KEDOSHIM 5784
Kedoshim, holy, is a short parsha that is often combined with the previous parsha, Acharei Mot. It consists of only Chapters 19 and 20. It offers us a broad mix of mostly negative laws (don’t do this) with punishments. The most frequent punishments here being death or being cut off from the people. There’s a concern for equitable weights being used, for keeping the sabbath and behaving respectfully towards your parents. There’s a broad range of proscribed sexual misconduct, including adultery and a repetition of the proscriptions against male homosexuality, sex with menstruating women and sex with animals. There are prohibitions against practicing divination or being friendly with ghosts.
This is also the parsha that contains the law to leave the corners of the fields for the poor, to not oppress the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt and to not place a stumbling block in front of a blind person, one of my favorite aphorisms. The parsha also prohibits child sacrifice and says you have to pay day workers on the day that they work. A true smorgasboard.
I want to discuss the following four themes.
What makes something holy
The cultivation of humility as present in the recognition that we were aliens in Egypt and in leaving the corners of the field unharvested.
The prohibition against mixing species.
Being cut off from the people.
“And YHVH spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them: “You shall be holy because I, YHVH, your God, am holy.” (19:1-2) “And you shall make yourselves holy, and you shall be holy, because I am YHVH, your god. And you shall observe my laws and do them. I am YHVH, who makes you holy.” (20:7-8). This seems pretty unambiguous to me. We are holy as people because our God is holy and we are his people. That is, as long as we observe his laws. This is a theme that is repeated throughout Hebrew scripture.
It seems to me that what we have outlined in this chapter only works in the context of a tribal religion that practices monolatry, the worship of one God, with the assumption that there are multiple Gods. Monolatry is different than monotheism which is the belief that there is only one God. Rabbinic Judaism is monotheistic, but our text here is monolatrous.
If you are monolatrous, where does this approach leave other Gods and other people? Are other Gods holy? That’s not exactly a traditional Jewish view. But if other Gods are not holy, does that mean that other people can’t be holy? That’s not a position I want to defend. Rabbinic Judaism, which is monotheistic, addresses the different requirements for Jews and non Jews by talking about a Noahide code of ethical obligations that are incumbent upon everyone and that is the totality of what non Jews have to follow in order to be holy. But this is at best awkward. For non Jews, what does the prohibition of worshipping idols mean? If you worship Christ on a cross, is that an idol and so you can’t be holy? What about Buddhist Stupas? Why is a law against eating the flesh torn from a living animal one of the seven most important things a non Jew can do or not do? Here’s a reference for Noahide laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
The parsha begs the question of how to be holy. Is someone holy who follows all the laws, but is cruel to other people and beings? Is a Jew who acts for the betterment of the world but eats pork not holy? Can someone who acts well in the human world but despoils the more than human world be called holy?
Further, there’s a question of individual holiness and communal holiness. The demand in this parsha is for communal holiness. One of the ways Judaism is counter cultural to our mainstream culture is that we of the west are the inheritors of Protestant individualism which focuses on the person more than the community. Can an individual be holy if her/his community isn’t? What does communal holiness look like?
How do you think about what constitutes holiness? How do you think about the question of individual and communal holiness?
“When you reap the land’s harvest you shall not finish harvesting your field’s corner, and you shall not gather your harvest’s gleaning [the grain that falls to the ground during the harvest]. And you shall not strip your vineyard, and you shall not collect the vineyard’s fallen fruit. You shall leave them for the poor and for the alien.” (19:9-10). “And if an alien will reside with you in your land, you shall not persecute him. The alien who resides with you shall be to you like a citizen of yours, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (19:33-34)
There’s an ethic of humility in these four verses that is sorely missing in our society. On one hand, these first verses can be read as a way to take care of the poor that every society has. Don’t try to get every last dime of profit out of your customers or your workers but have a system that at least meets minimum needs for everyone. Why? Not just because it is good public policy (which it is), but because we were aliens in the land of Egypt, because we were brown skinned people struggling to survive with harsh taskmasters. The world would be a different place if we could truly incorporate “there but for the grace of God go I” into our actions. That’s a key lesson of this parsha and of Passover. Avadim Hayinu l’Paroah. We were slaves to Pharoah, so don’t be a Pharoah just because you can. Don’t farm fencerow to fencerow as modern farmers with enormous tractors do, just because you can (or at least think you can in the short term). Leave a little for everyone else dependent upon the harvest because we were all once slaves, even if today we are masters or free people.
We should, I believe, extend this humility to our relationship with the more than human world. We routinely act in disregard for the unintended consequences of our actions, but there are always, always, consequences.
I live in suburbia where we all have lawns and many of us in the subdivision have a little bit of woods in our backyards. We also have a no shooting law in the township (with which I agree). Guess what? We have a ton of deer because what a deer loves more than anything is woods to hide in coupled with open fields. And yesterday my neighbor came over to say we have a coyote who has come into the neighborhood and actually caught one of the deer and killed it—and is also a threat to all the domestic cats and dogs so many of us have. Where there is prey, eventually, there will be predator animals. Humility would look like recognizing that there will be unintended consequences, and instead of saying the coyote is bad or that the deer are bad, recognize that their presence is because of our human actions.
Farming fencerow to fencerow, which has long been the official policy of the US government through grain subsidies or price guarantees, and is contra to the instructions of our parsha, is bad for the ecosystem as a whole. We fail to value the beings that exist on the edges, whether those are trees that protect our riparian system by absorbing fertilizer run off before it gets into our streams, or the birds that eat insect pests, or the jewelweed that is an antidote to poison ivy etc etc. Our modern farming leaves as little as possible for the rest of creation. It is a kind of farming that ignores, deliberately ignores, the claims of the more than human world, that denies the possibility of the other.
Leaving corners of field unharvested is both a metaphor and a literal teaching. As a metaphor, leaving the corners of the field unharvested is at a minimum a message to not take everything you can.
How do you cultivate humility Where are you harvesting the corners of your fields? How do you remember that you were once a slave to Pharoah?
“Your animal: you shall not mate two kinds. Your field: you shall not seed two kinds. And a garment of two kinds, sha’atnez: it shall not go on you.” (19:19). This is the famous prohibition of wearing linen and wool together. It’s often used as an example of a law which makes no logical sense but which we should follow because it is a law from the divine. Thus the Rabbinical students who were my teachers when I was a teenager wouldn’t wear linen and wool together but couldn’t tell you if their clothes were made out of cotton, polyester or something else, had never seen a cotton plant, and couldn’t tell you a thing about how polyester is produced.
But I think there is a logic that my teachers didn’t understand and Jewish tradition generally simply has forgotten. I think the fundamental orientation that this law seeks to capture is that there is a sacred order in the universe and you shouldn’t mess with it by putting two things together that don’t belong together. This, in my reading, is very akin to the laws surrounding which animals may be eaten—split hooves and chewing one’s cud belong together and having only one or the other is just wrong. This is Mary Douglas’s interpretation of why certain animals are kosher and certain animals are not.
I say that Jewish tradition has forgotten what this law is about because Jewish law does not ban things like like Round Up ready soybeans, corn and wheat. Round up ready plants come from genetically modified seeds that tolerate the herbicide in Roundup. Sticking a non wheat gene into wheat should be a violation of the law of mating two kinds. They should be banned because the genetic modification of the seeds means that we have mixed things that don’t belong together. We need some more humility, referring back to the gleaning laws; just because we can make frankenfoods doesn’t mean we should.
What belongs together in your life that isn’t present? I felt this way in my thirties when I was single: I was supposed to have a mate and I didn’t. What is together in your life that should be separated? Where is the sacred order of the universe being violated?
The punishment of being cut off from the people is a common punishment in Leviticus. We have 6 instances of it in this parsha. (19:8, 20:3,5,6,17,18) Note that we have more crimes that are punished by death (including adultery, an unenforced punishment) or have no punishment mentioned. Be that as it may, within the context of modernity, we might have an intellectual appreciation of how serious a punishment being put into exile was for our ancestors, but I think most of us lack a kind of deep visceral connection to how consequential this punishment was. Exile could very well literally mean death because survival was a communal process of shared work.
That kind of connection to community is completely opaque to us, since we often don’t know most of the people at the grocery story, the people who made our clothes, (almost always in some foreign country), the people who built our houses, the people who assembled our cars and keep them running. But our ancestors relied upon their communal relations for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation. But we are living the consequences of the breakdown of communal structures; this is a core explanation for the alienation, xeneophobia and toxic nationalism that are global phenomena today.
If you are like me, you think about alienation from your tribe in cultural or psychological terms. I became an earth based Jew in my adolescence in the 1970’s, but earth based Judaism in the United States only existed in a Zionist context back then. Once I walked away from the idea of making Aliyah to a kibbutz, I had no way to express my earth based Judaism communally. To live rurally in the United States means to live with very few Jews around—another kind of alienation.
We are also obviously alienated from the more than human world. Most of us don’t know even the most obvious things about the beings that surround us. What watershed do you live in? What kind of woods were native to your location back when humans lived in harmony with the environment? What are the most prominent bird species and what ecological niches do they fill? What are the most prominent four legged species and what ecological niches do they fill?
There’s a common thought which I share, that our core alienation is our alienation from the land.
Who do you want your community to be? How are you alienated, cut off, from that community? How do you repair all that alienation?
QUESTIONS
How do you think about what constitutes holiness? How do you think about the question of individual and communal holiness?
How do you cultivate humility Where are you harvesting the corners of your fields? How do you remember that you were once a slave to Pharoah?
What belongs together in your life that isn’t present? What is together in your life that should be separated? Where is the sacred order of the universe being violated?
Who do you want your community to be? How are you alienated, cut off, from that community? How do you repair all that alienation?
GLEANING