In many of these divrei, I’ve explored words that are difficult to translate, either because they’re ambiguous in the Hebrew or because I want to freight them with mystical meaning. Not so this week; שֵׁשׁ | sheish tidily means “linen”.

Even so, there’s something curious about its presence in this week’s parashah. G-d commands Mosheh to make the holy garments of the high priest, the garments that are to be worn when ministering in and around G-d’s holy desert tent, and in Shəmot 28:5, we learn that these garments are to be made of אֶת־הַזָּהָב וְאֶת־הַתְּכֵֽלֶת וְאֶת־הָאַרְגָּמָן וְאֶת־תּוֹלַֽעַת הַשָּׁנִי וְאֶת־הַשֵּׁשׁ | et hazahav və’et hatəkhéilet və’et ha’argaman və’et tolá’at hashani və’et hasheish | “gold and blue and purple and worm-crimson and linen”. The Torah doesn’t specify what fibers are supposed to be dyed blue and purple and red, but rabbinic tradition is firm that those fibers were to be wool. Which is to say that the high priest’s holy clothes would have been made from a mixture of wool and linen, a mixture that is elsewhere explicitly prohibited by G-d.

There’s a lot one could say about this. I’ve written elsewhere about the idea of G-d as an all-containing Unity; perhaps drawing close to G-d requires relaxing divisions that are present elsewhere, edging towards a state of being where any one thing is every other thing at once. One could bring in the mystical narrative of tzimtzum — the idea that to make room for creation, G-d first had to shrink the Divine Presence and withdraw from the world — and Biblical notions of Holiness as dangerous (see, eg, Nadav and Avihu) to suggest that the commanded separation between wool and linen is a fence, a barricade, a staking out of room for material things to exist. (The first primordial acts of Creation were acts of division, separating light from darkness, upper waters from lower; there is a sense in which division is somehow necessary for creation, a sense in which there cannot meaningfully be an I unless there is also a not-I that I am distinguishable from.) But the high priest, in interposing between G-d and the Israelites, has to let down this fence at least a little bit, to relinquish, partly, Earthly existence in order to be able to commune with the numinous.

This is all very rich ground, and someday I may come back to it, but for once, I want to set the mysticism aside and talk materiality.

In descriptions of the priest’s clothing, linen often gets short shrift. People have a lot to say about the metal threads, about the brilliant and fussy dyes, but the linen, when it’s mentioned at all, tends to be glossed as “plain” or “simple”. If you look up pictures of the holy outfit, you’ll find a lot of attention paid to spectacular, eye-catching patterns and big bold washes of intense hues; you won’t find a lot of attention paid to the undyed flax fibers that are also there.

Here is what it takes to turn linen from a plant into a thread.

After the flax has grown — and note that agriculture, especially pre-industrial agriculture, is famously hard labor, so this is already eliding out a frightful amount of work — it must be pulled out of the earth — pulled and not cut with a scythe because you want to get some of the root system too to maximize the length of the available fibers. You must then partially dry the stalks to prepare them for retting. Retting is the process of letting the flax stalks sit in stagnant water so the pith swells and bursts, making room for bacteria to eat away the pectin that binds the bast fibers (the fibers that will ultimately be spun into linen thread) to the other parts of the plant. If you have big pools of standing water (which you must monitor, because if you let the retting process go too far, the bast fibers themselves will begin to decay), this process may only take a few weeks; if you’re in a drier climate (and the wildernesses of the Torah are not known for being particularly wet), you may have to rely on morning dew for the moisture in this process, which will take considerably longer.

Once the retting has gone far enough, you must then break up the stalks completely so the fibers can be extracted. The extraction itself is done by scutching the bundles of flax — striking them repeatedly with a wooden knife to essentially scrape away the woodier parts of the plant. You must then hackle the flax, combing it with a bed of nails to separate out any short or broken fibers, leaving only the long and sturdy bast. A really skilled team might get fifteen or so pounds of usable fibers from fifty pounds of grown flax; with less-skilled teams, you should expect to lose more along the way.

You are now ready to begin to spin. There are fewer conceptual steps to spinning — you take the fibers and spin them into thread — but what steps there are take a great deal of time: Before the invention of the spinning wheel (approximately fifteen centuries after the date of this text), spinning ate up somewhere north of 80\% of the total production time of a garment, including the time necessary to process the flax stalks beforehand and to weave, cut, and sew the garment behindhand. All that retting and scutching and hackling is just a drop in the bucket next to the endless painstaking labor of twisting fiber against fiber from the distaff to the spindle.

And then, of course, you do need to weave and cut and sew those fibers into fabric and into garments.

This is, to put it mildly, an awful lot of work. And this is what is described as plain linen, as simple linen. This is the boring unremarkable stuff.

I am always thinking — worrying, even — about where stuff comes from. To get plain, undyed cloth with no particular embroidered ornamentation, you need all this vast apparatus of production, all these hours and hours of labor and years of learned skill. (There are few things as humbling as trying to spin thread even and fine enough to be woven into clothing using nothing more than a drop spindle and your own two hands.) I often read visions of idyllic, utopian futures where stuff just seems to pop magically into existence, as tho generated by a Star Trek replicator. No one has to harvest the fruit; no one has to lay sewage pipes; no one has to stitch together the pillowcases. But all of these things take work, and if you put that work out of mind, it’s all too easy to put the people who do that work out of mind as well. But without people doing that work, the work does not get done, and if the work does not get done, none of these things can exist.

We look at the high priest, and are dazzled by the finery. Shəmot’s lavish descriptions beguile us with their sensual details. A panoply of colors swirls up from the text — and then plain, simple linen caps the list off, reminding us how staggeringly much human effort goes into making even the most unadorned things.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the whole series here.]