Dvar Torah on Parshat Kedoshim

Parshat Kedoshim is one of the most beautiful and significant portions of the Torah. It contains the commandments to love your neighbor as yourself, to not lie and cheat, and to help and be sensitive to others, especially the disadvantaged, in a multitude of ways.

The opening phrase, “you shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy”, could be read as a general introduction to all of the very rich content in the parsha: keep this wide range of laws and that will make you holy, God-like. However, many of the commentaries see this commandment to be holy as more than a general introduction to the parsha’s laws. They understand it as a separate, specific request to be holy in a certain way. Rashi sees it as an emphasis on refraining from forbidden sexual activity, whereas the Ramban sees it in a more general way, with this specific twist: you are about to get a long list of great laws, in addition to the ones you have already received. However, you need to understand that keeping these laws does not, unfortunately, really guarantee anything. The Ramban explains that one can keep kosher, but still eat like a pig. Not technically engage in forbidden sexual relationships, but still be vulgar, selfish, and crass in one’s sexual and interpersonal behavior. It is because keeping strictly to the letter of the law does not guarantee good behavior – a very radical idea, when you think about it, for a religion with an awful lot of laws -  that we need this prefatory “you shall be holy”; to tell us that there is a whole other layer of sensitivity and mindfulness we need to bring to the way we live our lives, beyond simply not breaking any of the Torah’s specific laws, if we really hope to be good, and holy.

A bit later in the parsha, we get a great example of this. We are told to rebuke our fellows; if someone is doing something wrong, we should tell him or her, and not just ignore it, or keep our distaste to ourselves and hate them silently. We should tell them how we feel about what they are doing, whether it concerns the way they are behaving towards us, towards other people, or towards God and His Torah, by breaking religious law.

The Talmud, seeing this, shares with us a profound insight, in line with the Ramban’s understanding of “you shall be holy.” Before rebuking your fellow, before telling someone off for their bad behavior, one must think long and hard about how to do that. One must be sure that this rebuke will not lead to further bad feeling or inappropriate behavior. One needs to be sure it will work. And if you think it may not, the Rabbis tell us, you should not do it, not tell off your friend, and just leave it alone.

In other words, while the Torah does demand of us to take responsibility for our friends’ behavior, and admonish them if they are doing something wrong or hurtful, it leaves it up to us to decide how to do this and, more radically, tells us to ignore this commandment completely, and keep silent, if and when we determine that the situation will only be made worse if we keep the Mitzvah and tell off our friend or neighbor.

This notion, that the commandments of the Torah, at face value, are not sufficient as a guide to proper behavior, leaves us with a question. If the halacha is not enough, if the laws do not, on their own, educate us to behave properly in every situation, what does? What material, what wisdom, not contained in the halacha, teaches us how to make the right decisions about how to behave in certain situations.

I would argue that the Torah itself, with its non-halachic material – the many stories we have about the characters of the Bible – is a start. Reading about the various activities of God, and of the families of the patriarchs and matriarchs, starting with the creation story and Adam and Eve, including their many dysfunctional aspects, is certainly a way to tap into some very profound ideas about the human condition.

However, just as the Ramban has taught us that Jewish law is not a sufficient guide to how to behave in every possible interaction, so, too, the insights into the human condition which the Torah also gives us do not exhaust the thinking we need to do about how one can be a good person, how one should live one’s life. Our world is not the world of Abraham and Sarah, and the stories in the Torah do not, can not, cover every human interaction. The project of thinking about how to live a good life is an ongoing one, and we are bound, I think, by the commandment to be Holy, as God is - always remembering that God is infinite and all-knowing - to acquire for ourselves as rich a collection of sources which give us insight into the human condition as we can. We need to enlist the best minds of the ages, of the past and the present, the thinking that mankind has done about what it means to be a good person, if we hope to live up to the Torah’s demand to be holy. We need to try our hardest, along with the rest of humanity, to figure out on our own – remembering that simple adherence to the laws of the Torah is not enough - how to be good, and holy, people.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix