Parshiyot Aharei Mot—Kedoshim – 5786

A D’var Torah for Parshiyot Aharei Mot—Kedoshim

By Rabbi Dorit Edut (‘ 06)

With all the conflicts in our world today and the divisiveness in the Jewish community we might well be tempted to respond to Parashat Kedoshim’s formulation of The Golden Rule with the words from the famous Tina Turner song: “What’s love got to do with it?” And yet, I think there is a great deal that the Torah is trying to teach us in this portion about love.

It is not a simple matter – to love someone else.  Just look at the verse that precedes (Leviticus 19:17) – where we see what Abraham Ibn Ezra calls the reverse of this expression: “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart.”  While indeed there is a difference in our relationships to our “kinsfolk,” i.e., our relatives or other Jewish people, to our “fellow,” i.e., our non-Jewish friends and the larger society in which we live – the focus here is on what it means to “hate in your heart.” Starting from this point and getting to love in our relationship to others is quite a seismic shift, even if the Torah does it in two verses!

There may be valid reasons for feeling this hatred – especially if you have been hurt physically, verbally or emotionally.  But the Torah is cautioning us NOT to keep this bottled up, “in our hearts” so to speak, but rather to proceed with the advice in the next part of this verse:

“You shall surely reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of this.” It seems that the Torah is urging us to speak up about this, release this feeling, speak directly to the one who has caused you to feel this way, but do it carefully. We can find wisdom for our days in the words of Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah, known as Hizkuni, a 13^th century French Jewish Torah commentator who wrote the following on this verse:

“If it has come to your attention that the Jew made negative comments about you, accused you falsely behind your back of wrongdoing, do not bottle your resentment up in your heart by hating him. You should remonstrate your colleague about having wrongly accused you, asking him what prompted him to badmouth you. Perhaps, once matters are in the open you can demonstrate to your colleague that he completely misinterpreted one of your actions…. You are to act in this manner even if you are convinced that your remonstrations will not help at all. In fact, your failure to make an attempt at reconciliation will be held against you by the heavenly tribunal. This is why the verse concludes with the words “but incur no guilt because of this.”

And going even further with this the next Torah passage clearly says that we are not to bear a grudge against others nor take vengeance against them, paraphrasing the first half of Leviticus 19:18.

So, all this ‘dirty laundry’ needs to be examined BEFORE we can even offer love to another. The Torah recognizes our fallibility as human beings and how easily we can get into conflicts with others because of what we think they might have said or done, because of our unwillingness to attempt reconciliation, because of our defensiveness and the speed at which we can build a grudge against another, and because we can contemplate or actually act to release these feelings in vengeful ways.  In fact, as Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel pointed out in a his Hilkhot Rotzeah 13:14 (and cited in an article in the journal Sources, Summer 2025, pg.98) righteous anger and hatred towards another can quickly devolve into pleasure, as we take a certain satisfaction in not only feeling we are right but also in seeing the ‘enemy’ suffer. Although this might seem a natural impulse, it is something that we should resist because it ultimately dehumanizes us, making us callous towards the suffering of others

But pause a moment and remember that we, the Jewish people, have endured suffering at the hands of many enemies throughout our history, and our current times are no exception. How is it that, despite the persecutions, previous generations have not developed deep hatred in their hearts but have retained that spark of human dignity which allows ultimately for love?  One of the most influential writers of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, described this in his article “To Remain Human In the Face of Inhumanity” (cited in Bernard Raskas Heart of Wisdom II, pg.218.) He describes the liberation of the concentration camp where he was one of only a few thousand inmates who had miraculously survived:

“When the first American jeeps appeared at the gates, there were no outbursts of joy. The inmates just did not have the feeling to rejoice or even the energy to cheer… But what did the Jewish survivors do to prove they were free? Believe it or not, they held services.”

In a world which had tried to annihilate them, the end of this darkness was observed with prayers – probably Kaddish for those whose holy souls had passed to Gan Eden but who died terrible deaths there in that concentration camp. Somehow, they also tried to express themselves as human beings with all the grief and loss that they had not been able to even openly show until then. They were not focused on any hatred or vengeance at that moment that may have been inside of them, and even years later does not seem to be a central theme in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors.

Our world is complicated today and our Jewish people are so divided because of the pressures of “identity politics”, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, etc.  It seems almost impossible at times to try to bring people back together, to close some of these gaps. And yet we must remember what we are here for, why we exist even as a Jewish people. This parashah is called “Kedoshim” because we are reminded of all the ways in which we can become an “Am Kadosh – A Holy People” by embodying the values and morals given by our Torah in our relationship to ourselves, to others and to God. And this DOES have everything to do with love.

As Rabbi Avraham Kook, first Chief Rabbi of Israel, wrote in his work Orot HaKodesh, about this idea of “Attaining Ahavat Yisrael”:

Loving others does not meant indifference to baseness and moral decline. Our goal is to awaken knowledge and morality, integrity, and refinement; to clearly mark the purpose of life, its purity and holiness….[1]

We can move from hidden hatred to open discussion and questioning – to respectful confrontation and reconciliation – to understanding, friendship, and ultimately to love. We may not succeed at first, but we cannot stop trying. In a world of unholiness, let us live as an example of what holiness in our human relationships can look like.

[1] Adapted from Orot HaKodesh vol. III, pp. 324–334; Malachim K’vnei Adam, pp. 262, 483–485