Parashat Kedoshim: Be True to Your Best Self

Elokay neshama shenata bi tehorah hi. We each have a pure soul, a piece of the divine inside us, our best, highest self. But we often forget this soul, forget our roots above, in the daily mess of life here on earth.

What it means to be kadosh, as the Torah enjoins us this week, is to remember this higher aspect of self. Kedoshim tehyu ki kadosh ani Hashem Elokeikhem. Be holy because I, Hashem, your God am holy. Our holiness stems from the mirroring of God’s holiness in ourselves, from our knowledge of our connection, our source, above.

This sense of remembering our higher selves is expressed in many of the laws:

Keep Shabbat – a weekly reminder of your connection above, as you stop the business of this-worldly achievement to be attuned to the soul.

No idol worship -- Don’t get involved in worshipping other things in the world that don’t really matter and take you away from your true self. Don’t be confused about who you are.

Leave the corners of the fields for the poor -- Yes, you need to be involved in the world, but in doing so – when you grow things in the ground or on trees – don’t rush like an animal to eat it all up. Have dignity and compassion and love for others. These are the higher sides of yourself and you need to uncover and develop them through constant limitation and giving.

Do not curse a deaf person. Why? He won’t hear you anyway. Ah, but it will affect you – it will debase you, the speaker, take you away from your true elevated self. To lie and to cheat others are similarly degrading, a debasement of the kedushah that lies in each of us. It’s not just that it’s wrong to hurt others; we are better than that. We should hold ourselves to a standard of dignity and love, be mirrors of the loving holy God who created us.

The parsha repeats again and again the reason for all these laws of kedushah -- Ani Hashem Elokeikhem. I am Hashem your God. Certainly there are other ways to interpret this phrase, but this year, what it says to me is -- Remember who your God is; remember who you are and where you came from; be true to this mirrored image of God in yourself; be true to your highest self.

Read this way, the constant enjoinment ani Hashem Elokeikhem becomes not a threat – I am the God who will punish you if you don’t follow My laws – but a source of encouragement and hizuk (strengthening). You can do this. You already have inside you what it takes to be holy and good and loving and dignified. You are already connected above. All you need to do is remember that connection.

Remember that connection in every aspect of your life. Not just when you are in shul davening, but also when you are in your fields harvesting grain or in the supermarket buying apples or eating breakfast on the run or doing the dishes or interacting with a colleague or client or child or other driver. Kedushah means bringing God into the world by remembering who we are at all times, remembering our pure soul from above, letting that knowledge seep in to every detail of how we act and every moment of our lives.

For Yom HaAtzmaut: Shuli Rand's "The Poet" and the Journey Towards Peace

In honor of Yom HaAtzmaut, I taught a song of Shuli Rand’s in the high school this week called Hameshorer, “The Poet.”

The song tells a story about Shuli Rand, a Haredi Israeli singer, and a friend of his, a famous secular Israeli poet. In the song the two meet while swimming in a pool and again on a city bench. Both times they connect and converse but end up in argument and discord over religious questions. “You said no. I said yes. If I said there is, you laughed, there isn’t.” The second time, Shuli says they almost end up coming to blows over the argument. A huge gulf opens between them.

The song begins with argument but ends with peace. In the final scene, the secular poet is sick in the hospital, “entangled in frightening tubes” and Shuli comes to visit him. This time, they talk little. Shuli says, “I had feelings. I had no words.” They both sense the end is near. They both see the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, above the poet’s bed. They do not speak. They cry together. Shuli blesses his friend: Sa Leshalom. “Travel in peace.” And the friend answers: “Amen.”

Peace. Shalom. How do we move from argument to peace? Shuli Rand shows us here. The answer is Shekhinah. Not just Divine Presence, but human presence. Perhaps we can even say that the Divine Presence is drawn down to earth in places, as here, where humans are being present for one another. There is a quality of presence here that we don’t normally achieve. It is presence beyond words and beyond the ego involvement of an argument. Beyond -- I’m right. You’re wrong. We each need to defend our positions. To be present is not to be right but to care, to connect. The illness of the poet helps them see what matters, helps them see their shared humanity and mortality and understand that to be right is not as important as to love, to connect, to be at peace with another.

Ideological divisions abound in this world. What ultimately drives peace may not just be national or international work, but simple encounters like the one described in this song, person by person, in intimate and less intimate relationships, simple everyday encounters where we learn not always to assert our views with words and arguments, but to cry together, to feel together, to be present and connected, simple encounters where we ask ourselves – do I want to be right or do I want to be at peace?

Sa Leshalom. May we all be travelling daily toward peace and presence.

Reflections from the Second Generation: On Torah and the Shoah (Talk Given at Young Israel of Toco Hills)

When I was a child, brushing my teeth at night, I would set up little tricks for myself in order to make sure that the Holocaust did not happen again. If I was very careful about closing the lid of the paste or putting it on the right and not the left side of the faucet, then I could be sure to stave off the likely event of another Holocaust happening at any moment. This was magical thinking, born of a very deep fear that has always lived inside me.

My father was born in Krakow, Poland in 1934. On September 1, 1939 he was 5 years old. He was with his mother and two younger sisters, ages 3 and 1, out in the countryside enjoying the end of the summer in my grandmother’s childhood shtetl home of Mishlinetz. His father was not with them that day, as during the summer, he would stay in the city to work during the week and join them in the country for Shabbat. That Friday in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the trains were taken over by soldiers so he was not able to rejoin them.

My father and his mother and sisters survived the war in Siberian slave labor camps. They were evacuated from the Polish countryside into the Ukraine and taken from there by the Russians as slave labor, part of a large group of Jewish refugees, quote “saved” by the Russians, though at the time they thought they were the unlucky ones. They endured their own suffering.

But we were asked to tell one story – and I want to share the story of my grandfather, who was left behind in Krakow. He ended up in the Tarnow ghetto. My dear cousin Lala chronicled what happened to him there – alone in a small room, he was studying Talmud one day when Nazi soldiers passed by and saw him with the Talmud through the window. They ordered him out into the courtyard and barked at him to sweep the floor. They shot him in the back while he was sweeping.

I chose this story because it gives me something positive to hold on to, to live for. The legacy of the Shoah for me has been primarily a deep sense of fear, depression and insecurity about the future. A part of me knows with certainty that the world is primarily evil – that evil is likely, at any moment, to swallow up the good. My dreams are like Pharaoh’s –yes, there are fat cows – that’s how we live now – but eventually the skinny cows will eat up the fat ones. This I know. That is the way of the world, and especially the way of the Jews. My father, too, lived a good life before the war. I expect my own life or worse, my children’s or granchildren’s lives, to be disrupted at any moment by war and persecution.

That is the dark side, the abyss I stand next to, circling, at all times. I am thrown back into it by an article about the horrors of the American prison system or the Syrian refugees or the rise of white supremacists. Any sign of evil triumphing can throw me.

I struggle with the question – what can we do to prevent this? How can we stop evil from triumphing in the world? How does one tip the balance to the good in this world? What is my role in particular? I don’t want to play toothpaste tricks anymore. I know things can’t be controlled, but I want to play my part for the good.

There are many answers and I admire those who have chosen other responses – helping other refugees, being strong about the State of Israel, fighting injustice in all its forms, healing and helping people in many ways.

But the reason I chose the story of my grandfather’s shooting is because for me the answer that has become clearer and clearer over the years lay in my grandfather’s hands just before he was shot – Torah. Torah is the antidote to evil in the world. Ki lekah tov natati lakhem. Torah is goodness. A good teaching given by the ultimate Good One to help us slowly, over time, uncover the true goodness of a world created out of love. Torah is the tool to tip the balance. Perhaps not today, perhaps not in our lifetimes. But slowly, one letter at a time, we effect the world through Torah.

In the end of the day, I do not believe that those Nazis killed my grandfather. He was attached to something above death, beyond denigration, something true and eternal and elevated and strong and steadfast in the face of evil. I attach myself to this same chain, to this same eternity. I am comforted and strengthened and energized. And sometimes, when I am studying a piece of gemara, I can feel my grandfather’s blood coursing through me.