaman – purple — means “woven.” Torah usually mentions argaman in the same sentence as two other colors: “sky-blue, purple, and a crimson thread.” Perhaps argaman was actually a weave of blue and red that looked purple at a distance. Purple reminds me that everything can be seen from multiple perspectives.

Eternity. Sky-blue is known in Hebrew as techelet. About techelet, R. Meir used to say: “Why is techelet different from all the other dyes? Techelet is like the sea. The sea is like the sky. The sky is like the Throne of Glory.”

Rabbi Meir means: Techelet dye is made from a small marine animal. This animal’s home, the sea, takes on the color of each day’s sky.  The sky inspires ecstatic visions of God’s home. When seventy Israelite elders ascend Mount Sinai, they see “under God’s feet, something like a work in sapphire stones, like the pure essence of sky.” The prophet Ezekiel sees something “like sapphire stone in the shape of a chair, and on it, a human-looking image.”

Techelet — half the weave of argaman — is the color of sea and sky. Sea and sky — the vast, reliable envelope of our changing earth — are raw material for images of God’s splendid eternal palace.

Mortality. Tola’at shani, a crimson thread, looks like a bright, healthy earthworm, the kind that quietly maintains the earth. Sometimes the earth beneath our feet is shaken by death or sudden illness, as if the reliable earthworm has secretly failed. When this happens, Torah teaches, take some time off, and then reset your inner system with a ritual burning of a tola’at shani.

Crimson thread reminds us that life and health are temporary, but so are setbacks. We can heal and move through life’s changes.

Fabric of life. Eternity and mortality; the small and the vast; the expansive and the painfully narrow — stark contrasts woven into a single garment: the fabric of our lives. That’s argaman, and that’s purple.

Or Shalom. Purple is not the official color of Or Shalom. But argaman describes our style. As our mission statement says, “we are a Jewish spiritual community,” both crimson and sky-blue. We are very earthy; we like to have simple fun, playing with art, music and our garden’s dirt. We support each other through temporary setbacks. At the same time, we use our earthiness to reach towards heaven. Events in our lives point us to seek God within and God transcendent. No matter what image of God we discover, we use what we find to become better people. We know that we are mixed beings. We don’t expect perfection. We ask only to be real and moving forwards.

I’m so glad that Charles and I fell in love with Or Shalom in March 2004, and that we’re all walking the purple path together.

***

Text prepared for Or Shalom’s Hagigat HaRav ceremony, June 3, 2012.

Quotations: Rabbi Meir: Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 43b. Vision of the seventy elders: Exodus 24:10. Ezekiel’s vision: Ezekiel 1:26.

Images: Queen Elizabeth, nytimes.com; Purple Sea Star, lhsvirtualzoo.wikispaces.com; Reb Laura at interfaith panel, by Rizwan Peerzada; Blue-red silk taffeta, renaissancefabrics.net; Lake Okanagan at Naramata seen from my car, by Laura Duhan Kaplan; Crimson threads, beadshop.com; Hillary K. modeling a talit, by Laura Duhan Kaplan; flowers at Or Shalom’s Hagigat HaRav, by Laura Duhan Kaplan.