Aharei Mot
Leviticus 16:1-18:30
Ezekiel 22:1-19
Nearly everyone knows that, in Judaism, life itself is our highest value. For many of us, we learned early on in our Jewish education that Judaism values life so highly that most of the mitzvot may be abrogated in the service of genuine life-saving activity. Yet like so many teachings that sound good as generalities, this one — Jewish regard for life — has a complex and fascinating story when one considers the origin and context of this ideal in classical Jewish text.
One of the sacred texts from which this value derives is found in this week’s Torah portion, Aharei Mot, but its source is by no means simple here, in its original context.
“Keep My laws and My rules; one who observes them will live by them; I am God” (Lev. 18:5).
It would be tempting to begin to free-associate on this text as if it stood alone. But first, one must take note of the rather difficult context in which this verse is embedded.
First, our parashah begins with an allusion to the terrible story of the death of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu. With all that has been said in an effort to understand this apparently tragic story, it seems clear from the way the event is alluded to here that the young men’s sin was a kind of spiritual spontaneity that caused them to place their own need for religious experience in the center, and God’s will on the periphery. Thus, our parashah begins by recalling the young priests’ sin, then moves directly to a review of ritual and priestly issues that require intense devotion and precise attendance to God’s command.
Similarly, the parashah ends with the elaboration of the arayot (forbidden sexual unions), the Torah’s core code of sexual ethics. The meta-principle of the parashah is the same from start to finish. The start of the parashah exhorts the priests to do precisely what God commands — nothing more and nothing less. The end of the parashah exhorts us all to do what God commands, even in the most intimate dimensions of our lives.
This is a difficult teaching for our generation, Americans raised to worship individualism (in the public realm) and self-actualization (in private life). We believe that God is to be found, if anywhere, in the twists and turns of our own lives, in our evolving discovery of our own deepest sources of vitality. One may even point to texts in Torah that support such a path of finding God in the midst of our personal lives deeply lived. But in Torah we find a powerful guidepost leading to a different path: finding vitality through a lifelong search for God’s will.
Now, this image need not be quite as foreign and inaccessible as it sounds at first. One need not believe in a God with a long white beard on a heavenly throne, nor even in a Being with thoughts and feelings, to respond to Torah’s resounding insistence that life is fundamentally about responding to God. But I think Torah is unalterably insistent on this point: To live the good life, one must put God first.
This is the context into which our famous verse “Observe the mitzvot…and live by them” enters. Early rabbinic commentators paste the start and end of the verse together to yield something like: “Mitzvot are to be lived by, not to be died for” — hence the teaching that one may abrogate most mitzvot if life is seriously at stake. Yet this exegesis wrenches the verse far from its plain meaning. What might the verse itself mean, linking observance of mitzvot and responsiveness to God to life itself? What might it mean for contemporary Jews to find life in Torah?
All of us will someday die, and so observance of Torah and mitzvot cannot be a guarantee of life, of longevity or even of absence of suffering. Yet our tradition asks us to believe that aligning our life with our people’s ancient wisdom, placing God at the center, is the key to life well-lived, to a life of fullness and vitality and meaning. “Ki heim hayeinu ve’orech yameinu” — for words of Torah are our life and the length of our days — the key to fullness of life. May Torah fill our lives with goodness and meaning, and may we be open to its wisdom.