The Holiness Code

God spoke to Moses saying: "Speak to the entire assembly of the Children of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy." (Leviticus 19:1)

When giving us the Holiness Code, God makes a point of speaking to the entire community of Israel. To speak to a community, you must speak to each individual in that community. When an individual acts, she affects the community; when a community makes decisions, those decisions impact each person. But with the emphasis of the individual within community comes the necessity for the individual to maintain rights and responsibilities to her community, to God and to herself. The community can not aspire to holiness without individuals acting in consort, working together, and listening to each other. But the community can not be holy when it silences the voices of its individuals. No two individuals need to think the same way, to solve problems in the same way, to pursue the same activities; they do, however, need to hold the same aspirations, the same code.

This portion examines the rules that build community, and with kavanah, intention, create holiness. A society that keeps these commandments before it will be a blessing to the whole world. These guidelines create order in community so that one has room to create oneself. People will respect themselves and each other more. People will strive to repair the world and to act with loving kindness. God’s standard of holy living means that we obey the mitzvoth, not slavishly, but with intent, revealing our true commitment to humanity. It means we participate in "tikkun olam"—working in partnership with God to make the world a better place. Protecting the weak and disenfranchised can be achieved in obvious ways, by working for Habitat for Humanity or by teaching youth to think independently and make ethical choices for themselves. Or, it can be pursuing the activities that allow us to be the best that we can be – being a banker or a sailor or a homemaker – and thinking about what we are doing and how it positively or negatively impacts those around us. Living an ethical life and not judging others who are following their own path is a way to be holy. This is not an easy thing. We all stumble, we stumble across obstacles that we create, and we stumble over obstacles that some one else created with or without intending to. We make gashes on our souls, feeling guilt for things we have done and things we have left undone. Remembering that we are all holy because God is holy is the first step toward teshuva; towards actually creating that holy community.

We must aspire to be holy because God is holy. It’s a tall order, and can be an intimidating one. Holiness is something which we must pursue every day. Holiness is not up in heaven, but attainable through the efforts of humanity to partner with God in creation and in repairing the world. Holiness is not mystical meditation alone; it is a part of life. It is living in such a way that we reflect God’s character. Holiness begins with ethical behavior. But while any community can be ethical, holiness requires a belief in something transcendent, a striving towards God and each other, by individuals and the community which we form. We learn through practice how to grow to spiritual maturity. We learn compassion, respect, honor, and integrity. This is God’s definition of love: treating other people with the same care and concern that we would like to see them apply to us. And we must teach this behavior to our children, modeling the behavior we consider important so that children can develop into community. If parents model prayer, t’shuva, and tzedekah, children internalize these values and the community continues. Paying lip service to beliefs is not enough; we must practice what we preach.

On this day, as we reflect upon all the wrongs and all the rights of the past year, as we make amends for those wrongs, as we stand before an open ark, with our hearts open to the love of a God we all experience differently, as we contemplate how we are to avoid repeating these same wrongs again this year, we are asked to contemplate the holiness code. In many sections of the Torah, we are asked to look at holiness in a way foreign to most of us – as ritually pure or impure. Holiness is too frequently understood through separation, not through connection. But on this, one of the most holy of holy days, holiness is based on a positive commandment regarding how we treat each other. Holiness is not a state of being, it is the acts of integration in our lives, of integrating ethical behavior and community back into our lives.

The Torah teaches that we are a nation of priests and a holy people. We need to bear this in mind at all times, for the act of doing holy deeds is transcendent beyond the world in which we live, allowing us to rise to a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of intent, and a higher level of humanity. By imbuing the laws with holiness, they become more than simply the "right" or "wrong" thing to do. They become a means by which each of us can connect in a profound way with the spark of holiness which resides in every one of us, every man, every woman, and every child, no matter what their ethnicity, age, gender or orientation.

The benefits of following these holy laws don't stop there, though. If we are good to the poor, we touch their spark of divine. If we honor and respect our elders, our loved ones, and our children, we do the same. If we refrain from cheating a customer, from putting a stumbling block before the blind, from not knowingly giving bad advice, we help others see the divine within themselves. They, in turn, can then touch others, who can touch others and so on, until the sparks within combine and leap together into a flame of holiness which can ultimately burn away the inequities, inequalities, and ill-will of the world in which we live.

-- Karen Youel