I am very excited for the opportunity to share words of Torah with you. Each week, in this spot, I look to share an idea I've found that speaks to me and that I think will resonate with you as well. This week, I share with you an excerpt from an article by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ZT"L entitled "Love is Not Enough" which analyzes the enigmatic collection of laws in this week's Parsha.
Leviticus 19 brings side-by-side laws of seemingly quite different kinds. Some belong to the moral life: don't gossip, don't hate, don't take revenge, don't bear a grudge. Some are about social justice: leave parts of the harvest for the poor; don't pervert justice; don't withhold wages; don't use false weights and measures. Others have a different feel altogether: don't crossbreed livestock; don't plant a field with mixed seeds; don't wear a garment of mixed wool and linen; don't eat fruit of the first three years; don't eat blood; don't practice divination; don't lacerate yourself.
At first glance these laws have nothing to do with one another: some are about conscience, some about politics and economics, and others about purity and taboo. Clearly, though, the Torah is telling us otherwise. They do have something in common. They are all about order, limits, boundaries. They are telling us that reality has a certain underlying structure whose integrity must be honoured. If you hate or take revenge you destroy relationships. If you commit injustice, you undermine the trust on which society depends. If you fail to respect the integrity of nature (different seeds, species, and so on), you take the first step down a path that ends in environmental disaster.
There is an order to the universe, part moral, part political, part ecological. When that order is violated, eventually there is chaos. When that order is observed and preserved, we become co-creators of the sacred harmony and integrated diversity that the Torah calls "holy."
Why then is it specifically in this chapter that the two great commands - love of the neighbour and the stranger - appear? The answer is profound and very far from obvious. Because this is where love belongs - in an ordered universe. [...] That is what the opening chapter of Kedoshim is about: clear rules that create and sustain a social order. That is where real love - not the sentimental, self-deceiving substitute - belongs. Without order, love merely adds to the chaos.
[...] That is as acute an explanation as I have ever heard for the unique structure of Leviticus 19. Its combination of moral, political, economic and environmental laws is a supreme statement of a universe of (Divinely created) order of which we are the custodians. But the chapter is not just about order. It is about humanising that order through love - the love of neighbour and stranger. [...] Hence the life-changing idea that we have forgotten for far too long: Love is not enough. Relationships need rules.
Hoping and praying for a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Davies
Rabbi@SOICherryHill.org
