Kedoshim
How can we uncover the kedushah that is already there?
Reflection by Ariel Yisraelah Hendelman, the Or HaLev Team:
"In the Torah portion of Kedoshim, we explore the idea of holiness. `Be holy, for I God am holy!` is the central message (Lev 19:2). Much like when we recite the V'ahavta prayer and find ourselves wondering how we can be enjoined to love, this week’s Torah portion finds us asking - how can we be commanded into holiness?
There are many physical prohibitions, mostly relating to food and sex, that Kedoshim enumerates to answer this question. But Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in her commentary on the book of Vayikra, The Hidden Order of Intimacy, takes us beneath the surface. She describes holiness as aspirational or in flux, `Kedushah, in this framework, is a movement upward, an energetic state…Kedushah can be understood as the aspiration toward vitality. A kind of discomfort is its baseline: a restlessness about all given situations. Here, one is not yet who one wishes to be. One seeks out a deeper and larger way to be.`
While the longing for holiness is grounded in both ritual and social practices, it is the longing itself that expands those practices beyond a rote list of law and into the realm of the sublime. Kedushah, as Zornberg points out, is the very reason that human beings were created in the first place. `Let us make humans in our image,` says the Infinite One to the ministering angels in Bereishit. What is the image of the Creator if not holiness?
Like the promised land, which we are always journeying towards but don’t actually reach at the end of the five books of the Torah, the longing itself is holy. Of course, longing alone would be unsatisfactory and ultimately unsustainable. Some destinations are reached, and then new journeys spring forth asking us to make new choices.
What guides these choices into the realm of Kedushah again? Rather than seeing it in the binary of abstention vs permission, the Mei HaShiloach (Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner) translates holiness as being attuned. Meaning that what we are really being asked is to uncover the kedushah that is already there within each moment, each choice, which we can only do when we are truly present and attentive to the illumination of the Divine in each thing, each person.
May our meditation practice help us to unearth the holy seed within each blooming moment."