This week, I am away. I'm visiting family in Sweden, so I have invited my colleague, Rabbi Kelilah Miller, to come and guest-blog. Enjoy, and I'll see you all again next week.
First of all, I want to thank Rabbi Gerber for inviting me to guest-blog this week - I enjoy reading his “Take on Torah” weekly, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to be part of the conversation!
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Kedoshim, seems to be a bit “all over the place” at first glance. It is full of laws that don’t seem to have much to do with one another; ritual instructions are followed by labor laws, which are in turn listed alongside fiery condemnations of witchcraft and fortune-telling. Some of the laws still reflect our current sensibilities and ethical commitments, and others are more difficult to wrestle with from our perspective as 21st century Jews. It can be a tough text to access, partly because of the whiplash you can get as you move from verse to verse! One might fairly ask, “who organized this, and what on earth were they thinking?!”
I am continually amazed by how the Torah defies our expectations, bringing us up short and forcing us to notice things that might otherwise recede into the background. I think that this might be one reason why parashat Kedoshim stubbornly refuses to get organized. The very structure of the parashah reflects the messiness of real life. While we may prefer our commandments in neat “boxes”, the Torah insists that we are not allowed to see any part of life as separate or disconnected from any other.
It is particularly striking that the theme of this parashah is holiness - its name comes from the opening verse, in which God tells the people of Israel that they must be holy, since God is holy. We may be tempted to think of holiness as something that exists in an ethereal realm - far away from the mess and difficulty of everyday life. This parashah reminds us that if we want to find holiness, we have to go deep into the mess - the physicality of life, the details of what we eat and who we love, the ways we make a living, the blood and guts of sacrifice (literally and figuratively). It’s by staying in the struggle that we have a chance of finding holy connections, holy moments, holy insights.
It seems fitting that near the very center of this parashah, which is near the middle of the book of Leviticus, which is the middle book of the Torah, we have one of the most famous lines in the entire Torah: “You shall love your fellow as yourself (Leviticus 19:18)”. The Torah teaches us that this powerful kind of love is found in the middle of things - in the mess and in the struggle. It is only when we are immersed in the details of life that we are able to have empathy for the people around us, to understand that everyone is doing their best with tools that they have. When we are in touch with our own mess, we can love the mess that we encounter in others.
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