May 7/05 — Shabbat Kedoshim

Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

“And God spoke to Moses, saying: “Speak to the entire congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, because I, the Lord Your God, am holy.’” (Leviticus 19:1-2)

At first blush, this statement seems to be entirely unfair. According to the commonly understood definition, God is perfect, God is holy, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Moreover, God presumably doesn’t have to exert Himself to excel at any of these characteristics. God Is the way He Is. As the prophet Isaiah tells us (43:11), “I, even I, am the Lord, and beside Me, there is no saviour.”

Now, given that human beings are far from perfect, far from holy, and far from being omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, how then is God’s holiness a justification for a human obligation to holiness? How can God get away with saying, in essence, “If I can do it, so can you?”

But this argument presumes that the apparent great gulf between God and humanity is real, and unbridgeable. Many times, this does seem to be the case. Individually and collectively, we human beings regularly fall into the abyss of hatred, sadness, and confusion—an abyss which is a breeding ground for the kinds of mistakes that separate us from God and from each other.

However, this week’s Parsha comes to tell us that in spite of the very human propensity to fall and fail, we have the ability to bridge that gap, and to rise up again and again. And God, from His side, never gives up on us. As often as we are willing to climb out of the abyss, and dust ourselves off, God is willing to take us back into His embrace.

Why should God be so kind to us? One could answer that it is God’s very nature to do so. God is in the “forgiveness business”! But I would go further and say that God has no choice but to take us back, time and again.

This is because at the deepest level, there is no difference between Divine Being, and human being. The statement, “You shall be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy,” hints at this. We should read it, not as “I, the Lord your God, am holy,” but “THE I, the Lord your God, is holy.” This “I” is something that God and human beings share in common. If we look deep within, we find that the truest level of ourselves is Divine Self, and holy. The creation story in Genesis teaches that we are all created in the image of God. The Divine Self is God’s indestructible image, living and breathing within each one of us.

Therefore, I read this beautiful passage this way: God is telling us, “You shall be holy, because it is your destiny to discover, through your actions and life experience, that there is no essential difference between your true I, and Me. Therefore, if I am holy, you have no other choice but to be holy, if you wish to honour the impulses of this deepest, most essential Divine Self that I have planted within you from the beginning of creation.”

Of course, we cannot use this reading to justify taking action on all the impulses that arise during the course of the day. This is why the Torah gets very specific about performing the precise kinds of actions—Mitzvot—commandments—that are designed to bring one into tune with the inner Divine Self. Halacha—Jewish Law—but literally, “The Way”—helps to train a person to discriminate between those impulses that lead into the abyss, and those that lead to holiness, and attunement with one’s essential Divine Self—the image of God that we all carry within.