Kedoshim
God spoke to Moshe,
saying “Speak to the entire community of the Children of
19:1-2
This admonition to strive for absolute human
perfection is addressed to each and every member of the nation as an
individual. No station in life, no sex,
no age, no state of personal fortune is excluded from
this call to strive for the heights of absolute morality, nor is the call
addressed to any one individual apart from all the others.
Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th Century)
There are two groups of people observing mitzvot. One group
is so preoccupied with trying to understand the will
of God, that even if the mitzvot had not been given,
they would have divined most of them themselves, and proceeded to observe
them. This is the group of people from
whom potential leaders are drawn. They
are, alas, few in number. The second
group is the group that comprises the vast majority of people. These people observe the mitzvot
because they are afraid that non observance will make them liable to
punishments, to physical afflictions.
They are not really concerned with any considerations beyond that. Among these two categories, some will attempt
to understand the deeper meaning behind the mitzvot
whereas others content themselves with simply performing them. It is in the nature of things that if one
expects people to observe the commandments out of comprehension, the objectives
should be stated first.
Akedat
Yitzchak (15th Century)
“You shall be holy…” Be self restraining…in my
opinion, this abstinence does not refer only to restraint from acts of
immorality, as Rashi wrote, but it is rather the self control mentioned
throughout the Talmud…from self indulgence…Therefore, after having listed the
matters which god prohibited altogether (in the last parsha), the Torah
followed them up by a general command that we practice moderation even in
matters which are permitted…
Ramban (13th Century)
In his famous book, “The Idea of the Holy,” the
great German scholar of religion Rudolph Otto, claims that the holy is the
other, the “luminous,” the different, the spectacularly supernatural. How then is it that we Jews are commanded to
be holy, ourselves? If holiness is
precisely what God is and we are not, then how can we be expected to become
holy too? The imitation of God (or, more
precisely for Jews, the imitation of God’s actions…) is the supreme task for
the Jew…This parsha trains us not only to be humane but to be holy, like
God. It tells us that the way to become
a mensch is to imitate God. It links the
ethical moment to transcendent sources and implications…That is what I call
holiness.
Arnold Jacob Wolf (contemporary)
What is the relationship between law and personal
feeling?...Today’s parsha offers us some hints of the relationship between the
demands of law and the promptings of the heart…Judaism is a legal system but it
is also a religious system asking more of us than any civil law could. It teaches us about a progression of
relationships, of a process of becoming holy. It begins with very carefully
defined legal relationships, but it asks us to constantly move deeper, so that
finally we transform all our relationships in fundamental ways…It is completely
open in possibility, and can never be limited by an articulated contract…We
have then here an approach to a Jewish sense of the path toward holiness. It is
a march, it is a walking on the way. We never have the smugness to say we have
arrived, nor the equal smugness of saying the ideal is not achievable. Rather we are asked to see ourselves on a
pilgrimage.
Edward Feld
(Contemporary)