“OF ROYALTY AND BAD BEHAVIOR: THE LAW OF BLUE TASSELS”
37 Then the LORD said to Moses,
38 “Give the following instructions to the people of Israel: Throughout the generations to come you must make tassels for the hems of your clothing and attach them with a blue cord.
39 When you see the tassels, you will remember and obey all the commands of the LORD instead of following your own desires and defiling yourselves, as you are prone to do.
40 The tassels will help you remember that you must obey all my commands and be holy to your God.
41 I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt that I might be your God. I am the LORD your God!”” (Numbers 15: 37-41, New Living Translation)
This is one of those boring passages in the Old Testament that is tempting to skip. I decided that I would dig a bit deeper. I’m glad that I didn’t skip, but dug deeper. The brief dig was more than worth it. Two sentences from an Old Testament scholar shed a great deal of light on this. Pekka Pitkänen writes,
“As Milgrom suggests, the purple colour in the tassels is likely to tie in with the Israelites being a kingdom of priests (Milgrom 1990: 414; Ex 19:6). This said, the law at the same time ties in with the fact that human nature can be susceptible to bad behaviour (v. 39).”[1]
So, the tassels remind Israelites (and us) of two things: We are royalty, and we are, at times, behaving royally badly. Those are two things that we all need to remember.
Twelve-steppers confess two things at meetings: We are recovering and we are addicts (or, as one of my friends likes to say, “We have an addiction”).
Being recovering addicts makes us royalty. But we are still “susceptible to bad behaviour.” Indeed, as an addict, I am prone to very bad behavior!
I believe that these are two very important things for all humans to remember. If we don’t affirm our royalty, we are ignoring our own worth. If we only affirm our royalty, we ignore our innate tendency to do the wrong, destructive thing to ourselves and others—our tendency to screw up royally.
But what do we do to remind ourselves of these two seemingly contradictory facts? What are our blue tassels?
I can’t speak for you, but my 12-step meetings, readings, and phone calls are my blue tassels. The program and my friends in it remind me of what a good person I am, how blessed I am, how I reflect the glory of God in some dim but important ways.
But they also know all my stuff. They have heard my unvarnished, unedited, x-rated story. They know only too well that I am “still susceptible to bad behaviour.”
I would encourage everyone to find and wear some blue tassels. Put them on every day. Look at them often.
[1] Pekka Pitkänen, A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual and Colonialism, Routledge Studies in the Biblical World (London: Routledge, 2018), 125.
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