Shuli Passow

JTS Senior Sermon

Parshat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim 5775
April 28, 2015

Five years ago I received an email from the JTS admissions office. It read, in part,
Dear Shuli:
Shalom! I want to confirm that your rabbinical school interview will take place on Tuesday,
March 16
We request that you share some words of Torah with the Admissions Committee.... Your Dvar
Torah, focusing on the parsha, should be limited to three minutes..
When I checked the calendar, I realized that the Torah portion that week was Parshat Vayikra,
Leviticus, a blood and guts-filled parsha dealing primarily with the details of Temple sacrifices.
One year ago, when I found out that I was pregnant with our second child and due this past
January, I opted to schedule my senior sermon for the last date possible. And when I checked
the calendar, it turned out that once again I would be speaking about a torah portion in Sefer
Vayikra, the book of the Torah that some --though not Chancellor Eisen--would say is the most
inaccessible, the most challenging for a modern Jew to connect with, full of--some-- seemingly
bizarre laws.
Now somehow I managed to say something meaningful and resonant five years ago, because
they let me in to rabbinical school!
And Im hoping I can do the same today, so that they let me out of rabbinical school!
Parshat Kedoshim, the second half of this weeks double Torah portion, contains some of these
difficult, hard to access laws, and we are challenged as we read this parsha to wrestle with
these mitzvot and to consider what what meaning they might have for us.
I think its particularly difficult to find relevance in mitzvot that we cannot not practice at all--but
curiously, one of the greatest thinkers in Jewish history--Maimonides--seemed to think that two
commandments from our parsha
--two commandments which he did not observe, and which most Jews of his time and most
Jews today do not observe, in fact cannot observe-somehow represent the essence of Judaism and what it means to be a Jew..

Basing himself on the Gemara in Tractate Yevamot1, and codifying this rabbinic passage into
law, the Rambam teaches that when a person seeks to become a member of the Jewish
people, we are to first instruct her generally in some of the minor and major commandments.2
Then the Gemara and the Rambam get specific, identifying four agricultural practices whose
laws must be taught to the prospective convert, four practices which all require allocating a
portion of ones harvest for the poor.
Two of these practices are commanded in Parshat Kedoshim: peah, leaving the corners of ones
field for the poor to harvest, and leket, leaving behind grain that has fallen to the ground while
harvesting, again, for the needy to collect.
This is rather curious. Of all the hundreds of mitzvot that Maimonides could have explicitly
identified, he and the Talmud, singled out these laws --Peah and Leket--as ones to mention to a
prospective convert.
Peah and Leket. Peah and Leket?
Are these really the central mitzvot of Judaism?
With all due respect to the new generation of local Jewish farmers like my brother Nati, These
laws are applicable only if you are farming in the land of Israel!
How many converts to Judaism--how many Jews!--are ever going to observe them?
So why does the Gemara, and the Rambam, insist that we teach the mitzvot of peah and leket
to someone who wants to convert to Judaism?
The Gemara itself is bothered by this question and tries to find an answer--in doing so, reflects
what I think is a keen understanding of the human psyche. The Gemara explains that we
human beings, by our nature, are concerned about losing even the smallest amount of our
property--even the corner of our field, even a few bundles of grain.3
In other words, there is an impulse to claim ownership, a feeling of entitlement to what we
believe to be ours, that is very human. And if you spend much time with a two year old, you
know that this is very true. At the moment in which the child is beginning to develop her sense
of self, her own identity, how does she so often express it? With the word Mine! By claiming
her toys, her food, everything in her sight! as her own.

1 BT Yevamot 47a
2 Mishne Torah, Hilchot Issurei Biah 14:2
3 BT Yevamot 47b

And while most of us hopefully outgrow the behavior of pointing to something and saying mine,
there is a vestige of this psychology that remains. In fact there is a body of literature on what is
called the psychology of ownership, which explores the connection between possessions and
human identity--and the research demonstrates that possessions play a central role in the
construction of identity, that the things we own become an extension of the self, and who we
understand ourselves to be.
And so it makes sense that we would be resistant, as the Gemara understands us to be, with
giving up even the smallest amount of our property--because doing so would be tantamount to
giving up a part of who we are.
The laws of Peah and leket challenge this psychology: They agitate us to transcend our basic
human nature. They require us to relinquish our sense of entitlement, saying that even the fruits
of our own labor do not fully belong to us.
And while the Torah does not call for complete self-effacement, by forcing us to resist an
expansive claim of ownership, these mitzvot do undermine the centrality of the self in our
posture towards the world.

In requiring that peah and leket be among those few mitzvot that are taught to a prospective
convert--even if she is not going to be able to observe these laws--the Gemara, and the
Rambam are saying that the ethos that animates these mitzvot is the essence of what it means
to be Jewish.
The ethos that animates these mitzvot is the essence of what it means to be Jewish.
The values which find expression in these specific commandments are the very values that
animate the entirety of Jewish law, of halacha. Because halacha, is a system --a spiritual
practice-- that pushes us to create lives and communities where the self is not the arbiter of all
meaning.
So what it means to become a member of the Jewish people is to embrace and embody a
particular worldview, a worldview described by Abraham Joshua Heschel as one in which the
self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel.4

Making sense of the Rambam and his understanding of how peah and leket introduce a
potential convert to Judaism, we can better understand the opening of our parsha, the first two
verses of Leviticus 19.
4 Mans Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism, p. 7


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1 And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying: 2 Speak unto all the congregation of the children of
Israel, and say unto them: Ye shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy.

Biblical commentators note an unusual phrase in verse two: el kol adat bnai yisrael, to the entire
congregation of the Children of Israel. Generally, we have the introduction: speak to the
Children of Israel. This is the only time in the book of Leviticus--and one of only a handful of
places in the entire Torah-- where this phrase is used, where Moshe is specifically instructed to
address the entire congregation.
Why does the Torah here refer to the people as kol adat bnai yisrael?
The 18th century Chassidic thinker, Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, known as the Meor
Vashemesh, connects this notion of the collective, the edah, to opening words of the parsha:
kedoshim thiyu, you shall be holy.5
He writes:
, - , - '

the passage You shall be holy was stated to the entire community, teaching that it is possible
for an individual to achieve holiness only by gathering together with the congregation in service
to the divine...

Writing in Hungary during the same period, the Hatam Sofer offers a similar idea6:

The Torah does not demand of us a holiness of separation...on the contrary, the injunction to
be holy was stated to the entire community: be holy by situating yourselves within the
community and through interwovenness with humanity.

5 Kalonymus Kalman Epstein (Poland, born c 1753). His commentary on the Torah is known as the Meor
Vashemesh. This passage is from his commentary on Parshat Kedoshim

6 Cited in Itturei Torah, a commentary on the weekly Torah portion by Aharon Ya-akov Greenberg (b.
1900, Poland, d. 1963, Israel)

Put slightly differently: holiness cannot be achieved by the individual alone. By using the phrase
kol adat bnai yisrael --the entire congregation of the Children of Israel--in conjunction with the
instruction to be holy, the Torah teaches that kedusha can be achieved only by joining ourselves
up with others, by pursuing a spiritual life together with others, by understanding that our lives
are intertwined with all life.
This sounds lovely. But the implications of this idea are potentially very challenging.
Because being part of community means that we accept upon ourselves an obligation to the
other, and to the greater whole.
Being part of community calls, at times, for self transcendence, putting aside our own needs and
desires for something larger than ourselves.
Being part of community means that we take part in the community, even when we might find it
inconvenient, or taxing, or less than personally fulfilling.
And these are hard things to do. I find them very hard. I find it very hard to fight against basic
human nature, especially when it is compounded by a culture that prioritizes the individual and
tells us that what is most important is our own personal experience, personal fulfillment,
personal meaning. A culture that tells us that we are absolutely entitled to everything we have
worked for and believe to be our own.
And it is hard, it is hard for me, to try and consciously deconstruct the importance of the self,
and commit myself through my actions to the larger enterprise that is Am Yisrael, that is
halacha, that is a world of tzedek and chesed.
But the highest aspiration of the Jewish religion--kedoshim thiyu--happens through this exact
spiritual exercise: of transcending our self-centered impulses and reorienting ourselves to the
larger whole of which we are part.
So the very worldview underlying the mitzvot of peah and leket-The worldview that the Rambam, and the Gemara, understand as being at the heart of
Judaism-The worldview that a convert to the Jewish people must be prepared to adopt as her own-the self is not the hub, but the spoke of the revolving wheel-is the worldview that allows for kedusha, for holiness.
Vayikra Chapter 19 can read and feel like a random collection of laws. But there is a reason
why Leket and Peah are only seven verses from the larger commandment to be holy.

There is unity in this chapter, in this parsha--an underlying message that a life well lived is a
delicate dance between the assertion and the intentional contraction of the self. When we
dance this dance, bringing ourselves into covenantal community with others in service to the
divine, we will live out this parshas vision for who we are asked to be in the world: kedoshim
thiyu.