Acharei Mot-Kedoshim: A Tale of Two Titles

I love the process of rabbinic interpretation! Let's face it; if there's something you, the Biblical commentator, want to say, you can 'magically' find a way to see it in the text. And one wonderfully sneaky

method the rabbis employ to do this is looking at just the titles of Torah portions. Never mind the context of where something is written, never mind the intention of the original author. For the purposes of what I would like to say here and now, the title hangs in limbo, ready for interpretation. So let's see where this rabbit hole takes us...

This week's parashah is a double-portion, so we are reading both the section known as Acharei Mot and the section called Kedoshim. Acharei Mot literally means 'After the death(s),' and for our purposes we are ignoring what the text is actually talking about. (If you want to read it for yourself, the English translation can be found here.) 

Kedoshim means 'holy,' as in: 'you shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.' (Sorry, that was too much context. I said we were going to ignore that. My bad.) I was reading a Torah commentary on the AJWS website, written a few years ago by Sam Berrin Shonkoff of Stanford University's Hillel. Shonkoff looked at these two titles, and noticed something fascinating when you read them in relationship to one another: 'After death, holiness.' He talked about how darkness can be followed by luminescence; how sometimes tragedy and joy come close together. Death and sadness do not have to be an ending, creating total finality, but rather they can be a beginning, a low point that leads to growth, rejuvenation, and happiness.

This past week, I led a Lunch n' Learn session on God in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (you know, a light and breezy little subject...). We talked about the philosopher Saadia Gaon, who lived in the early 10th Century in Babylonia, and wrote about free will and suffering. 

Saadia suggested that pain and suffering were actually to our benefit as human beings; because they are opportunities to make changes in our lives, to improve our relationship to God, and to lift ourselves up and celebrate life. In the moment of experiencing grief and tragedy, it's obviously hard (if not impossible) to see this, but I think that over time we come to discover that it is true. If everything were perfect all the time, we might lose our appreciation for it, and we could take life for granted. Acharei Mot-Kedoshim - After death, holiness. When we are brought low, that is when we can begin to rise up again, striving for holiness and peace.

We each have the power to reframe our lives. We can allow hardship and adversity to knock us to our knees and leave us decimated. But there is also another possibility: Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. Where is

the potential for holiness in such a moment? Are we able to see it? Do we know how to reach out and grab it, how to pull ourselves up and become the active agents of improvement and sacred change in our own lives? Sometimes the answers are hidden. Like when the titles of two, separate Torah portions seem so far apart, and so unrelated to one another. But when we bring them together - when we, ourselves, bring them together - it's amazing what new insights we can discover, and what new opportunities suddenly come into view.

Photos in this blog post:

1. CC image courtesy of garlandcannon on Flickr

2. CC image courtesy of vestman on Flickr

 

3. CC image courtesy of jpockele on Flickr

4. CC image courtesy of Wolfgang Staudt on Flickr