The nineteenth chapter of Vayikra, with which our parsha begins, is one of the supreme statements of the ethics of the Torah. It’s about the right, the good and the holy, and it contains some of Judaism’s greatest moral commands: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and “Let the stranger who lives among you be like your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt.”
But the chapter is also surpassingly strange. It contains what looks like a random jumble of commands, many of which have nothing whatever to do with ethics and only the most tenuous connection with holiness.
What have these to do with the right, the good and the holy?
To understand this we have to engage in an enormous leap of insight into the unique moral/social/spiritual vision of the Torah, so unlike anything we find elsewhere.
Through an examination of the text, we can understand that the strange collection of commands in Kedoshim turns out not to be strange at all. The holiness code sees love and justice as part of a total vision of an ordered universe in which each thing, person and act has their rightful place, and it is this order that is threatened when the boundary between different kinds of animals, grain, fabrics is breached. An ordered universe is a moral universe, a world at peace with its Creator and itself.
This article is part of the Covenant & Conversation series.
To read more from Rabbi Sacks or to subscribe to his mailing list, please visit http://www.rabbisacks.org/. You can also follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
