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Kedoshim contains the two great love commands of the Torah.
The first is, “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). Rabbi Akiva called this “the great principle of the Torah.”
The second is no less challenging: “The stranger living among you must be treated as your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:34).
These are extraordinary commands.
Many civilizations contain variants of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” or in the negative form attributed to Hillel (sometimes called the Silver Rule), “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; go and learn.”( Shabbat 31a).
But these are rules of reciprocity, not love. We observe them because bad things will happen to us if we don’t. They are the basic ground-rules of life in a group.
Love is something altogether different and more demanding.
That makes these two commandments a revolution in the moral life...
Nowhere else in all Tanach are we commanded to love our neighbor...
And why does the command to love your neighbor as yourself appear in this chapter containing such laws as, “Do not mate different kinds of animals. Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material”?
These are chukim, decrees, usually thought of as commands that have no reason, at any rate none that we can understand.
What have they to do with the self-evidently moral commands of the love of neighbor and stranger? Is the chapter simply an assemblage of disconnected commands, or is there a single unifying strand to it?
Judaism…contains not one perspective but three.
There is the prophetic understanding of morality, the priestly perspective and the wisdom point of view.
Prophetic morality looks at the quality of relationships within a society, between us and God and between us and our fellow humans…
With only three exceptions, they do not speak about love in a moral context, that is, vis-à-vis our relationships with one another.
The exceptions are Amos’ remark, “Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts” (Amos 5:15); Micah’s famous statement, “Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8) and Zechariah’s “Therefore love truth and peace” (Zech. 8:19).
Note that all three are about loving abstractions – good, mercy and truth. They are not about people…
The wisdom voice in Torah and Tanach looks at character and consequence. If you live virtuously, then by and large things will go well for you.
A good example is Psalm 1. The person occupied with Torah will be “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers...”
But the wisdom literature does not speak of loving your neighbor or the stranger.
The moral vision of the Priest that makes him different from the Prophet and Sage lies in the key word kadosh, “holy.”
Someone or something that is holy is set apart, distinctive, different.
The Priests were set apart from the rest of the nation. They had no share in the land. They did not work as laborers in the field.
Their sphere was the Tabernacle or Temple. They lived at the epicenter of the Divine Presence.
As God’s ministers they had to keep themselves pure and avoid any form of defilement. They were holy.
Until now, holiness has been seen as a special attribute of the Priest.
But there was a hint at the Giving of the Torah that it concerned not just the children of Aaron but the people as a whole: “You shall be to Me a Kingdom of Priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6).
Our chapter now spells this out for the first time. “The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:1-2).
This tells us that the ethic of holiness applies not just to Priests but to the entire nation.
We, too, must to be distinctive, set apart, held to a higher standard.
What in practice does this mean?
A decisive clue is provided by another key word used throughout Tanach in relation to the Kohen, namely the verb b-d-l: to divide, set apart, separate, distinguish.
That is what a Priest does. His task is “to distinguish between the sacred and the secular” (Lev. 10:10), and “to distinguish between the unclean and the clean” (Lev. 11:47).
This is what God does for His people: “You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy, and I have distinguished you [va-avdil] from other peoples to be Mine.” (Lev. 20:26)
There is one other place in which b-d-l is a key word, namely the story of creation in Genesis 1, where it occurs five times...
Genesis 1 defines the priestly moral imagination.
Unlike the Prophet, the Priest is not looking at society. He is not, like the wisdom figure, looking for happiness. He is looking at creation as the work of God.
He knows that everything has its place: sacred and profane, permitted and forbidden.
It is his task to make these distinctions and teach them to others...
Above all the ethic of holiness tells us that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. God made each of us in love.
Therefore, if we seek to imitate God – “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” – we too must love humanity, and not in the abstract but in the concrete form of the neighbor and the stranger.
The ethic of holiness is based on the vision of creation-as-God’s-work-of-love. This vision sees all human beings – ourselves, our neighbor and the stranger – as in the image of God, and that is why we are to love our neighbor and the stranger as ourself.
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