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God, Hamas, Holiness Code, Judaism, Leviticus, love your neighbor, Torah
The Holiness Code is my favorite part of the Torah, and not just because it was my bat mitzvah Torah portion. Chapter 19 of Leviticus is packed with some of the greatest one-liners the Torah has to offer. It is so important that I often take new Torah learners there first.
Without hesitation, it tells us why be holy, and then how to be holy.
Why? “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2)
But wait — that doesn’t exactly make sense. God is holy because God is God. There’s no correlation between God’s Godness and us humans. Unless the Torah is telling us that we can behave like God.
We are offered the radical proposition that we can be like God when we do God-like things. Which makes sense in light of the assertion in Genesis that we are made in God’s image.
How can we do this? Not by doing things that God specifically does. Certainly not by building temples or praying. No, the Holiness Code says that we become holy by participating in the human community, and by treating each other justly.
This is mind boggling. As soon as the Torah tells us to be holy it dives into commandments about how we should behave towards each other.
You’d be forgiven for thinking, “This is religion? I thought religion was about faith and prayer, and then about helping the poor.”
Not Judaism. Judaism wants us to understand that holiness lies in the way we treat all of our fellow humans, and how we care for the planet on which we reside. It is our actions that define and elevate us, not our beliefs.
There are many beautiful and meaningful commandments in this chapter, which I love to teach about and discuss with people. But there is one that is perhaps the most difficult in the entire Torah:
וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵֽעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ
V’ahavta larayacha camocha, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
How is this possible? And who exactly is my neighbor? Do I have to include the people down the street who deal drugs from their home? The homeless man who lives in the woods nearby and uses the street as his bathroom at night? The Hamas terrorists who attacked neighboring Israel and murdered wantonly?
The injunction to love is relatively easy when your neighbor is likable, although still a stretch. It feels impossible when the neighbor is unloveable.
But that is exactly what the Torah asks of us. Without regard to the neighbor’s merit as a member of a functioning society. Without judgement (that’s God’s job) and without prejudice.
This is so difficult that I think it may be the definition of the messianic age, a time when we can love each other without reservation.
In that case, may it come soon. We need it. And if I am wrong and it’s up to us and not a messiah, we need to get to work opening our hearts as wide as they will go, and then a little wider still.
SRQ Jew 