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To Be Holy Is to Live Morally and Treat Others With Respect
Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.
Chapter 19 of Leviticus, known as Kedoshim, includes a range of laws that concern ethical standards that were relevant back then and today.
It starts with respecting one’s parents and then goes on to talk about the importance of giving charity and helping the poor and the indigent. It also includes such basic ethical rules as don’t steal, don’t deceive, don’t lie, don’t oppress your neighbor, etc. ( Leviticus 19:2-18).
However, interspersed in this collection are ritual laws, and the repeated refrain “Be Holy because I am holy,” “I am your God,” or “ I am your God who took you out of Egypt.”
To the modern skeptical mind, they seem out of place. We are so used to thinking of morality and ethics as being divorced from concepts of God, that these ritual-based commands seem to be irrelevant to many people. Yet the Bible is based upon the principle that humans are fallible, changeable, and unreliable, and are often not the best judges of good and bad. Greek philosophical culture, on the other hand, thought that logic alone could determine what was right or wrong. The Torah established the concept of Divine Authority as a safeguard against overweening human arrogance.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead discovered that there is a universal pattern that explains all this strange connection between morality and ritual. The ancient world was concerned with order. Each culture was regulated in its own way. The Torah, too, is concerned with order, a holistic approach to life that includes the spiritual as well as the physical. It is a template of the complete life, in which one finds room for a way of life that connects with God through ritual and behavior.
In our case, the universal sacrificial system that once dominated our ritual life soon fell away. Instead, we have focused on the laws that make up what is called halacha — how we behave day-to-day and how all our actions should be predicated on forethought, consideration, and a value system.
An ethical system predicated on a ritual one, however irksome, adds a level of spirituality to our daily lives. If religious behavior does not improve one’s morality or behavior towards others, it is failing. Holiness in the Torah means being better — not automatically through birth, but rather what we do, and how we behave.
When we say be holy because God is holy, we’re not describing God. We may disagree as to what is good and what is bad, what is fair and what is not, and whether there is a God and to what extent God controls our lives. But, in the end, we should live a life of consideration and respect for ourselves as well as for the rest of humanity.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
The post To Be Holy Is to Live Morally and Treat Others With Respect first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.