LEV269 Something fundamental happens at the beginning of Parashat Kedoshim, whose story is one of the greatest, if unacknowledged, contributions of Judaism to the world. Until now Leviticus has been largely about sacrifices, purity, the Sanctuary, and the priesthood. It has been, in short, about a holy place, holy offerings, and the elite and holy people--Aaron and his descendants--who minister there. Suddenly, in chapter nineteen, the text opens up to embrace the whole of the people in the whole of life: "The Lord said to Moses, 'Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy'" [this and preceding verse]. This is the first and only time in Leviticus that so inclusive an address is commanded. The sages said that it meant that the contents of the chapter were proclaimed by Moses to a formal gathering of the entire nation (hak'hel). It is the people as a whole who are commanded to "be holy," not just an elite, the priests. It is life itself that is to be sanctified, as the chapter goes on to make clear. Holiness is to be made manifest in the way the nation makes its clothes and plants its fields, in the way justice is administered, workers are paid, and business conducted. The vulnerable – – the deaf, the blind, the elderly, and the stranger – – are to be afforded special protection. The whole society is to be governed by love, without resentment or revenge. What we witness here in other words, is the radical democratization of holiness.

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LEV683 See [[GEN973]] Genesis 18:19 instruct SACKS 41-45

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LEV905 A president guilty of sexual abuse; a prime minister indicted on charges of corruption and bribery; rabbis in several countries accused of financial impropriety, sexual harassment, and child abuse. That such things happen testifies to a profound malaise in contemporary Jewish life. More is at stake than simple morality. Morality is universal. Bribery, corruption, and the misuse of power are wrong, equally, whoever is guilty of them. When, though, the guilty are leaders, something more is involved--the principles introduced in Parashat Emor of kiddush Hashem and hillul Hashem: "Do not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified in the midst of the Israelites, I the Lord who sanctify you" [this verse]. The concepts of kiddush and hillul Hashem have a history. Though they are timeless and eternal, their unfolding occurred through the course of time. In this parasha, according to Ibn Ezra, the verse has a narrow and localized sense. The chapter in which it occurs has been speaking about the special duties of the priesthood and the extreme care they must take in serving God within the Sanctuary. All Israel is holy, but the priest are a holy elite within the nation. It is their task to preserve the purity and glory of the Sanctuary as God's symbolic home in the mist of the nation. So the commands are a special charge to the priest to take exemplary care as guardians of the holy.

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LEV958 So relevant does this vision remain that the international movement for debt relief for Third World countries by the year 2000 was called Jubilee 2000, an explicit reference to the principle set out in this parasha. Three things are worth noting about the Torah's social and economic programme. First, it is more concerned with human freedom than with a narrow focus on economic equality. Losing your land or becoming trapped by debt are real constraints on freedom. [This is the argument set out by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his book, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2001).] Fundamental to a Jewish understanding of the moral dimension of economics is the idea of independence, "each person under his own vine and fig tree," as the prophet Micah put it (Mic. 4:4). We pray in the Grace after Meals, "Do not make us dependent on the gifts or loans of other people… so that we may suffer neither shame nor humiliation." There is something profoundly degrading in losing your independence and being forced to depend on the goodwill of others. Hence the provisions of Behar are directed not at equality but at restoring people's capacity to earn their own livelihood as free and independent agents. Next, it takes this entire system out of the hands of human legislators. It rest on two fundamental ideas about capital and labor. First, the land belongs to God: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you reside in My land as strangers and temporary residents" (Leviticus 25:23). Second, the same applies to people: "Because the Israelites are My servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves" (Leviticus 25:42). This means that personal and economic liberty are not open to political negotiation. They are inalienable, God-given rights. Third, it tells us that economics is, and must remain, a discipline that rests on moral foundations. What matters to the Torah is not simply technical indices such as the rate of growth or absolute standards of wealth but the quality and texture of relationships: people's independence and sense of dignity, the ways in which the system allows people to recover from misfortune, and the extent to which it allows the members of a society to live the truth that "when you eat from the labor of your hands that you will be happy and it will be well with you" (Ps. 128:2).

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LEV1019 See [[LEV958]] Leviticus 25:10 liberty SACKS 204-5

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LEV1020 The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is God. Hence the elaborate political and economic structure set out in Leviticus, organized around the number seven, the sign of the holy. Every seventh day is free time. Every seventh year, the produce of the field belongs to all; Israelite slaves are to be liberated and debts released. Every fiftieth year, the year following the seventh set of seven years, ancestral land was returned to its original owners. Thus the inequalities that are the inevitable result of freedom are mitigated. The logic of all these provisions is the priestly insight that God, creator of all, is the ultimate owner of all. [This verse]. God therefore has the right, not just the power, to set limits to inequality. No one should be robbed of dignity by total poverty, endless servitude, or unrelieved indebtedness.

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LEV1023 What Shabbat does for humans and animals, the Sabbatical and Jubilee years do for the land. The earth too is entitled to its periodic rest. The Torah warns that if the Israelites do not respect this, they will suffer exile (Leviticus 26:34). Behind this are two concerns. One is environmental. As Rambam points out, land which is overexploited eventually erodes and loses its fertility. The Israelites were therefore commanded to conserve the soil by giving it periodic fallow years, not pursuing short-term gain at the cost of long-term desolation (The Guide for the Perplexed, III: 39). The second, no less significant, is theological: "The land," says God, "is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me" (Leviticus 25:23). We are guests on earth.

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LEV1082 See [[LEV958]] Leviticus 25:10 liberty SACKS 204-5

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LEV1129 See [[LEV1023]] Leviticus 25:23 Mine SACKS 302

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NUM42 The Torah does not make a direct evaluation of the Nazarite. On the one hand, it calls him "holy to God" [this verse]. On the other, it rules that when the period comes to an end the Nazarite has to bring a sin offering (Numbers 6:13-14), as if he has done something wrong. This led to a fundamental disagreement between the rabbis in Mishnaic, Talmudic, and Medieval times. According to R. Elazar, and later to the Ramban [Nachmanides], the Nazarite is worthy of praise. He has voluntarily chosen a higher level of holiness. The prophet Amos (2:11) says, "I raised up some of your sons for prophets, and your young men for Nazarites," suggesting that the Nazarite, like the prophet, is a person especially close to God. The reason he had to bring a sin offering was that he was now returning to ordinary life. The sin lay in ceasing to be a Nazarite. R. Eliezer HaKappar and Shmuel held the opposite opinion. The sin lay in becoming a Nazarite in the first place, thereby denying himself some of the pleasures of the world God created and declared good. R. Eliezer added: "From this we may infer that if one who denies himself the enjoyment of wine is called a sinner, all the more so one who denies himself the enjoyment of other pleasures of life" (Taanit 11a; Nedarim 10a). Clearly the argument is not merely textual. It is substantive. It is about asceticism, the life of self-denial. ... one of Rambam's [Maimonides] most original insights [is] that there are two quite different ways of living the moral life. He calls them respectively the way of the Saint (hasid) and the sage (hakham). The sage follows the "golden mean," the "middle way." The moral life is a matter of moderation and balance, charting a course between too much and too little. Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity lies between profligacy and miserliness. ... The saint, by contrast, does not follow the middle way. He or she tends to extremes, fasting rather than simply eating in moderation, embracing poverty rather than acquiring modest wealth, and so on. ... The Nazarite has chosen, at least for a period, to adopt a life of extreme self-denial. He is a saint, a hasid. He has adopted the path of personal perfection. That is noble, commendable, and exemplary. But it is not the way of the sage -- and you need sages if you seek to perfect society. The sage is not an extremist, because he or she realizes that there are other people at stake. There are the members of one's own family and the others within one's own community. There is a country to defend and an economy to sustain. The sage knows he or she cannot leave all these commitments behind to pursue a life of solitary virtue. For we are call upon by God to live in the world, not escape from it; to exist in society, not seclusion; to strive to create a balance among the conflicting pressures on us, not to focus on some while neglecting the others. Hence, while from a personal perspective the Nazarite is a saint, from a societal perspective he is, at least figuratively, a "sinner" who has to bring an atonement offering. ... Rambam ... had to carry a double burden as a world-renowned physician and an internationally sought halakhist and sage. He worked to exhaustion.… Rambam was a sage who longed to be a saint – but knew he could not be, if he was to honor his responsibilities to his people. That seems to me a profound judgment, and one still relevant to Jewish life today.

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