‘Turn it and turn it, for all is in it, and look in it and grow grey and old in it, and turn not away from it, for there is no better rule for you than it’, the sage Ben Bag Bag advises in Pirkei Avot, that ancient collection of wisdom from rabbis such as Hillel, who is said to have been a teacher of Ben Bag Bag.
Ben Bag Bag is talking, of course, about the Torah, advising his listeners to study it continually. His words seem to describe our practice of reading the Torah over and over again each year in a never-ending cycle (although his saying, recorded in Pirkei Avot 5:26, may predate the Jewish practice of reading the whole Torah annually).
His words seem apt as we come to the halfway point in our yearly cycle, the portion in the centre of the Torah called Kedoshim. It contains what has come to be called the Holiness Code – what ‘The Torah: A Women’s Commentary’ refers to as ‘A Compendium of Paths to Holiness’.
It opens with that remarkable assertion, ‘Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy’. (Lev. 19:2)
This is a statement which, if taken seriously, should boggle the mind. Judaism teaches relentlessly, insistently, unequivocally, unquestionably, that God is beyond human comprehension. Nothing we can positively affirm about God describes God; at best, we can perhaps make negative statements about what God is not, such as God is without limit or end. And yet here, in the heart of the Torah, God is telling us that we, the whole people of Israel, are to be like God in one of the most ineffable ways imaginable: We are to be holy.
Conveniently, God immediately gives us a list of instructions for how to be holy, some of which will be roughly familiar from the Ten Commandments: Revere your mother and father; keep God’s Sabbaths; do not turn to idols or make molten gods for yourself.
And later: Do not steal. Do not swear falsely.
Some of the instructions in Kedoshim emphasize the importance of keeping things separate: Do not sow your field with two different kinds of seed; do not wear cloth from a mixture of different materials. (This is where the prohibition on garments of mixed linen and wool, shatnez, comes from.)
Separateness is a pervasive theme in Judaism – the separation between holy and everyday, or between light and darkness. Some of our greatest rabbis, including Rashi and Rambam, interpret the words ‘You shall be holy’ as ‘You shall be separate,’ and indeed the traditional havdalah blessing at the end of Shabbat declares God blessed for separating the people of Israel from the other nations of the earth.
But there is far more in the Holiness Code about connection than there is about separation, about proper – holy – relations between people.
Some might seem mundane: The wages of a labourer shall not remain with you until morning.
You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind. (Lev. 19:13-14)
But these demands of us are in no way mundane. They are about the proper treatment of workers and people with disabilities, concerns which you might call prescient; or which you might say are the obvious result of our turning Torah and turning it, for everything is in it.
What else is in our Torah portion this week?
Perhaps most important of all, parashat Kedoshim contains two of the Torah’s three commandments to love:
Love your fellow [Israelite] as yourself (Lev. 19:18), and
The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I the Eternal am your God. (Lev. 19: 34)
Taken as a pair, these two instructions command us to love – to love – everyone we might reasonably come into direct contact with most of the time, our fellow Israelites, or Jews in today’s parlance; and the stranger among us, or non-Jews.
No wonder Shai Held called his most recent book ‘Judaism is About Love’.
No wonder that Tamara Cohn Eskenazi rejects Rashi and Rambam’s definition of holiness as being about separateness, teaching, ‘In parashat Kedoshim, holiness comes from cultivating relationships’.
This ancient message has never been more important than it is now.
Whether your concern is about teenagers – and, let’s be honest, their parents and probably their grandparents – spending too much time looking at screens rather than looking at each other, or about how many so-called leaders whip up fear of the Other, whomever they find most convenient to label the Other, we need to cultivate and cherish direct human relationships before we forget how.
I’m not naïve. I don’t claim this is an easy time for us as Jews to reach out to the strangers among whom we live, much less love them. Events targeting Jewish institutions in London in the past month have put many of us on edge, as indeed they were designed to do.
But ignoring the commandment to love the stranger leads to a vicious circle.
As the great American satirist Tom Lehrer, z”l, once said: ‘I know there are people who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!’
The opening words of Kedoshim don’t give us that choice, the choice not to love our fellow human beings. There has been endless commentary on the opening words, ‘Speak to the whole Israelite community’, being a more expansive address than the usual ‘Speak to the Children of Israel’, as if God is underlining that the Holiness Code is not only for the priests or the heads of tribes, it is for all of us.
It is on each one of us who hears these words to be holy, regardless of circumstance or what those around us do.
The playwright David Mamet teaches the lesson pointedly in a book of Torah commentary he co-wrote with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, ‘The self-content Jew might say, “I know I might be holy, but the Levys, the Horowitzes?” Reference to [Kedoshim] might yield the answer, “Yes, indeed, and perhaps you could look to yourself”’.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.