Aharei Mot - Kedoshim 5767

This week, we are grappling with another double parashah - Acharei Mot is wedded to Kedoshim this year. In fact, in the popular mind, the two are conjoined even when we don't read them together. People like to say the names of this week's parashah, together with the one which follows - Acharei Mot Kedoshim Emor - with the cynical wisdom that is born of experience: "After the death (of a person), say holy things". Indeed, it seems to be easier to envision holiness from the safe distance that death provides than it is to envision it in life.

If you ask a child, "what do you want to be?", that child might answer, "I want to be BIG", or "I want to be FAMOUS", or "I want to be a FIREMAN". An adult, posed the same question, might answer, "I want to be HAPPY", "I want to be SUCCESSFUL", "I want to be RESPECTED", "I want to buy a Mercedes-Benz". But, can you imagine anyone, at any age, with all their marbles, who would answer, "I want to be HOLY""?

And yet, what else should a person want? Parashat Kedoshim is the very heart of the Torah, the significant seventh parashah of the central chumash of the Torah. All the while Hashem has been directing His teaching primarily to the life and practice of the Kohanim, with special attention to ritual purity and impurity (taharah and tum'ah). Now, he turns to all the people, "Daber el kol adat bnei Yisrael", and says to them: "Kedoshim tiyhu ki kadosh ani Hashem e-loheichem" - Holy ones shall you be, for holy am I, the Eternal, your G-d". We are either commanded or exhorted/encouraged (see below) to be holy BECAUSE Hashem is holy. But what does that have to do with anything - "To whom shall you compare ME! ", says the prophet on Hashem's behalf. Nevertheless, one of the first teachings of the Torah is that we are created in Hashem's image, that is WHO WE ARE. Of what does that image consist? We're not told there, and there is much speculation - intellect, language, will, creativity, etc. But here, at the heart of the Torah, we are told what that image is - we are holy. Why shouldn't we WANT to be what we are?

Part of the trouble is that we don't really have a good grasp of what holiness is. We have a better grasp on what it is not - it is not raping, looting and pillaging. It is not lying, cheating, and deceiving. It isn't in doing the opposite of what our tradition tells us is the expressed will of Hashem. But, as the Ramban points out in his comment on this parashat, you can be a "naval bereshut hahalachah" - a wretch with halachic "permission", gorging your appetites in a glat kosher fashion, WERE IT NOT for the commandment of "Kedoshim tihyu".

The classic explanation of "kadosh" is brought by Rashi "parush". At the risk of invoking associations of other spiritual paths, I'll translate the word as "non-attached" instead of "separated". The two words mean the same thing, but one arrives at its meaning through negation, and this is a useful tool when we are trying to understand being G-dlike. We normally understand non-attachment as referring to material things, and proceed to work on our "taives" (cravings, with a yiddish inflection for sex, drugs and rockandroll, food, cars and professional advancement. But our more powerful attachments are to who we feel and see ourselves to be.

I WANT means I LACK. "He knew no want", "For want of bread", are a couple of examples of what might well be the real root of this word which lies at the very core of our identity.

TO BE means NO LACK. Hashem is absolute being, as the Rambam and others teach us, and we are contingent being. Absolute being = no lack.

When we say "I want" and we skip over the real meaning of "to be", moving on to some "accident of being", as the Rambam would put it, such at "tall", "strong", "a fireman", we do dishonor to BEING, Hashem's, and, He tells us, our own.

Being holy, then, is unplugging from the sense of lack which is our portion due to our createdness as finite beings, and allowing the fullness of being that Hashem tells us is His gift to us to well up from inside, giving us all the identity and self we'll every need.

The work of the life toward holiness is to WANT THAT. To feel the lack of not feeling the lack, and to strive toward it, converting thereby the energy of the yearning into the fullness itself.

We don't need to wait until after death to BE. The way to that is charted toward the end of the first parashat we read this week. There, Hashem characterizes His commandments in following way: which, if a person does them, he will LIVE in them: I am the Eternal". "V'chai bahem" is usually translated as "live by them, live through them, by their agency". But the Sages understood the statement in this fashion: "Live through them, and don't die through them -from here we learn the precept of Pikuach Nefesh" - that any mitzvah save three can be violated to save a life. But if these are divine commandments, and if they GIVE LIVE, then we should never face a situation whereby keeping a mitzvah endangers us". Ah, but that's not what the verse is saying - rather, as I postulated above - live IN them. Doing the mitzvot are no guarantee for long life. Rather, life, real life, is to be found in the space afforded us to tap into the illimitable life which is Hashem.

Live in the holy space Hashem in His wisdom and love grants us - in the doing of the divine will time and time again, in every context we are continually presented with, with a full and yearning heart, thereby becoming a vessel for the divine flow of life.

When it come to holiness, I may only be a "wannabe", but I "wannaBE"!