https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L7L_-k_4LP4
So why don’t we follow these rules anymore? The rules about linen and wool, especially Christians don’t follow those rules. Now Christians still have purity rules, at least traditional Christians. Baptism, of course, being the prime one, but also the liturgy. In the liturgy the priest will wash his hands ritually. We have the washing of feet once a year, but we don’t have rules about mixing. Nor do we have rules about kosher foods and other rules like that. So how to make sense of that? I want to come back to the notion of wool and linen, because it’s one of the most complete examples of all this, and it will help us to understand why Christians don’t follow these rules. Besides the fringe, there’s another place in the Bible where joining linen and wool is not only permitted, but is actually mandated. The priests in the tabernacle. The tabernacle is the place where the priest would offer sacrifice and where the Ark of the Covenant was. So the priest wore a linen undergarment with a wool tunic. The way the priest wears his vestment possibly reproduces what is forbidden in the laws, but it also reproduces the tabernacle itself. In the tabernacle, a linen veil was used to separate the different places in the tabernacle. So the holy of holies from the holy place, and then the holy place from the outer court. But then the tent itself, the outer covering of the tent, was made out of animal skins, different types of animal skins. There was first a wool skin, then there was first a wool covering, and then a skin of ram’s hair, which was dyed red. And so you can see that it gets coarser and coarser as you get out. And then finally there was the skin of an animal, which we don’t know what it is. And until now, you know, scholars, Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, discuss to try to find out what this unknown animal is. And so it fits perfectly with this idea of the fringe as being this question mark, as being this thing that doesn’t fit, that is insure, that is indeterminate, let’s say. So in the temple, we see the law in action. So not only are the plant and the animal separated, but they are used as separators. They are used to mark different spaces and to contain different spaces. Christianity, in one of its important facets, is a constant discussion on how things can be both united and separate at the same time. For example, it is very important that Christ and the incarnation of God is not a mix between God and man. I mean, there were a century more than, you know, we could say at least a whole century of argument about how to formulate this, to formulate the fact that Christ is not a hybrid, not a mix between God and man. But the Church Fathers really insist that Christ is both fully God and fully man united without mixture. In the same way, God is a Trinity, both unity and multiplicity, fully found in God without confusion, without the confusion of persons. I mean, these seem, these might seem like contradictory meaningless statements at first reading, but they’re extremely important in the vision of Christianity, of how unity and multiplicity need, how they can coexist, and how, and therefore, how the highest non-duality of being can be expressed and the multiple and dual can be expressed as well within the grand vision of the infinite. And it’s really important in how Christianity can be universal and can join itself to all cultures, all the while preserving the possibility of this multiplicity in unity, not dissolving all peoples and identities into this uniform sludge. And so the symbolism of Christ will show how it is, since the Logos is the origin of the world, how it is that he transcends the problem of keeping things only separate from each other. Some of the symbolism of this is around Christ’s tunic, which in the Bible is described as being a tunic without seams. That means that that isn’t different pieces of material sewn together, but is rather one woven piece completely. So that’s really important, this idea of this unity. And they say that this tunic without seams was never torn apart. And some of the earlier Christian symbolism, we see this is used, for example, the cloth, there’s a cloth that is used to cover the host during communion, to cover the chalice in the Eucharistic ritual. And in some early traditions of Christianity, this was meant to represent both the the pall of Christ, and so the cloth which surrounded him as a body, the cloth that surrounds the dead body, but it was also at the same time his tunic without seams. And that that cloth was made specifically out of wool and linen together. Another way to show this transcendence is in the very old tradition of showing an ox and an ass in the place where Christ was born. And this is interpreted in the Church Fathers as being a joining of the Jew and the Gentiles, the joining of the inner people with the foreigners. And this obviously refers to those laws in the Bible we mentioned earlier, which forbids yoking an ox and an ass together.