Do you know that feeling when you put on a beautiful dress, or a real expensive suit? You walk into the room and feel like everyone’s eyes are on you. You strut around with a certain sense of yeah!

 

When the party’s over, the dress comes off, the suit comes off, and you’re back to being the regular guy and gal. Those feelings of importance are gone and only live as wispy memory as a moment of self importance.

 

The reason for that is that while clothing can make us feel in certain ways, we know that it is not the true definition of who we are, deep inside.  

 

(BTW this is one of the reasons that in Jewish tradition all people are buried in shrouds. Rich or poor, learned or uneducated, popular or not, when we strip away the clothing, we are much the same at our core).

 

The foremost book of Chabad Philosophy is the book of Tanya. The author, the Alter Rebbe, teaches that we are the soul and each of us have clothing that we put on. The clothing is thought, speech and action.  

 

Our consciousness naturally gravitates towards defining who we are by our clothing. You might say we live in our heads. How we think about ourselves usually is about how we do, what we think and feel and how we come across to others.

 

But the truth is that we are not our clothing and we get to choose how we want to define ourselves; by our clothing or by our essence, our soul. (We are forced into the essential consciousness when we encounter moments of vulnerability. In those moments we know that our clothing doesn’t matter and all we are left with is the truth of who we really are).

 

When I think about myself, who am I, what’s my worth and contribution to society, I define myself by certain qualities and accomplishments.  That’s the “who I am”.  

 

But what if I wasn’t that? What if I shed the external definitions of who I am and asked myself “who am I if I’m not I” (the I that I’ve adopted as my identity)? What’s left then? 

 

In this week’s Torah portion we read of the garments of the Kohen. They are elaborate, fine, and expensive. On Yom Kippur the Kohen Gadol would change his clothing five times, depending on what type of service he was engaged in.

 

The Torah is teaching us that as long as we are in this world, we are required to live in our clothing. The clothing are the thoughts, speech and actions of Torah and Mitzvot. But at the same time, the wardrobe change reminds us that that we are not our clothing.  

 

There is an “I” that transcends all of the garments and this is my core connection to Hashem, my essence, my soul.

 

As you get to know your Neshama a little better, more connected, the rest of the world comes into focus in a radically different manner and one doesn’t ride the highs so high or the lows so low.