The mitzvot in the beginning of parashat Kedoshim offer us a radical re-envisioning of how we structure society and see ourselves and each other, inviting us to move from a power dominated perspective to a consciousness that is centered on love and the essential equality and sacredness of each individual. Below, I want to explore this movement and imagine ourselves into this alternative consciousness.
Society’s Current Power Paradigm
The mitzvot in this section of Kedoshim (and in many other places in the Torah) deal with a lot of hierarchical differences in society. There is the question of rich and poor – there might be reasons to prefer one or the other in court – and the poor laborer could be taken advantage of if we don’t ensure his welfare. There are the disabled, the blind, the deaf and the mute, and how they might be mistreated and undervalued, not respected. There are the old – sevah – who also could be devalued or mistreated. And there is the ger, the stranger, the outsider, anyone we consider Other in some way, and how easily that person could be stripped of power, and oppressed.
There are so many reasons to disempower people, so many ways that society judges who is more or less valuable among us humans. In our own society there is judgment around age, sex, weight, race, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, ableism, productivity, beauty, athleticism, intelligence, job, education, health and many other subtle and not so subtle scales by which we are constantly evaluating people’s relative value, always putting some people in the ‘less than” category. We are all subject to this dominance lens, even if it is unconscious. Notice for yourself when that happens to you, what kinds of issues make you feel somehow less valuable than others, and how much that hurts.
An Alternative Paradigm: Radical Equality of Value
The Torah offers us a different lens through which to view ourselves and each other. Throughout this parsha, the Torah uses words like re’akha, akhikha and amitekha, words that mean things like your fellow, your brother, your neighbor, your kinsman. The goal is to invite us into a place of seeing ourselves in this type of equal fellowship of humankind, all of us together, everyone a neighbor and a fellow, equal in value. Kamokha, “like you,” says the central tenet of ve’ahvta lere’akha kamokha, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Kamokha, like you, is a word that creates a radical equivalence between self and other, no matter who the other is, a radical equality, with no hierarchy or preference, no one lower or higher.
You are Sacred
Underlying this radical notion of essential equality and fellowship is a very deep religious ideology that is based on the creation of humans betzelem elokim, in the divine image. All humans were created this way, which means that every human being is sacred. Beyond all the scales of judgment, the lenses through which we make distinctions and evaluations, old or young, rich or poor, we all have this basic underlying intrinsic sacredness. We profess to know this truth, but I don’t think we fully recognize or assimilate its radicalness and its power to transform our way of viewing ourselves and each other. Each of us is intrinsically sacred, unrelated to our particular place on all those societal scales of value.
Which is why the parsha begins with a special hakhel call not just to adat Yisrael but to kol adat yisrael, to all the members of the congregation, old, young, rich, poor, abled and disabled, men and women, all gathering to hear God say – kedoshim tehiyu ki kadosh ani – you are all sacred because I am sacred. Every single one of us partakes of the sacredness of God.
Despite everything, I am sacred.. All the other judgments and lenses– all the reasons you are less than – they are all like chaff that gets blown away in the wind, leaving behind the core kernel of who you are, the solidness of your inherent sacredness.
Love Instead of Dominance
Because we all partake of this inherent sacredness, there is a different type of consciousness that can emerge among us and between us. Out of this security, the knowledge that we each have intrinsic value, we can love each other in a new way. Ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha, the core mitzvah of this section, and the “heart” of the whole Torah, proclaims: We can love our neighbors as ourselves. We can stand solid in our own value and belovedness and from that stance, radiate out love to others without competition or worry over losing our own footing. This is an invitation to a new consciousness, a new way of viewing ourselves and each other, not in the power dynamic of a winner and a loser but in the joint collaborative effort of abundant love, ahavah rabbah, all partaking of the abundant love bestowed on us by God.
Ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha – love your neighbor as yourself: Love yourself, love your neighbor, they both need to be true and are dependent on one another. This is a love that grows from inside and outside, from the back and forth, the giving and receiving. It is the opposite of a zero sum game. The more I have, the more you have, the more you have, the more I have, ever increasing, like a candle that lights a thousand other candles but is not itself diminished, the light ever increasing. There is overflow here, the overflow of the divine love that stands at the core of the universe. When we enter this other zone, we partake of the overflow and leave the tight and narrow competitive world of feeling more than or less than. We are loved and valued so fully that the love overflows from one to the other and keeps growing, no one left out, all part of re’akha kamokha, of this fellowship of equality.
Our Experience of Love As Scarce
But it’s not always so easy for us to enter this zone because we often feel like love is a zero sum game, a scarce resource, not an abundant one. The Torah acknowledges this type of love in the early stories of Breshit, where love is often preferential rather than inclusive, each parent “loving” one and not the other child(ren). Indeed, it could be said that Yaakov’s preferential “love” of Yosef, and the consequent deep wounds suffered by Yosef’s brothers – to be unloved and rejected, second class in your own home, is deeply traumatizing – eventually led to the creation of the ultimate system of human disempowerment and devaluation: slavery.
The whole unraveling and descent of Israelite history into Egypt thus began, on some level, from this scarcity of love, from the type of love which the Torah describes elsewhere as a situation of an ahuvah, “a loved wife,” and a senuah, “a hated or unloved wife.” One up and one down in a zero sum system where there is a limited amount of love and value to go around.
Imagining a Different Kind of Love
But what the Torah is asking us here to imagine is a different kind of consciousness, to imagine an ahavah, a love, that spreads and includes and grows, lere’akha kamokha, to others, to yourself, back and forth, all around. This is a transcendent love. We are all wrapped in it and extend it to one another without ever losing it ourselves.
I am imagining a vast field of flowers, all in bright shining colors, each one beautiful in its own unique way, all nourished from the generous earth, and each flower bowing to one another in the wind, basking in its own beauty while admiring the beauty of the others. Plenty of room for all to shine and grow. Each one is so radiant that it radiates and pours out its color into the other, making the other ever more beautiful. Each one pouring color into the other and receiving a colorful overflow back from the other. That is the love of ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha. There is no scarcity here, just hearts overflowing with the abundant love of the divine.
Returning now to the parts of us and of others that feel less than, for whatever reason, because they are less abled or older or heavier or the wrong color or whatever it is – returning to all those parts in us and in the wider world that suffer in this way, that feel like second class citizens –, so many of them out there – and extending to them this free abundant love, showing them the field of flowers and letting them know that they, too, are such flowers, each one intrinsically sacred, honored, beautiful and beloved just as it is.
A Taste of the Future
Kedoshim tehiyu is said in the future tense – “you will be sacred” – even though the truth is that we already are sacred. I think this is because entering a zone where everyone knows they are sacred, entering such a consciousness, is indeed a thing of the future, an evolving messianic consciousness that is not yet here, that we only get a taste of in this current world. Working toward this vision of the Torah, letting go of our lenses of self and other devaluation and cultivating inside ourselves a heart that loves unequivocally, is the work for which we were born, moving us ever closer towards that other world (olam haba) that is, with our participation, ever “coming.”
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels
