Mar 31/07 — Parashat Tzav / Shabbat Hagadol

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

Everyone by now knows that for centuries educating Jewish schoolchildren didn’t begin with stories about Creation, Noah, or Abraham or Sarah from the Book Genesis, but rather with the Book of Leviticus, which is dense with rituals and sacrifices.

This focus makes a lot of Jews uncomfortable. But the rationale for beginning with Leviticus and not Genesis is on solid ground, because a Jewish child is going to have to give up a lot of things associated with living the way non-Jews live. There may be many things we gain by choosing to live a Jewish life, but some non-Jews (and even some Jews) like to make Jews acutely aware of how much one sacrifices by denying oneself a fast-food bacon cheeseburger in order to be a practicing Jew.

These losses, however, pale in the light of what we gain. I am proud of my heritage which aspires to shape children by emphasizing that life is build on duty and responsibility, rather than on “doing your own thing” or “me first.” To be a Jew is to defy chance and resist giving in to current habits and instead to cultivate a deeper perspective on life: our task is to raise human beings with a clear and well-defined set of values emphasizing respect for others and for life itself.

At the heart of the Book of Leviticus is a sequence that scholars call the “Holiness Code.” In it you will find teachings like “mipne seyvah takum...” – “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old” (Lev. 19:32), “lo telech rachil be-amecha” – “You shall not deal falsely with your fellow Jew (Lev. 19:16), and, overriding everything else, a passage that includes the famous teaching “Ve-ahavta le-re-acha kamocha” – “You shall not hate your fellow Jews in your heart; criticize your kinsman – but do not become complicit in wrong because of him; you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge … but love your neighbour as yourself…” (Lev. 19:17-18).

We should be proud of a heritage that was the first to emphasize the importance of right behaviour, which is symbolized in this week’s portion: “Eish tamid tu-kad ahl ha-mizbeach – lo tichbeh!” – “A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar – not to go out!” (Lev. 6:6). You don’t set aside ethics, values, and rituals casually – they have to be kindled continually, or else you put out a light of civilization that has been burning for thousands of years.

A few years ago, a Jewish schoolteacher in the United States named Kathleen Weinstein was abducted and killed by a teenager who wanted to steal her car. The newspaper stories about Ms. Weinstein emphasized that she was a caring, gifted teacher. Reporters invariably described her classroom campaign to teach her pupils to “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.” While Ms. Weinstein did not invent the term (it originated in an essay in a decades-old publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue), her innovation was that she designed a program for her 5th- and 6th-grade students. She asked her classes to smile from time to time at someone they didn’t know, to offer to help to people overloaded with grocery bags, and so on. She wanted to define a practical ethics for pre-teens who had never been taught by their parents to be kind to others.

Ms. Weinstein undertook a campaign to increase the decency and thoughtfulness in the world, and apparently she was a great teacher with great ideals. Even her murderer said that she spoke to him gently, and offered him guidance and help in starting fresh in life – but he killed her anyway.

But after reflecting on Ms. Weinstein’s program, I had to confess that a campaign to further “random acts of kindness” is completely un-Jewish. In Judaism, you cannot connect “kindness” to “random acts” – because random has “no specific objective” according to its dictionary definition, and in Judaism kindness is the sole purpose of every single mitzvah (“lo nitnu hamitzvot elah le-tzaref bahem et ha-briyot” – “the commandments were not given for any purpose except to refine human beings”).

While random is “haphazard,” kindness is the great, deliberate principle of Judaism. “Zeh klal gadol ba-Torah” – “This is the great rule of Torah,” Rabbi Akiba taught. In fact, in Pirkei Avot, we are told that the world’s existence depends on Torah, worship, and deliberate acts of kindness. Where kindness is random rather than the central goal of life – we can expect life to be far more brutish, insensitive, and cruel. Any relief from that is accidental and unpredictable.

Jewish kindness is a constant discipline; you can’t leave kindness to chance. When you sit at the Seder this Passover, think about it as the beginning of more than 3,000 years of spiritual resistance against randomness. Unlike the lyric in the musical South Pacific that claimed, “You have to be carefully taught to hate,” Judaism gives us a counter-lesson: “You have to be carefully taught to love and respect.” And each Passover seder, emphasizing the centrality of children and their eternal questioning of all things, teaches us that we must carefully and thoughtfully respond in order to help shape the kind of people that the world truly needs.

A kosher and joyful Passover to you all!