This week’s parsha, Behar, deals with laws concerning common business practice; most notably, honesty in the marketplace: “”If you sell property to your neighbor or buy any from him, do not take advantage of each other. (Lev. 125:14)”

The rabbi’s interpret this law to be about asking a fair market price, not over inflating the price of something or hiding its flaws in order to make a greater profit. The Hebrew word for this sin is ona’ah - in other contexts, it refers to rape.

What, one might ask, does price gouging and unfair business practices have to do with rape?

From the biblical point of view, one who is a seller of an object automatically has power over the purchaser. The seller presumably knows if something is as valuable as it looks or has a problem (a used car with a lot of miles on it may run fine or may be a lemon). The purchaser really has no recourse, other than asking to “look under the hood” to make a judgment. Of course, the buyer could always decide not to buy - but not if it is a product she needs - transportation to and from work, for example. So the buyer is always the one taking the risk and is therefore, according to the Torah, the weaker of the two in the transaction - the seller is the one with all the power.

The exploitation of a weaker entity by a stronger entity is exactly the kind of power dynamic present in the violent crime of rape. The fact that the bible defines these crimes using the same language reflects the understanding of just how dangerous and damaging exploitation of those weaker than us can be. This language might be chosen here - in what might seem to be a “light” crime - in order to shock us into realizing how serious an offense price gouging and business exploitation really is.

Sure, everyone wants to make money - and hunting for bargains is not only economical, but often fun. But at what point did the great “steal” you found on designer shoes really become stealing? And how much can your really charge someone for your time before you are exploiting them?

Of course, no one is accusing any one of rape in this chapter. But it is possible that the choice of language used to describe the crime of exploitation is there to remind us tha tin addition to our neighbor’s physical integrity, we have responsibility for their financial integrity and labor integrity as well.

After all, in order to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must raise them up to our equal in all interactions, be they business, social or otherwise.

Shabbat shalom

Posted: May 14th, 2009 under Dvar Torah.
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This week’s parsha is the double portion of Acharei Mot-Kedoshim (Lev 16:1-20:27). Kedoshim is one of the middle parshiyot of Leviticus, which is the middle book of the Torah. That means that in the cycle of readings, we are just about half way through our year. This just happens to be the case, but interestingly enough, some say that it is the most central point in the Torah as well.Kedoshim means, literally, “holy things” and comes from the second sentence of the portion which reads: “Speak to the entire congregation of Israel and say to them, “become holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” The following paragraphs are often referred to as the “holiness code” and some commentators have suggested that this is the most central point of Torah, indeed of all Jewish teaching. “Be Holy, like God is Holy.” All the rest, of course, is commentary.

But this begs the question, what exactly does it mean to “be holy?”

In biblical language Holy (in Hebrew Kadosh) seems to mean “of God’s realm” or “relating uniquely to or from God.” God’s power, for example, is the ultimate expression of holiness in that it is not comparable to any thing else in existence. Kadosh also comes to mean things given over to or dedicated to God or to the worship of God - the sacrifices, for example, are kadosh and therefore, cannot be used for any other purpose.

But how does that help us understand the meaning of the kadosh that we are instructed to become? What does that look like?

This week in Hebrew school, I put the question to our upper school students. After looking at various definitions of the word “Holy” and reflecting on their own understanding of the word, they were instructed to come up with their own definitions. In three separate groups, they come up with the following definitions:
Holiness is:
1 Sacred, spirituality, peaceful, Torah, internal
2 Really special, worth keeping for a long time, eternal, spiritual, God-like; something or someone who sets a standard of behavior or ethics and maintains it
3 Good, moral, sacred, pure, related to God, consecrated, special, righteous, spiritual, relating to God and acts of loving kindness, of or relating to wholeness of character

I was fairly impressed with their definitions, but even more so with their uninhibited ability to think about the question and offer an answer. Not a single student refrained from offering an opinion nor shied away from the task. And when asked, all of them were fairly certain that they knew what holiness is.

The same was true when I asked students to share their ideas of how one “becomes holy,” what behaviors are meant by the exhortation to “be holy.” The students immediately responded with a list of activities: visiting the sick, going to synagogue, talking to God, saying please and thank you, caring for others, not doing harm.
The answers were great answers - but again, more impressive was the quickness of the students’ responses, their absolute confidence in their ability to articulate and suggest ways to “be holy” in this world.

This is not often my experience with adults. More often than not adults express uncertainty about the meaning of holiness and their own ability to define it. Many adults seem to think that this passage requires interpretation and commentary, that they are unequipped to explain holiness to themselves or any one else who asks, that this concept must be something very complicated and exotic.

But in reality, as the upper school students know, it is not. It is very obvious and plain. It is as simple as the students suggest: visiting the sick, going to synagogue, talking to God, saying please and thank you, caring for others, not doing harm. What God asks of us, indeed the central message (both chronologically and experientially) of Torah is this: care for others and do no harm. As a much later passage in the Torah suggests, it is “neither to hard for you nor to far off..but very near to you and in your heart that you may do it.” (Deuteronomy 30:12-17).

Holiness is exactly what we think it means and doing it is simply a matter of acting the way we think we should, being the person we want to be - all the time. Defining Kadosh as our students suggest, is actually quite easy. It is remembering to do it that gets tricky.

Shabbat shalom

Posted: April 30th, 2009 under Dvar Torah, Rabbi's Column.
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This week’s portion, the double portion of Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1 - 15:33) provides us with a detailed list of bodily fluids, skin disease, discharges and the like that were a great cause for concern to our ancestors. These are parshiyot that wreak havoc on the unfortunate B’nai Mitzvah assigned to chant and study one of these two parshiyot. They have to slog through the descriptions of scaly rashes, labor and childbirth, mold-contaminated dwellings and other icky things and try to find some kernel of Torah worth discussing from these texts.

Pity them and pity us for coming around, once again, right after Pesach, to these chapters that require us, too, to look at them anew each year for insight and teaching. What do these laws of biblical hygiene really have to teach us, anyway?

This year, I don’t feel so ready to dismiss these ancient practices as archaic and obsolete - although I have no interest in reviving the systems set in place to manage them. However, I do feel a need to look closer - a little deeper about what the text, in laying out such specific descriptions, rules and laws for dealing with these most physical of human processes might be trying to tell us.

In both these parshiyot, we are given several examples of conditions, incidents and ailments that lead to a state of “tamay” or ritual impurity. Often poorly translated as “uncleanliness,” tamay is actually not about physical hygiene or cleanliness at all. It is really about a spiritual state of impurity that prohibits one from accessing certain rituals (like performing sacrifices in the temple) that were part and parcel of life in those days. Spiritual impurity - tamay¬ is a state of being, usually temporary, that requires ritual to correct, to bring one to a state of tahor or ritual purity. The ritual usually involved a period of separation from others and then a ritual immersion in a mikveh or pool.

Let’s look at the instances and occurrences that cause one to become tamay (from this parsha and elsewhere):
• coming into contact with a dead body or certain dead animals
• childbirth
• menstruation
• seminal emission
• a type of skin ailment (incorrectly translated as leprosy)
• contact with one who is “impure” through one of these circumstances
• contact with a vessel that has become “impure” by contact with one of the above mentioned cases
• certain molds or funguses on the inside of houses.

If we look carefully, we see that, (with the exception of the last one which I truly don’t understand), all of these instances involve contact with or being in the presence of the boundaries of life and death. A dead body was once alive, but now isn’t; a menstruating woman potentially carried a new life inside her, but now doesn’t; the same might be said for seminal emissions; childbirth involves bringing something from unlife to life.

Interestingly, the amount of time a new mother is required to remain apart from others before rejoining the community is doubled when she gives birth to a girl as opposed to a boy. While we might find this offensive if we read into it an implication of “greater impurity” by giving birth to a daughter, we may also see in it recognition of the baby’s own future potential, as a female, to give life.

Ok, so tamay, ritual impurity, has to do with standing at the liminal moments - a term sociologists like to use for “in-between.” One becomes tamay when one stands at the edges of life and death. OK - but still, what am I to make of this now, when religious life is no longer dependant on ritual practices, like sacrifice, that require one to be tahor - ritually pure?

Every once in a while, I have the opportunity in my role as rabbi, to be with someone at the end of his or her life, to be in the presence of someone who is walking along that bridge, through that liminal space between life and death. Each time, I have been awed by the overwhelming holiness, expansiveness, presence-fullness of the moment. Midwives and others who attend births report the same sense of holiness at the moment of coming-into-life. At those moments, it is as if the veils between God and the world disappear and we stand for fully aware of the preciousness, sanctity, frailty and beauty of life.

As it happens, more and more of us will have such opportunities as we age - we will more often - God-willing - spend the last minutes of our loved-ones lives with them as they cross the bridge; and some of us will be lucky to witness the births of children (grandchildren?) in this same way.
I would suggest that it is at those moments that we become tamay - unable to perform in the mundaity of life and on the human stage. And it takes time to come back to earth, to come down to the ground and reconnect. If we don’t take the time to see what is really happening, we will miss it - and it won’t mean anything at all. But if we are prepared, if we have a language and a framework, if we allow it, every moment spent standing on the edge will forever change us, transform us, shape us just as the rituals our ancestors engaged in did so long ago.

We may not follow the same patterns, but the framework of tamay and tahor, the ability to name the sacred at the edges of life is the legacy of this week’s parsha and is not something to be easily case away as too odd, quaint or archaic.

Shabbat Shalom

Posted: April 23rd, 2009 under Dvar Torah, Rabbi's Column.
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