Kedoshim

We are beginning to study the weekly portion that is called Kedoshim (Holy Ones). It is devoted to how to keep holiness, how to live in holiness. And we will begin reading from verse 1 of chapter 19.

The Most High says: “I am your LORD. I want to live among you. I want to reign in this people, and so that you can cleave to Me, you must strive for holiness.” If a person in a state of impurity tries to cleave to the Most High, he, as it were, soils, defiles Him. Everyone knows that before two surfaces are glued together, they are cleaned. In our case only one surface needs to be cleaned – us, because the LORD is Holy anyway. For Him to live in us, in our hearts, we must strive for holiness; certain requirements are placed on us. That, in fact, is what this will be about.

In the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) we read: “A person must honor father and mother.” Here it is a little different and in a different order: to fear mother and father. Indeed, the most painstaking part of caring for a child falls on the mother, she takes care of a person from earliest childhood, therefore it is easier to show respect to the mother, and she inspires less fear. And the commandment puts the emphasis where it seems to us that we can slip through: the mother must be feared. And the father must be respected, honored, although it may seem to us that he, as a matter of fact, did not directly take part himself in our upbringing.

In the Decalogue we read that the commandment about keeping Shabbat stands next to the commandment about honoring parents. And here we see the same thing, we see that there is a connection. Since parents are our previous generation, to honor one’s parents means to honor the past. When we also raise our children in respect for us, we build the life of our people across time. And Shabbat is very important for counting time. We live from Shabbat to Shabbat, we move from the past into the future. And this replacing of one Shabbat by another is somewhat like the replacing of generations. By treating the flow of time with respect, we respect our parents and teach our children to respect us.

The word elil may be a diminutive of the word el (god), that is, little god. Or it may come from the root chet-lamed-lamed, which has the meaning to empty, to take out the contents: for example, the word chalal means an empty thing, something empty inside. That is, it can be translated as do not turn to empty things.

What does and do not make molten gods mean, and on top of that for yourselves (velohe massecha lo ta'asu)? We read about this commandment in the book of Shemot, in chapter 34. There it comes before the commandment about unleavened bread: “(17) Do not make molten gods for yourself. (18) Keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread…” What kind of commandment is this? Besides the fact that it has a simple meaning – one must not cast for oneself any little gods out of lead, out of silver, and out of whatever else we might want to cast them from, it also has another meaning, and there are many commentaries on this point.

The word masach in modern Hebrew too means curtain, canopy or screen. And the Hasidic teachers, beginning with the commentary on the Torah Or haChaim (Light of Life), say that elohe massecha is a curtain (screen), that hides the Most High from us, that dulls the sense of the Divine, that dulls our sense of holiness; a curtain that we have hung between ourselves and God. For example, a person has taken some job, has ended up in a company where foul language is in use, everyone around talks like that. At first this outrages him very much, but gradually he gets used to it. Even if he himself does not catch it, this insensitivity seeps into him, and the outrage that was in him has closed off. His hearing, his sensitivity to the surrounding reality become dulled because he has already gotten used to something. One can tell a story about Rabbi Yosef-Shlomo Kahaneman, who came to Tel Aviv at the beginning of the 30s. And the first time he went out for a walk on Shabbat, he saw a Jew who was walking and smoking. His heart overflowed with bitterness, he burst into tears: “How can it be that a Jew can smoke on Shabbat?!” Several months passed, Rabbi Kahaneman was gradually getting used to life in the land of Israel. Once he again went out for a walk on Shabbat and again noticed a man who was walking and smoking. Again he burst into tears and said: “I am no longer crying because this man is smoking. I am crying because I have gotten used to it, because I no longer cry over seeing a Jew who violates Shabbat. It has become habitual for me that a Jew can violate Shabbat!” Some things can become habitual for us in our own actions too. Having gotten used to them (“everyone does it,” “everyone lives like this”), we can make ourselves a little screen that filters out some Divine energy, filters out some little rays of the Divine, which allows us to resign ourselves, to live with it calmly.

Another understanding of the phrase elohe massecha is given by a sage of the era of the tannaim (tanna in Aramaic is teacher) named Rabbi Yosi. He understands the word massecha as mask – do not make yourself a mask of God. A person can sometimes be angry or indignant with a certain righteous anger. No, we do not get angry when someone cuts in front of us in the line at the supermarket. We do not get angry when someone cuts off our car. But then we see at the service a girl who is not modestly enough dressed, or we see that someone is whispering while the teacher is speaking, or, even worse, while we are speaking. That is when we are filled with righteous anger. And Rabbi Yosi says: “At this moment a person is very hard to correct. A person in anger flares his nostrils (in the Torah anger is in general connected with the nostrils), and through these flared nostrils holiness goes out of the person. And where holiness has gone out, impurity fills the person. His face becomes distorted. And the person himself (that is just how we say it) changes in his face, a mask appears on it. The person has put a mask on himself, declaring himself God, taking the place of God and getting angry where God should be angry, and not he himself.” Why does the Torah in the book of Shemot connect this with unleavened bread, with matza? Unleavened bread is like the absence of one’s own pride, the absence of one’s own sort of yetzer-hara (evil inclination). You are angry that someone is whispering during the study? You are angry that a girl has not covered her hair enough with a headscarf? Check whether this is really God’s anger.

A third understanding is given by the Hasidic teacher Rabbi David Oppenheim, who lived in the 17th century, who says: “It is about not becoming molten oneself, not becoming immobile oneself under the influence of an idol.” This begins with simple dependencies, when we cannot live without something, cannot do without something, when this something becomes dearer to us than anything else. And that is a kind of idol. Coffee, a cigarette can become such a thing – anything at all, really. Rav Rosenthal told how his wife weaned him off smoking cigarettes. In general, this was a man truly immersed in study, and the whole day, from morning till evening, he devoted to studying Torah, he tried not to tear himself away from Torah. His wife took care of the whole household. When he received people, when he taught lessons, his wife did everything that was necessary, including buying him cigarettes. Once he reached for the pack of cigarettes and did not find it. His wife was not home, and Rav Rosenthal himself went down to the little shop by the building, walked a short way from the entrance, bought himself cigarettes. His wife came and said: “Is your craving to smoke really so strong that it has overcome your passion for study? You will never have cigarettes again!” And he, understanding that she was right, stopped smoking.

They also tell a story about Emperor Napoleon. They say that Napoleon also liked to smoke. And once he was lying in his tent, there was a raw, bitter cold outside, and he wanted to go out for a smoke, but he was too lazy. And he said: “Well now, I am the emperor of France, I am Napoleon, not just anybody, can it be that I will not gather my strength and go outside for a smoke?” He got out of the tent, rolled himself a cigarette (I don’t know how that was done back then) and suddenly thought: “Here I am, Emperor Napoleon, and I am so attached to smoking that I got out into this nasty, vile cold in order to smoke there?!”, threw away the cigarette and went back into the tent. This is most likely a tall tale, but it is one more example of how a dependency can control us, and it is the same understanding – not to be dependent on something.

This same understanding can also be applied to our opinions, our views, our positions. Sometimes we show a certain stubbornness: this way or no way, it will be only this way, or only this way do we want to do it. For us this becomes a value, and even when we are told that we are acting wrongly, we still want to act our own way, accusing the one who tells us this of deceiving us. In chapters 43–44 of the book of Yirmeyahu there is a story about people who came to him and said: “We know that you are a prophet. We will do as you say! Should we go down to Egypt or not go down?” And when Yirmeyahu told them what he really thinks, they answered: “Ah-ah-ah, it is Baruch ben Neriya who is putting you up to this!” In any case they found a loophole to act their own way. And sometimes it is very hard for a person to say: “I made a mistake, I was mistaken, what I fought for is wrong.” Often a person keeps fighting for some idea, shows stubbornness, pushiness, pressure, persistence. And when a person persists too much, one must check whether he is persisting for the glory of God or whether his own “I” has long been running everything there. This is the deep understanding of the phrase, the deep understanding of the commandment – do not make yourself molten gods.

There is no need to make an impression on anyone. Today, when we have no peace offerings, people throw weddings, celebrations, feasts for a reason and for no reason. They invite a mass of people to show themselves off, so as not to lose face. It often happens that I come to someone’s wedding, and the person says to me: “I got into such debts because of this wedding, so that the future mother-in-law would not think badly, so that nobody would say anything bad.” A peace offering is also a celebration, also a feast, a shindig, when a person slaughters the sacrifice and invites others to share this joy with him, to share with him love for the Most High. That is exactly what should be the goal. There is no need to throw a celebration in order to gratify your “ego,” to somehow show your dignity, your wealth. And the Most High says: “I do not need it, first of all. Second, if you bring Me a peace offering, bring it (if you want it to be accepted) precisely when you want to bring a sacrifice, when you want to unite with Me, to join Me. There is no need to do it under social compulsion, when someone comes to you and says: ‘Vasya, Chaim, Kostya, Mordechai! For some reason you haven’t brought a peace offering in a long time. Come on, bring one, it’s been a long time since we partied at your celebration!’”

We have already spoken about this law of the peace offering (in the weekly portions Vayikra and Tzav). If a person slaughters a sacrifice in order to share with others, then share with others, don’t skimp, don’t cut it into little pieces, there is no need to put it in the freezer and freeze it. Rejoice here and now. This, by the way, also shows itself in ordinary human life. We see that people have dinner sets standing in the cupboard that they plan to use on some fine, wonderful day. Girls have dresses hanging in the closet that they will put on for some wonderful celebration. And often, when people depart to the other world, after 120 years, the children carry out these dinner sets and wash the windows in this house with a rag, a former dress, the one that was supposed to be worn on a festive day. The Most High says: “Rejoice now! If you have My gift, a human gift, rejoice now, do not put off your sacrifices until the third day.”

If you treat this sacrifice like that, then it will not be credited to you as a sacrifice, you have simply eaten some slightly spoiled meat.

That is, do not go through a second time, do not search, do not hunt for unreaped ears of grain, leave them. It is interesting that when a person undergoes giyur, and even after the court, when he immerses himself in the mikva, he must be taught certain commandments. And among the other commandments they are sure to tell him the commandment of pe'a (the commandment about the edge of the field), the commandments about the tithe, the commandments about the fact that he becomes part of the people, that he is a person-people who must share with the poor. These are singled out as essential commandments, concerning the essence of a person who is not holy like that alone, by himself, but is part of the people of God striving for holiness, in which all are brothers, and a person must share with his brothers. This is sometimes very hard to take in.

If you took something as a pledge or owe some payment, do not say that you did not take it, lo-techachashu – do not back out of your obligations toward a person. And do not say: “I already gave it to you,” or, like a false witness: “And I know that he already gave it,” that is, lo-teshakkeru, do not deceive.

A person can not only bear false witness under oath, but also, God forbid, attach the Name of the LORD to this oath. In the last two verses one can see a chain of actions following one after another. First a person stole, took something, then he denies it, backs out of it. And it gets to the point that he swears falsely by the Name of God. And the war against people, against other people’s property, already turns into a profaning of the Name of the Most High. There are certain rules in relationships with one another. It would seem, this is my field, why should I give from it to the poor? But one must not only share one’s own goods: all the more so, one must not take other people’s goods, steal, take as a pledge and the like.

What is meant is a situation where a person finds himself in some kind of dependence on you. You can say to him: “Work for me for the minimum price,” or force him to sell something for a pittance so that he can survive. Or, conversely, if something becomes vitally necessary for someone, a person is tempted to inflate the price of this product. If someone needs a medicine, and he cannot do without it, one can raise its price, and that too is oppression. One can say to a person: “I agreed with you on 1,000 shekels, but I will give you 750, even that will be enough for you!” Yet here it is said do not oppress your neighbor, this is forbidden to do. It would seem, there is a deal, I want to buy, he wants to sell. But if I understand that he is forced to sell, if I understand that he is forced to hire himself out for work, to sign some contract, I have no right to oppress him. He is my neighbor, and I must show care for him. I cannot love myself so much as to disregard my neighbor.

The commandment lo-tigzol (do not rob, do not take away by force) also concerns the fact that one can take a person’s time from him. That is, one can say to a person: “Sit outside my office and wait for me until I come, from morning until lunch.” This is theft of time, this too is robbery. One can take a person’s sleep from him: if in the middle of the night I need something, and I call my employee and demand some reports from him. Or I simply behave noisily and keep my neighbor from sleeping, then that too is robbery, theft of sleep. One can also steal a person’s correct understanding. If I tell him: “This drug helps,” or: “Right now everyone in France goes around like this,” and so on, I am stealing correct understanding from a person, stealing from a person da'at, his view of the world. And that too is forbidden.

The commandment about the wages of a hired worker is also an important commandment. Even today in many countries there are people who live on daily earnings. These people have faced a situation where for a whole month, for various reasons, they did not go to work, and they are either eating up their reserves (those who managed to prepare some reserves) or asking their neighbors for help. It is very hard for a day laborer to cope if his pay is held back, therefore the pay must be given before morning.

Do not take advantage of human weaknesses in order to mock him. If a person can hear, you will not say to him what you can allow yourself if the person cannot hear. That must not be. The deaf will not hear, the blind will not notice, but God sees everything, He must be feared. This commandment, do not put an obstacle before the blind, must be understood as an indulgent attitude toward the weaknesses of other people. If some woman or some person comes to you to clean the house, do not leave a wallet stuffed with money before their eyes, so as not to tempt them: do not lead a person into temptation unintentionally or on purpose. If a person is on some diet, is trying to abstain from something, do not buy him good-smelling foods that will tempt him. And all the more there is no need to secretly mix into a person’s food those foods that he has given up. I know of such a thing: if a person gives up pork and does not eat something for God, fellow believers sometimes have the temptation to somehow mix that very pork into his food. The commandment is relevant not only toward the weak and not only toward the blind, the LORD cares not only about the blind.

One can disregard a poor man and say: “He is a poor man, why should I judge him properly? Why should I bother looking into his case?” One can, on the contrary, decide the judgment in favor of the rich man, because he is rich, because these are good and useful connections. In many countries the courts are like this to this day. The Most High says: “Judge your neighbors justly. Whatever person, however noble, you might try to please, however high his position in society may be, it is not worth quarreling with Me for his sake. There is no one higher than Me, and I, from the height of My position as your LORD and your God, stand up for the poor. I am for just judgment, I am the highest justice, do not quarrel with Me.”

The word rachil (gossip) is connected with sea traders, merchants who, besides goods (they probably had goods both good and various), spread rumors: “What’s new? You are from Odessa? And what’s new there? You are from the land of Israel? And what’s there, and how are things?” And besides amazing stories about great adventures, which the merchants of course told, they spread gossip and evil speech about various people. Besides that, a person can collect some rumors, some stories (“And do you know, they’re removing MamykiniThe Russian verb here can mean either that Mamykin is being removed from his post or that he is being filmed. We chose “removing”, the usual sense in this kind of gossip.…”) and offer them as goods. There is a society that asks: “Fresh gossip, fresh gossip, we want the freshest gossip!” And gossip, evil speech, slander become goods, and people come running to listen to them. With this one can attract attention and be on top, by spreading evil speech. The Most High says: “This will not be!” I know a story where a man came to a rabbi and says: “My leg hurts very much, it hurts very badly, and there is some pain in my muscles. No doctors can help, whoever I went to!” And the rabbi said to him: “Check, perhaps you are in some way guilty of gossip? Check yourself, because it is written: a gossip shall not go about among your people.” The man thought and said: “I do have such a sin.” I cannot say that he repented and was healed at once, I do not know what became of him afterwards, but this part of the story I witnessed.

What does it mean to stand on the blood of one’s neighbor? What is meant here is the following: if you pass by a person who has gotten into trouble, who is being beaten, by a girl who is being harassed, by a child who is being hurt, then intervene to protect your neighbor, do not pass by calmly, do not treat it calmly, protect! This is a very important commandment.

We know the New Testament commandment about non-resistance to evil and we like to repeat it, perhaps we even like to keep it. I have already told more than once the story that Christian brothers wrote to me about: “We went with the sisters to a summer camp. We set up the tents and had only just settled in when some village hooligans came and started pestering us, the sisters, and even started raping them, and we stood nearby and prayed. Then the hooligans laughed at us and said: ‘Bring your girls again!’ – and left. And after this the sisters stumbled in faith. How can they be brought back to faith?” That is the question with which a letter came to the editorial office. The Torah says: “Do not stand calmly on the blood of your neighbor. If you are wronged, you can to some extent endure it, you can turn the other cheek. If your sister is wronged, if someone is raping not your sister at all, but a woman completely unknown to you, you are obliged to step in, do not stand on the blood of your neighbor.”

We often say that holiness is separation, a holy one is one who is separated. But here, throughout the whole chapter, we see that the holy one cares for this world, cares for the poor, cares for the weak, cares for just judgment. From what is he separated? From his greed, from his own selfish interests. He lives for the sanctification of the Name of the Most High in this world, and for this service he is separated, in this is his holiness.

We are moving through the weekly portion Kedoshim and will read from verse 17 of chapter 19. We continue reading the laws and commands that the Most High gives for preserving our purity and our righteousness, our striving for holiness.

The word sin'a (hatred) in Hebrew does not sound as strong and as harsh as in the Russian language. For example, we read: “A man will have two wives, one he will love, and the other – hate.” Here the word hatred is not quite in the sense usual for the Russian ear, here it means to love less. A kind of slight (or strong) disregard, but not necessarily hatred at all, in any case this word does not always mean hatred exactly. Thus, do not hate can be understood as do not keep some malice, some disregard.

Besides that, by admonishing your brother, you, first, can turn him away from evil, help him turn aside, step away from evil, not be an accomplice in his sin. Second, there will not be on you the sin of hatred toward him, this is also important. And, third, you may not suffer from the consequences of his sin. Tradition says: “Oy (woe) to the wicked man and oy (woe) to the wicked man’s neighbor!” If your neighbor becomes a wicked man, things will not go well for you either, and you too can get into a whole series of unpleasant situations, and sin will not be far off. Therefore the best way is not to keep evil against your neighbor, to care for his correction: after all, he stands not before you, but before the Most High. And our task is to place a person before the Most High, to reconcile a person with the Most High. The peacemakers in the Gospel of Matthew are first of all those who establish peace between man and God, they are not always the blue helmets of the UN.

There is a very good explanation in the most classic commentary, that of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi). Rashi says: “What does do not take revenge mean? If you came to a person and say to him: ‘Lend me an axe!’, and he answers you: ‘No! I will not lend it to you!’ A couple of days pass, he comes to you and says: ‘Lend me a hammer!’, and you say to him: ‘You did not lend me an axe, so I will not lend you a hammer either!’ – that is revenge. But if you say to him: ‘Back then you did not lend me an axe, but I am not like you, I will lend you a hammer. Just remember that it was you who did not lend to me back then!’ – that is bearing a grudge”.

A person can change under the influence of circumstances. But we often remember some image of a person, perhaps not a very good one, although the person himself may already have changed. And it turns out that we interact not with the person himself, but with the image of him that has stayed in our memory. Just as one can make a curtain between us and God, the same thing can also happen in our interaction with a person. We can say: “I did evil against him, he will never forgive me!”, or: “He will never improve!”, “He will never do this or that, he is such-and-such, and that is unchangeable.” We, as it were, keep a library of this person’s evil deeds, we create a storehouse of his evil deeds. This too should not be done. We must constantly renew our mind, constantly be sure that this person can change both for the better and for the worse. Therefore one should not bear a grudge and keep his evil deeds as an eternal label on him.

The commandment love your neighbor as yourself is an amazing commandment. It is amazing in its simplicity and clarity. This is probably the best-known commandment in the Torah, and it is the hardest of all to fulfill, because it is very hard to love one’s neighbor. If we speak abstractly, then the whole people, all of humanity, can be loved. The neighbor is hard to love. Yeshua said that this commandment is one of the two most important commandments: love your God and love your neighbor. If you love your neighbor, if you truly love him, then you will not do anything that would cause him harm. You will not slander him, you will not covet his wife, you will not oppress him. You will leave him the edge of your field if he is poor. You will help him if he is in trouble. Absolutely all the commandments between person and person come down to this: you simply must love your neighbor. This is not always possible or not always simple. Sometimes the neighbor appears before you in the form of a drunk, foul-smelling person, or in the form of a person who shouts, who is angry at you, or in the form of an evil boss, or in the form of a quarrelsome woman next door, and it is very hard to love such people. You must, first, learn to see behind them the Most High, Who sent them to you, and second, to see in them children of the Most High, whom the Most High conceived, intended for the Kingdom. One can try to look at any person like this: what will he be like in the Kingdom, how did the Most High conceive him, what talents did He give him, what could he be if he were the best version of himself in this world, as God wanted? This is important for us too – to become, with each day, the best variant of ourselves, the best version of ourselves. Every day I must become the best Alex, our neighbor too can become better, this is important: not one more version of the best Alex, Chaim or Rabbi Akiva, but the best version of oneself. No one will ask Chaim why he was not Moshe. Chaim will be asked why he was not Chaim. And we can help him become the best version of Chaim. The LORD says: “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD, you are both My creation. I am your LORD, I am his LORD, you are both Mine. And if you love Me, you will love him too.” Yeshua gives this commandment at a higher level: “Love one another as I have loved you – even more than yourselves!” This is a very high bar: when a person truly overflows with love for his neighbor, he can dissolve in this love and forget about himself.

There is a story about Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Amishonov, one of the Hasidic rebbes, who was in Warsaw during the First World War. A woman whose child had gone missing came to him for help: for some reason the child had fallen out of her basket while she was running through the city. She was in terrible distress and, her mind clouded, wept so as she turned to the rabbi, as if it were he who had taken her child from her. And Rabbi Menachem was filled with such compassion for her that he had a heart attack. When a doctor was called to him, the doctor said to him: “But it is written, Rabbi: as yourself, not more. You cannot love her more than yourself. You cannot put yourself and your health in danger for the sake of this woman!” The rabbi could only raise his hands, as if saying: “I give up. I can do nothing about it.” Love seizes, overflows and breaks boundaries. If we truly love, it can even be more than oneself. The Torah says: “Begin by loving your neighbor as yourself, so that he becomes just as important to you in this world as you yourself.” This is a very difficult task and a very high bar.

Since I have been giving talks on the Torah for more than a year, this is, of course, not the first time I have had to speak about the commandment ve'ahavtá lere'achá kamócha (love your neighbor as yourself). It is always very scary to speak about this commandment, because whatever you say will be an ordinary banality. This commandment has no theory, it is exclusively practical, and its observance can be shown only by the example of one’s own life. And all reasonings are only a tune to the music of this commandment, a reflection of the fulfillment of this commandment in us. What is amazing is that in each of us it can be reflected quite differently, because God reveals His love to each one differently.

The word chok (law, rule) means the vertical, the connection between a person and God. Both regarding animals and regarding the field there is a command not to mix two kinds of animals, causing them suffering and changing the course of things in nature, or two kinds of grain, forcing them to grow together, that is, not to do violence to nature. And what about clothing? In excavations in the Judean Desert, pieces of clothing were found that are precisely sha'atnéz (woven of two kinds of thread), here – of wool and linen. We do not know whether this is Jewish clothing or not. Many pieces of clothing that have been found in the land of Israel, they really are sha'atnéz: their warp is linen, and the weft is wool. From a technical point of view, as craftsmen explain (I am not a specialist, but that is what the specialists say), it really is more convenient to make clothing this way, but this is forbidden for everyone except the kohanim, perhaps because by virtue of his service the kohen unites in himself the hard-to-combine nature of earth and heaven, he can have such clothing. A simple person who lives in the simple, real world does not need such clothing, therefore such clothing is forbidden to him.

Here we are dealing with a very complicated legal situation, very unpleasant and hard to understand in the 21st century. The slave woman, a non-Jewish woman, does not belong to herself, she belongs to another person, she is property. And as his property this master of hers has dedicated her, betrothed her to some third party – perhaps a Jewish slave, or perhaps a free Jew. At the moment when the master gives her a writ of freedom or when her potential husband pays the ransom for her, she will by law become a Jewish woman (I will not go into the complexities of this law). In our verse this woman is in a kind of halfway state: she is betrothed, but the ransom for her has not been paid, and the writ of freedom has not been given to her by the master. And in such a status she is not protected by anything, no one would have been able to stand up for her. Except the Torah: the Torah says that the one who did such a thing will be beaten with a lash.

A word that is hard to understand is used here, bikkoret. The Talmud interprets this word as a whip made of ox hide, with which one beats. That is, a person who seduced or raped a betrothed slave woman will be beaten with lashes. This is not the punishment that he bears for a free woman, which may outrage us. But we must remember that the Torah was given to a society in which morals differed greatly from ours, in which a woman was practically without rights, and a slave woman was completely without rights. The Torah says a lot about slavery, even about selling children into slavery, and about much else that is completely alien to us today (the example of the two wives, one of whom he loves and the other he hates). But the Torah was given to a society of sinners, an imperfect society, given to grow into. It is precisely thanks to the giving of the Torah that society began to grow in righteousness, and therefore humanity at some stage outlived slavery.

So, besides the fact that the person will be punished, he must bring an offering.

Here the word orla (uncircumcision, foreskin) is used: va'araltem orlato, uncircumcised with uncircumcision or, as it were, closed with closedness. Just as the uncircumcised flesh covers, in exactly the same way a certain uncircumcision will cover the fruits, and they will be inaccessible, forbidden, until the plant gains its strength. In the land of Israel it will be forbidden to eat from a plant for three years after it has been planted.

There is no need to try to eat the fruits of what you have planted right away; be ready to wait three years. In the fourth year it is too early to rejoice: dedicate the whole harvest to the LORD, and only then will this tree be blessed for you.

Of course, one wants to start earning from a planted apple tree, from a planted palm, from a planted olive tree as early as possible. The LORD says: “Do not hurry, do not hurry! And a bird that tears apart prey that is still alive is also not kosher. One must know how to wait, do not hurry with the trees.”

Three commandments, and, as they say, find the odd one out. Two commandments have to do with predictions, but what does the commandment do not eat on the blood have to do with it? The pagan peoples had such a tradition: to summon demons, devils and all sorts of unclean spirits to blood. This is some kind of magic that was widespread in Mesopotamia, connected with summoning the unclean force, which takes part in the meal – not as in the shelamim offering, when the Most High takes part in the meal. Besides that, it is a prohibition on eating meat before the moment the altar has been sprinkled. And then it is similar to what is said about the fruits of trees. We do not eat the fruits until we have brought them to the Temple, and we do not eat meat until the altar has been sprinkled with the blood of the offering, that is, do not eat without having given the blood, and at the same time do not eat on the blood, when the earth has not yet absorbed the blood. It is precisely this that provokes the indignation of King Sha'ul (first book of Shmuel, 14:31–35), it is precisely for this reason that he builds his first altar, so that the people would not sin against the LORD.

What is the difference between the concepts to tell fortunes and to foretell? The verb lenachesh (lo tenachashu, do not foretell) means fortune-telling with the help of some additional elements and phenomena, when a magician or sorcerer pours oil into water and watches how the oil spreads, or it is lead, or it is wax, or it is coffee grounds (fill in what is missing, cross out what is superfluous). The verb te'onenu means to tell fortunes by the reality that already exists in nature – by the hand, by the stars, by the kidneys of a ram and the like, in short, to seek answers in the kidney of a ram, in the flights of birds and in all sorts of similar things. All of this is forbidden to do.

Fortune-telling developed greatly where people believed that every person has a fate predetermined for him in advance; every person is predetermined to fall in some specific place, and if he is warned in time, he can spread some straw there. The foundation of our faith, however, is that the Most High decides our destinies. He governs the Universe in real time, and with Him there is no such thing as His having predetermined everything finally, in advance, so that it cannot be changed in any way. If we want to change our future for the better, we turn directly to the One Who is the Master of our future. Therefore we do not believe in fate and do not believe in predictions of the future; we have no need to try to give a bribe or to buy off some notional, intermediate district officers and local inspectors.

Usually this is understood as do not cut the hair off the temples. The word pe'ot, which is used here, is the plural of the word pe'a (edge), and in the Ashkenazi pronunciation this is exactly peyes, that is, those very Jewish peyes, the edges of the head, which must not be cut off. Such an understanding exists today. We do not know exactly what restriction on the hairstyle the Torah is speaking about here, but I will repeat that in today’s understanding these are peyes.

The verb lehashchit (to spoil) implies cutting with a knife or tearing out pieces, therefore with the invention of razors it became possible to shave off the beard. This is not a legal loophole. Believe me, people who shaved their beards were ready to die for keeping kashrut or Shabbat, were ready to die for their faith, but understood that some things may nonetheless be done. Again, one must be prepared for the fact that there are people who are above us in their level of holiness and above us in their level of understanding of the language, but who do some things differently from us.

Scars means cuts, incisions, burning and so on; tattooing means pricking ink under the skin on a permanent basis. Why was this done? It could be done as the concluding of an alliance with some entity, with some being, a demon, an idol, a little god; or as a brand of slavery to some master, of subjection to some king, that is, an owner’s brand; or it was done as a sign of remembrance of some ancestors, of someone among the departed, who, as was expected, would guard the one who is named by his name (the prison tattoo “I will not forget my own mother” has survived almost to our times). And the point was that people sought protection, defense from ancestors, from spirits, from anyone at all, and tattooed their names or symbols on themselves. And since Israel has a King and Master, Whose Name is already called upon the people, there is no need at all for scars, or tattoos, or connections with the dead, or dedication to some spirits, or anything like that.

The word zimma means lust, vile depravity. What is this about? In the simplest sense, this commandment forbids selling a daughter as a prostitute, as a harlot. For us, residents of the 21st century, this seems to go without saying, but there are still countries, for example Thailand, where this is a widespread phenomenon, when a father trades in his daughter.

This commandment also has other levels. For example, parents say: “Marry him, he is rich, he will be able to support you!” And many girls are brought up in such a way that one needs to find a man who is rich, who will support her. For this she prepares not only herself, but even the image of herself. If you ask an ordinary girl: “Who are you? Tell me about yourself,” she will either talk about her profession: “I am a designer, I am a marketer, I am a salesperson, a manicurist…”, or reveal some of her inner qualities that are realized in this world. That means the protection against sliding down into harlotry is inner content. After all, the Torah said at the beginning of the verse al-techalel (do not defile), we said in verse 4 of chapter 19 that the root of this word has the meaning to empty, to deprive of inner content.

Indeed, a woman has a great gift, and this gift is beauty. It is necessary, it is possible, it is wonderful to be beautiful, a woman should be beautiful, God Himself created her beautiful. About the woman (at creation) it is said that God fashioned her, this is the first thing in the world that was precisely fashioned. The woman is the most skillful work of the Most High, and therefore it is clear that her striving for beauty is laid down in her nature. But through beauty, as through a filter, as through colored glass, the inner light must be revealed, through outer beauty the inner world must shine through. Otherwise the woman will be empty, and this is precisely the sure road to where the Torah forbids going. Let the inner be as beautiful as the outer, first let the inner be beautiful. Then the daughter will be able to unite with her future husband first of all on the spiritual level, then on the level of the soul, and only then on the bodily level. They will become one flesh and will live in love for one another, satisfying not only bodily needs, so that there is not what is called znut (harlotry).

We often hear: “He gives you gifts, dresses, jewelry, and you don’t love him? Well, what else do you need? What did you want? Why are you putting on airs?” That is what girlfriends say, that is what acquaintances say, and it happens, God forbid, that the parents also say so. And in the end the woman is forced to live with her husband for an apartment, for food, for a dress. This is the same znut, the same depravity. Therefore, dear parents, dear dads, guard your daughters and teach them to love their soul before loving the body. As Mashiach said: “What is the use if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?” Teach your daughters that the soul is the main thing, and only then the body. Then there is a good chance that the girl will not get lost, will not turn simply into a body, and the body will not turn into a tool for earning money. And may she be not only rich, but first of all happy, and even before that – righteous and pure.

Many times I have told this story and I will tell it once more. When I was young I wanted to get married, and the rabbi asked me: “What, are you looking for the most beautiful girl in the world?” I said: “Well, why not?” He answered me: “You won’t succeed. I have been married to the most beautiful woman in the world for more than twenty years!” Dear girls! Your beauty will be revealed in the eyes of your husband, and for him you will be the most beautiful girl in the world, that is what he is your husband for, and you are his wife. I say all this with enormous, enormous love and warmth.

Interesting, isn’t it? Interesting, why is this verse exactly here? Sabbaths are not only our weekly Sabbaths, they are also the Sabbaths of years, these are the seventh years, the years of shmita, when it is forbidden to sow the field (we are speaking of the time when the people have already come into the land). Again, what is this about? We can, of course, squeeze out of our property everything possible: “How is it that we won’t sow in the seventh year? Are we going to take a loss? How is it that we won’t open our store on Shabbat? Everyone will be trading, and we will be swaying in the synagogue? No, that won’t do. We’ll open the store, sow the field, we’ll eat the fruit right away, and we’ll set up our daughter with someone richer.” And the Most High says: “Fear My Holiness, I am the LORD! With all your cunning moves and shortcuts – fear! If you do not believe, if there is no trust, then at least fear My Holiness. You must remember that you are coming to the Holy Land, which exists by special laws, therefore fear My Holiness, keep my Sabbaths, live in My time!”

The difference between ovot and yidde'onim is that ovot summon the spirit of the deceased, while yidde'onim claim that the spirit of the deceased enters into them, they are able to hear him and speak in the name of the deceased like some kind of oracles. There is a dispute as to whether it is really the soul of the deceased that rises, or whether it is some spirit that rises. And this dispute is endless, and we have no way at all to check it. Very many young people are fascinated by this, despite the prohibition. An acquaintance of mine used to say: “I might, perhaps, still believe that these three young girls somehow managed to summon the spirit of Einstein. But that Einstein would talk with them for three hours about something, that I find very hard to believe!” And these long conversations about nothing with the souls of the dead suggest that this is a prank by some petty demons who come to mock the youngsters amusing themselves with magic. Although I say all this with humor, nevertheless the prohibition is very serious, and one can get into very unpleasant situations, one can expose oneself to very great danger if one engages in this thoughtlessly.

It does not matter that people have a saying: “Sometimes old age simply comes, but wisdom does not come.” That does not matter, that is not your business. You must respect the old man. Give up your seat to him on the bus: perhaps he is not a wise man, but simply white-bearded, give it up anyway, turn a kind face to him anyway, show him respect, it does not matter what he is like. Here we might think that the old man is a defenseless beggar, and why should we show him any special respect? But the LORD says: “Fear God! Not the old man – Me, God, fear, and out of the fear of God show him respect.”

One cannot say: “They’ve come flooding in here! Israel is not made of rubber, there is no room for everyone! Go back where you came from!” No, love him as yourself, and as for Israel not being made of rubber, that is not your business.

And what happened to you when you were strangers in the land of Egypt can happen to others too, the very best, the most decent people; remember this and do not oppress the stranger.

One more command. True stones are weights with the correct weight; efa is a measure of volume for dry substances; hin is a measure of volume for liquids. Since in those times there was no paper money, iron money, copper money or credit cards, much was sold or exchanged by measures. And scales, gauges, measures – all this had extremely important significance. The Most High says: “Honest and true gauges for all kinds of goods you must have!” We know from excavations on the Temple Mount that many gauges have been found, little weights with a seal with the kohen’s permission that this is a proper weight: there was some kind of inspection that checked this. The Most High says: “Trade must be honest, scales correctly adjusted, measures correctly calibrated, everything must be honest!”

With God's help, you and I are finishing the study of the weekly portion Kedoshim. The chapter that we will be reading is devoted to a description of sins and the punishments for them. Most of the prohibitions spoken of here were already mentioned earlier as a warning, and in this chapter we read not only a listing of the crimes themselves, but also the punishments for them, a kind of Criminal Code.

The whole people must know the Law about crimes and punishments. In this case the whole people is warned about the responsibility that arises for a specific crime, and about what measures must be applied to those around, if those around commit a crime: a person is responsible for his neighbor.

The word lirgóm from the root resh-gímel-mem means precisely stoning and refers only to execution, such a special verb is used here. The people of the land, precisely the neighbors, those around, simple people can punish a person who brings children to Molech. We are responsible for our land not being defiled by impurity. Therefore, when someone serves other gods on it, we must take measures, so the Torah commands. Of course, today we do not carry out pelting with stones, but some work we must do: we must always remember that we bear responsibility for what our neighbor does.

 Each of us who has a relationship with the Most High is called by the name of God's people, a man of God. When we turn to other gods, we thereby dishonor our God. For, doing such a thing, we testify that His authority, His involvement in our life is not enough for us. We turn away from Him, we turn to other gods, to other sources. And when a person turns away from the Most High, what happens? The LORD says: “I will turn My face to him – not so as to give peace, as in the blessing of the kohanim (Bemidbar 6:22), I will turn it with anger. My eye will catch on the one who does not look at Me, who turns to other gods. Therefore take measures against him, as prescribed in the previous verse!”

Well, who wants to get mixed up in this? It is pleasant to hand out awards to veterans, pleasant to give flowers to women, unpleasant to stone a villain. And besides, we are humane, peaceful people, punishing someone is not our thing at all. And the Most High says: “If you conceal, hide your eyes from him, pretend that you noticed nothing…

“…I will destroy not only him, I will carry out a general sweep. If you do not take care of this yourselves, I will take care of it personally. But I shoot in a tight cluster, and I will no longer be doing spot cleaning, but a thorough general cleaning.”

Again, when a person, as is written here, tifné (turns) to diviners and soothsayers, that is, turns away from the Most High, stops expecting mercy and destiny from the Most High, but wants to take everything from life through foretellers and diviners, he is precisely the one who will see the face of the Most High, the Most High will turn His face to him. Whoever turns away, looks to the sides, tries to see other gods, some kind of shortcuts, diviners and foretellers, will meet the eyes of the Most High and will be destroyed from among the people. He will be told to step out of the ranks, and he will never return to the ranks.

That is, the person will himself be to blame for his death. Although our chapter will further be devoted to forbidden relations within the family, it begins with this: there will be no normal family if there is no respect for parents. This is the beginning of everything. They gave birth to us with the participation of the Most High, they were co-workers of the Most High when we were conceived and born. And whoever curses father and mother, to a certain degree also curses the Most High. But besides that, he rises up against the order of the world, against the order of the family. If there is no reverence for parents, then it makes no sense to speak of any other family values. By cursing father and mother is meant any cursing of them, insulting them, presenting them in a bad light and so on, no matter whether they are alive or no longer.

This is an important difference between Jewish law and the laws that existed in those times. Jewish law endows a woman with an independent will. This is a great mercy toward the woman, but at the same time also a great responsibility. If, under the laws of Hammurabi, a wife was unfaithful to her husband, he could say: “I forgive her, please do not execute her!”, and she was forgiven and released, only the adulterer was executed. Under Jewish law the wife herself is fully responsible for her deeds. This is a mercy to her, but in this case it costs her dearly. The husband cannot intercede for her, because she, like any person, stands before God herself and answers for what she did.

Here it is about a situation when the father has divorced his wife or when she has been widowed. In either of these cases both the woman and the one who lay with her are punished with death for adultery. Even if she is divorced, and another man could marry her according to the laws of the Torah, still the son cannot marry his father's widow, a woman divorced from his father and so on. And the punishment for them is death. This is connected with respect for the father: whoever uncovers the nakedness of his father's wife uncovers his father's nakedness, and this must not be.

The word tével means mixing, heaping together, turning into a mash, into chaos.

Here, I think, no comment is needed. We have already spoken many times about homosexual relations. I will repeat: this is an unequivocal, distinct, clear prohibition, not reducible to some particular positions, to some kind of humiliation and so on. Any sexual relation between two men is forbidden by the Torah, and the punishment for it is death.

Burning at the stake is the most terrible punishment of all the punishments that are prescribed. At one time, as we read in the book of Bereshit, Yehuda sentenced Tamar to burning at the stake. In the weekly portion Emor we will read the law about the daughter of a kohen who played the harlot in her father's house and will be burned. And here too such a punishment is applied. This is the exceptional measure of all exceptional measures, the most terrible execution that is ever applied to people.

 This too, probably, there is no point in explaining at length. Unfortunately, this sin has not yet entirely left this world. To this day there are peoples and communities in which cohabitation with animals is widely practiced and is not condemned by society, or everyone (as was said in verse 4) hides their eyes from this sin.

Here and in several more places of the Torah we can see that a beast is to some degree responsible for its actions. One would think: what does the beast have to do with it? A woman came to some animal (I don’t even want to tell what happened between them), so why punish the beast? But just as the goring ox is punished, because in the nature of things a person kills an animal in order to eat it, and a beast must not kill a person, so it is here too: since there is something in this animal that allows it to violate its animal nature, the animal is punished with death. And, one can say, its blood is upon it, it is responsible for something. An animal is not an absolutely dumb creature that exists only on reflexes, but, as we see, it is responsible for itself, and this costs it dearly.

 The word chesed, which is probably familiar to everyone, or to many, in the meaning mercy, is used in this case in a completely different sense. Here this word is of Akkadian origin and means shame, disgrace, ignominy, and likewise in the Aramaic translations: kalno (shame, disgrace). It is in this meaning that it must be understood.

The Most High will make the hidden manifest. Those guilty of this sin are punished by destruction before all the people, when it will be obvious to everyone what they are punished for, no one will be able to say that it happened by a coincidence of circumstances. Here one can notice an important detail, if one reads attentively. It is written like this: “He saw her nakedness, she saw his nakedness.” Because it often happens that, when a brother and a sister live together in one house, he can take her secretly, by force. In this case she is not subject to punishment. Only if she also saw his nakedness, that is, she herself also wanted this relationship, only in this case is she punished together with him.

That is, the man uncovered not simply her nakedness, but the nakedness of nakedness. Even a woman who is not ashamed of her nakedness before her husband, who is not ashamed of some intimate parts of her body before her husband, is nevertheless ashamed of her flows and hides this. And here the man uncovered the nakedness of the woman’s nakedness.

In this case the aunt is not the father’s sister, but the uncle’s wife, the wife of the father’s brother. Here we read shall die alone, and in the next verse we will read a different punishment – shall be alone. And the midrash interprets the difference: shall die alone means that they will have no children, and shall be alone – if they did have children, then they will bury them: as a punishment they will outlive their children and bury them.

This rule has a single exception. There is a commandment: if two brothers lived together and the elder brother died, then the younger one must go in to his widow, in order to restore seed to the elder brother. To go in means not to take her as a wife, but to go in to her in the role of his brother. From the point of view of inheritance this is a loss for the younger one, because his children will have to share the inheritance with her children, they will be the heirs of the deceased elder brother. And nevertheless, in order to restore the allotment, he must go in to his brother’s widow.

Let me remind you that a land flowing with milk and honey – this is an image denoting a land ready for cultivation, a land that is only waiting for someone to begin working it. But you must not live like the other peoples, must not take them as an example and fall under their influence, because the LORD has separated you.

Do not defile yourselves with what I have called defiling for you, keep your purity.

 This is the beginning of separation, the beginning of the path to holiness. Choose holiness, become holy, and you will be set apart for Me.

Why is the woman mentioned separately here? Because this craft was very widespread among women. And to this day all kinds of esoterica are practiced more by women than by men, although a certain equality has been achieved.

The Most High separated the people of Israel from the other peoples, and this separateness, this division, must be kept. Sometimes harsh measures are required toward those who try to destroy this division. Of course, today we do not practice the death penalty, we do not stone anyone, we are very far from that. We are all humane, open, liberal people, we are open to the modern world, and this is good – one must know how to look attentively into this world, to interact with it, all this is good and right. And nevertheless, one must understand how seriously the Most High takes it that the laws of other peoples should not penetrate into our life, that we should live by God’s laws and not fall under some foreign influence, the influence of foreign laws, which can very easily happen if we do not make an effort and watch over this.

I would like to reflect on one of the most important commandments of the Torah. Whoever was lucky enough to go to a Jewish kindergarten (or whoever had the misfortune to go to a Jewish kindergarten) surely remembers how the teacher sings and the children repeat after her: “Rabbi Akiva said: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ – this is the main principle of the Torah.” We are taught from childhood that this is the most important principle of the Torah. And not only Rabbi Akiva, Yeshua also asserts that one of the most important principles of the Torah is love your neighbor as yourself. In Russian this commandment is formulated in six words. In Hebrew it is even simpler, in three words: ve'ahavta lere'acha kamocha. It would seem, what could be simpler, what could be clearer, what could be more familiar, but in life it is far from always that this works out, and questions remain: how realistic is it at all to love one’s neighbor, is it possible at all? To what extent is it possible to command or order – me, you, him – to love someone? How can one command love? And even if it is possible to command me to love someone, how can one determine the degree of this love? How can one not only command to love, but also command to love the way I love myself?

This commandment is in chapter 19 of our book, in verse 18. Let’s read.

Another question arises: why does the verse end with the words I am the LORD? The commandment that Yeshua gives sounds different, sounds new: love one another as I have loved you. What does this mean, and why is this a new commandment? And many, many more questions remain, which we will try to answer.

So, how can one command a person to love? If we look at the whole of chapter 19 of the book of Vayikra, we will see that it begins with simpler and more understandable commandments. For example:

Then come the commandments about the field, about the vineyard, about caring for the poor. This is also understandable. Further on we read:

This is also understandable. Understandable, although already more difficult: it is difficult to be truthful all the time, difficult never to lie. The Talmud tells a story about a man named Rava, who up to a certain moment considered himself very truthful: “I once considered myself a truthful man. I thought that I was truthful until I met another man, whose name was Rav Tavot. And he said to me: ‘Not for any money, not even for the greatest treasures in the world, will I ever lie. Because once I happened to live in a city that is called Kushta (Truth). In this city no one ever lied. Such was the custom of the people, that the inhabitants of this city had no lies, not even in small things.’ Rav Tavot settled in this city. He was a fairly truthful man, and they accepted him. He married a woman from that city and lived there long and happily, until one day a neighbor dropped in on them at a not very convenient time: the wife of this good man was busy with some personal matters just then. And instead of saying: ‘She is busy right now, she cannot come out to you right now,’ he said: ‘She is not at home’ – and his wife died. Because long life was ensured by honesty. The inhabitants of the city said to him: ‘Sorry, friend, there is no place for you among us. You do not hold up to the level of truth that is required to live here.’ And they drove him out of this city.” On the one hand, it is hard to tell the truth and only the truth all your life. Although, on the other hand, of course, telling the truth is easy and pleasant. This story is a tall tale, a parable, but there is a hint in it: telling the truth is hard, especially in small things. We very often deceive in small things. But there is a commandment not to deceive even for personal gain, even for the sake of making a profit by deceiving one’s neighbor.

What is this about? Sometimes we see a person who is in trouble, in a difficult situation. And we can say to him: “You know what? I’ll do you a good deed, I’ll give you a job!” We can give him a job and make him work for us for pennies, for food, for something else. This is called fleecing a person, that is, taking advantage of his poverty to make him work for a price lower than what he is due. Accordingly, one must not plunder either. One must not charge a person a higher price for something he needs only because he needs it very much. And one must not hold back a worker’s pay: not every person has the means for supper if he was not paid during the day, and this happens in our time too. This is what the Torah teaches us. And these are things quite understandable to us, although it is not always simple. It is not always simple to pay a person for his labor, or for a thing he sells, as much as it really costs. Sometimes we can take advantage of some weakness of his, some need of his. The Torah teaches us to grow gradually in the commandment. And further on we read:

If someone does not hear (not necessarily that he is deaf), then we cannot speak evil about him behind his back. If someone is blind, then there is no need to put a stick in his way to see how he will fall. This means not to tempt a person and to fear your God. We tempt a person if we use his weaknesses to extract some benefit from them, or simply disregard his weaknesses, even without any benefit for ourselves. A blind man fell, and we laughed: “Ha-ha, how funny.” We talked behind a deaf man’s back: “What a fool, he doesn’t hear anything, deaf as a post.” Funny, joyful? Then you do not fear God.

And further we read a whole series of different commandments: do not do injustice in judgment, do not go about as a gossip among your people, do not remain indifferent to the blood of your neighbor (that is, stand up for your neighbor when he is wronged), do not bear enmity against your brother in your heart… And only then do we read what we began our conversation with, what is written in verse 18: “Do not take revenge, and do not keep a grudge, and love your neighbor as yourself, I am the LORD.” That is, the Most High builds a certain ladder, and climbing it, going from one commandment to another, learning them, we grow, we acquire one quality after another. And so we ascend to that level when, having fulfilled all this, having carried out all this, we can say: “We are learning to love our neighbor as ourselves.” That is, the first understanding is that this is difficult, that this is a very high bar – to love your neighbor as yourself. But a little ladder of commandments leads to this bar, and one can climb up by it.

The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, read this verse differently. Here, in parentheses, it should be noted that, since there are no punctuation marks in Hebrew, for most verses of the Torah there are different variants of reading. And the Baal Shem Tov saw another reading, which he considered correct. (Possibly Yeshua too speaks of a different reading of this commandment.) The Baal Shem Tov read it like this: ve'ahavtá lere'écha kamócha aní adonáy – “As you will love your neighbor, so I too, your LORD, will love you.” In Tehillim 121, in verse 5, we read: “adonáy shomrécha (the LORD is your keeper), adonáy tzilchá (the LORD is your shadow) alyád yiminécha (at your right hand).

What is a shadow? A shadow is what follows a person. The LORD reflects in His attitude toward you your attitude toward people. If you want the Most High to love you, if you want His love for you to be revealed, then reveal your love for people. The more you love people, the more the Most High will love you. All these commandments teach you to love people, so that the love of the Most High for you may be revealed. This, as we said, is the understanding of the Baal Shem Tov.

There is one more understanding. The Jerusalem Talmud (tractate Nedarim) gives the example of a butcher who is cutting meat. In his right hand he has a knife, with his left hand he holds a piece of meat and cuts it. And one random, careless movement of the hand with the knife – and he has cut a finger of his left hand. But the left hand will not start attacking the right one, no matter what; even if the right hand has caused harm to the left, the left will not be angry at the right. Why will it not be angry, why will it not take revenge? Because there is an awareness that this is one body.

Here we can make a small digression and talk about another very important commandment, the commandment of love for the Most High. In the Torah, in the book of Devarim, this commandment is repeated three times, on three different levels of holiness. The first time it says: “Remember what the Most High did for you, how He brought you out of Egypt, how He led you, how He raised you.” If you remember everything the Most High did for you, this whole ladder by which He lifted you up in life, you will love Him. This is comparable to the first explanation, when we said that the Most High brings us to this level of holiness as if by a ladder. If we remember all His deeds in our life, all His lessons, then we love Him, and accordingly we love our neighbor too, by the same principle. Here is the second case where the Torah speaks of love for the Most High: “If you love the Most High, He will give you rain in its season and will take care of you.” We also spoke about this: “If you want the Most High to love you, if you want the love of the Most High to be manifested in your life, show love to your neighbor.” The third variant, the most exalted of the variants of love for the Most High: “Shmá yisraél adonáy elohénu adonáy echád – Hear, Israel, the LORD is our God, God is one!”, and therefore you love God. You love God because you are a participant, a part of one enormous orchestra of the universe, because you are included in this orchestra. And in exactly the same way you love your neighbor, because he plays one part with you in this orchestra, because he is part of one and the same melody of the universe with you.

Although the commandment of love for one’s neighbor is not given three times, these three facets of understanding it correspond to the three levels of love for the Most High. Every person, on his own level, loves the Most High, perhaps for what the Most High has done for him and for what the Most High has taught him. Perhaps for the sake of the Most High doing something for him, or perhaps out of an awareness of the greatness of the design, the unity of the design, and from an awareness of his own role, from an awareness of the happiness that a person is admitted to this design, each on his own level.

And in love for one’s neighbor there are exactly the same three levels of understanding. I can love my neighbor for his sociality, so to speak, for his care for me, for all those commandments that are fulfilled around me: for the grapes left in the vineyard, for the corner of the field left, for the tzdaká that will be given to me, and so on. On a higher level one can say: “I can love my neighbor in order to be worthy of the love of the Most High. I want the Most High to love me, so that it may go well with me through the love of the Most High. If He wants me to love my neighbor, well then, I will love my neighbor, so that I too am loved, so that the love of the Most High is shown to me too.” And on the highest level I can love my neighbor simply because I understand: as the LORD is one, so all of us, His creation, all people, are part of one big body. And it is foolish, of course, for the right hand to be angry at the left hand. And these three levels are three different facets, different degrees of understanding by each person on his own level. And it is not a given that I am on the same level every day. This was a short drawing of a parallel between the commandment of love for one’s neighbor and love for the Most High. Here the digression ends, and we return to our topic, to the commandment of love for one’s neighbor.

One more understanding is brought by Chagai Hofer, a contemporary teacher and public figure. And he says this: “Every person somewhere deep in his soul loves himself. An alcoholic who drinks, drinks so that he feels good, this is his expression of love for himself. Even a suicidal person, God forbid, who wants to kill himself, he too loves himself: he does what is good for him. His understanding of what is good for him is formed out of his mental unhealthiness, under the influence of his yétzer hará (evil inclination)”. How can we help him if we ourselves have, for example, an inclination toward alcoholism or suicide, God forbid? We cannot. Therefore, in order to show love for our neighbor, in order to serve our neighbor, we must cleanse ourselves of what harms us: of bad addictions, of the slavery of sin, of bad thoughts. That is, we ourselves need to maintain our spiritual health, to love ourselves and take care of ourselves, in order to love another; without this it will not work. If I do not love myself, if I have thoughts of suicide, hatred of myself, no peace with myself, then how can I show love to another person? How can I help him? My love for my neighbor is a projection of my love for myself: after all, I must act toward him the way I want others to act toward me.

Rabbi Yehuda Fetaya of Baghdad gives an example from the book of Mishlei (27:19), where it is written: “As in water – face to face, so the heart of a man – to a man.” If you want him to love you, love him, or: as you call out, so the echo answers. If you reveal your love for a person, then he too will reveal his love for you. As in a mirror, as a person’s reflection in water, so you will be reflected in other people. Of course, this sounds beautiful, but (I can say this as a side note) it does not always work, unfortunately; perhaps it worked in Baghdad a hundred years ago.

The rabbis tell this modern parable about a man who left Israel for America to seek American happiness. Whether a long time passed or a short one, he became very rich, got his business off the ground, built himself a house like a castle, somewhere over there, in the American Monte Carlo. Several years later his own brother came to America with a little backpack over his shoulder, counting on having a brother in America who would help him get settled. He knocked, the local security guard opened, looked and said: “What have you come for? No handouts for beggars here, go away!” He said: “Go, tell the owner that his brother has come to him.” But the owner of the villa was not a kind man: apparently he had not gone to a Jewish kindergarten, or had forgotten what he used to sing with the teacher. He answered: “But I have no brothers!” And his poor brother went off on his way. Whether he got settled in America or went back with nothing, the story is silent about that. Some time passed, and the rich man writes his father a letter: “Dad, I urgently need some documents from home, please make photocopies for me and send them!” No answer. A few days later he writes again: “Please send them, urgently!” No answer. He decided to call. And the father says to him: “Listen, I have a son. And he is my own son, I know about him that he is my own son. If he is not your brother, then it turns out you are not my son at all. And if you are not my son, then what documents, what do you want from me? I don’t understand at all!” If you do not accept that your neighbor is your brother, that he is part of you (like the butcher with his hands or, as we said, by the principle adonáy elohénu adonáy echád: the LORD is our God, God is one), if you do not feel this unity, then the Most High is not the LORD to you either. You remain without His blessing, God forbid.

These are the facets of understanding this commandment that can be revealed. There are, of course, many of them. Many rabbis, much ink and many pens have been spent on the interpretation of this commandment. And one cannot encompass them all, and all the books of the world would not contain them. And I have only touched on this in general terms, just a little.

Yeshua says: “A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved you!” We read these words in the Gospel of Yochanan (13:34). What was said in the Aramaic language we read in the Greek language; one always needs to make allowance for this. Whatever the leading of the Spirit may have been, and however carefully the words were chosen, a translation is a translation. Let us try, as far as possible, to understand these words in their historical and linguistic context.

We gave examples showing that this verse (19:18) can be read in different ways. And perhaps here Yeshua offers a new reading of this verse and, accordingly, a new understanding of the commandment ve'ahavtá lere'achá kamócha aní adonáy: love your neighbor as I, the LORD, love you. With the same love with which I love you, with the same light that I open up in you, act so that whoever sees you sees the Father: love your neighbor as I love you. And Yeshua does not speak here from himself, but simply rereads this commandment. It really can be read this way. (Here I want to remind you that we are trying to reconstruct something, to understand something, and we must do this with fear and trembling, with the apprehension that we may be mistaken, with the awareness that we may be mistaken. And nothing of what has been said here, of what we suppose here, can be taken as absolute truth, and it is frightening to think that it would be taken as absolute truth. Please remember this.)

The second variant of understanding the commandment that Yeshua gives: “Take an example from Me, I am an example of how one should love one another. You say that this is impossible, it seems impossible to you. I have shown you how. Now do as I do.” This “do as I do” again sounds like three words in the Russian language, but it is a school for a whole lifetime: how to learn to serve the Most High to the utmost in that mission to each particular person to whom you are sent, to each person whom you meet. Again I am speaking about my own understanding and my own interpretation of the commandment, and I say this not from the position of a person who has already mastered everything, has learned everything and is now writing memoirs “How I Learned to Love.” I speak about this from the position of a person who looks at this path the way someone standing at the foot of a mountain looks at the mountain. I am still very far from this level. But I am speaking of what we are called to, of the bar that Yeshua sets before us, of the heights to which He calls us.

If we compare these two variants of understanding the commandments, then they can also be combined. In order to learn to love your neighbor the way the LORD loves you, you must learn from Yeshua to love your neighbor the way He loves us, learn this love from Him, for He says about Himself: “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father!” If we turn to Yochanan and read from his epistles, we will see that through them constantly runs the thought that we must love one another the way God loves us, with God’s love. John constantly speaks about this. If God loved us, then we too must love one another: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 Epistle of Yochanan 4:7). One more quotation, again from Yochanan, from the same epistle (2:7–9): “Beloved! I write to you not a new commandment, but an ancient commandment, which you have had from the beginning. The ancient commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. But at the same time I also write a new commandment to you, which is true both in Him and in you: because the darkness is passing and the true light already shines. Whoever says that he is in the light, but hates his brother, is still in darkness.” Here Yochanan draws a parallel between love and light. The light spoken of by Yochanan from the very beginning of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…All things came into being through Him …in Him was life, and the life was the light of men” – this is the primordial light, of which the Most High said: “Let there be light! – yehi ór.” The light that was before the creation of the luminaries, that special light which, according to Jewish tradition, the Most High hid with Himself for the time being, in order to reveal it in the world to come. When it is revealed, then together with it Divine love is revealed in all its fullness, in all its perfection. Through the Mashiach, Who is the Light to the world, Who shows the world the Father, the love of the Father is revealed too. Whoever is with the Mashiach is a bearer of this light and must, as a testimony, as a seal of this light, wear not a bright face, not a fancy jacket, not a “Rolex” watch, not a pious expression on his face, but love for his neighbor. The words from the Gospel of Yochanan (13:35): “By this all will know, that you are My disciples, if you have love among yourselves” – this is the signature, the seal, this is the most important defining mark. Not by dogmatics, not by joyful dances, not by sad songs, not by your placing some dogma above a person, but “by your having love among yourselves, by this they will know that you are My disciples.”

At the very end it is worth returning to the very beginning and recalling Rabbi Akiva and the little song we know from kindergarten. Rabbi Akiva says: “Love your neighbor as yourself – this is the most important principle in the Torah.” It is told about Rabbi Akiva that thousands of his students died one after another, because there was no mutual respect between them, because there was no love between them. And the sages ask: “How can this be? Rabbi Akiva proclaimed this the most important principle in the Torah, and his students died because they could not live up to it?!” And the sages answer: “Precisely for this reason Rabbi Akiva proclaimed this the most important principle of the Torah: it was the most difficult thing for his students, and the most difficult thing is the most important thing.” Yeshua says that already disciples, not certified specialists, not those who have received a diploma from His school and finished the school with a gold medal, will have love among themselves. Already we, at our level, must strive to have love among ourselves; this will set us apart, by this we will be recognized. So far we do not manage to meet this criterion; it is bitter to admit, but that is how it is. But let us not lose heart, but let us persistently try to learn this. Love your neighbors more than dogmas, more than your own righteousness, love your neighbors because they are your brothers, because you are part of one body, because you are part of one world, because God loves them. Well, if for these reasons it does not work, then love your neighbors at least because, if you do not love them, God will not love you. The movement toward righteousness leads to this love. If righteousness does not lead to this love, then such righteousness is worth nothing. Let us try to be such a testimony that whoever has seen us has seen the Father; that whoever has met with us leaves the meeting with us feeling more loved, more needed, having come to know the Most High more. Let us try! I know that it is hard, but let us persistently try. These are the thoughts I wanted to share.

Read also the stenogram of the Acharei Mot portion, the talk about prayer and the weekly Torah portions.