Parashat Kedoshim 5782
Grace Gleason
Nearly every day of rabbinical school for the past four years, I have been reminded in some way or another, that — while Torah belongs to everyone, and always has — the Torah that I’m learning was never intended to be studied by me, a queer woman.
This may not be surprising. But one of the times in my first year of rabbinical school that I realized this in a more unexpected way was during a class on the Jewish approach to anger. Sitting in this lecture, going through source after source of men philosophizing on why you shouldn’t be angry, and how to control and suppress your anger, I found myself getting more and more — angry.
This, I thought, is important Torah for some people. It’s important Torah for people in positions of power. It was important Torah for the rabbis of the Talmud, who taught that “One who is angry does not even consider the presence of God important” (Nedarim 22b).
But for me, as a woman, who had learned not to show much anger, and not to express it — and who realized at some point how unsustainable and unhealthy for a human being that was — I wanted to know: where was the Torah of righteous anger? The Torah that showed you how to justly express and not repress it?
Well, I found an answer. We can find it, first of all, in the Prophets. We can find it in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos, and those prophets who cry out in anger against injustice in the world — a very Jewish anger, contrary to that Talmudic statement. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes about the prophet, and the religious person, as one who holds God and humanity in mind at the same time. It’s not that they don’t consider the presence of God important — it’s that they consider the presence of God so important that they cannot bear to live in a world in which God’s creatures are not honored and respected (Heschel, The Prophets).
After this realization about the prophets, I encountered another text on anger that was both refreshing and empowering, even cathartic. It was the story of Yalta. In the Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 51b, the story is recounted of Yalta, a powerful woman who sits at a table with her husband and his friends. In an act of disrespect, they do not pass her the wine goblet. So, of course, she gets up and smashes 400 barrels of wine onto the floor, unleashing a river of wine and chaos into this misogynistic meal.
This amazing story came to mind this week, as I learned the news of the leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the basis of reproductive freedom and justice in this country. There is little more infuriating than being dehumanized in a way you can’t control, in a way that may come to alter your life, in a way you never imagined in your lifetime. I know from speaking with many, many people this week, that I was not the only one angry. And I know that this anger is not a petty one — it’s the anger of Isaiah, it’s the anger of Jeremiah, the anger of Amos. It’s personal, and prophetic.
What would a Torah look like, that was interpreted from the margins — that was explained by the very people it once dehumanized? Thankfully, in recent years, we’ve been able to find out. Women and queer people and disabled and other marginalized people have been able to publicize their wisdom in interpreting the Torah, which has generated tremendous gifts to the Jewish people, some of which have come from our own community. But we have a long way to go.
And what would an American law look like, that was crafted and interpreted by the people that it affected most? We have begun to see that in recent years, as well, and yet — here, too, we have perhaps an even longer way to go.
Parashat Kedoshim, this week’s parashah, has something to say about just laws and lawmakers. We read, in Leviticus 19:15,
לֹא־תַעֲשׂ֥וּ עָ֙וֶל֙ בַּמִּשְׁפָּ֔ט
Do not do harm by means of the law.
In this week’s parashah also, one of the most famous lines in the Torah, the one that Rabbi Hillel used to summarize the entire Torah, while standing on one foot, occurs:וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ. Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18). All the rest is commentary, now go and learn, Hillel says (BT Shabbat 31a).
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, born in Lithuania in 1810, was the founder of the musar movement, a movement which focused on developing personal morality and ethics in practice. Contrary to the isolationist bent of many religious Jewish sects of his time, Rav Salanter’s musar movement emphasized that religious Jews need to be involved in their external communities, improving the world around them actively, and not relegated to the study hall, pursuing holiness, kedushah, detached from society’s difficulties.
Rabbi Salanter’s understanding of musar, of ethics, is a powerful interpretation of this very commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself.
“Most people,” he wrote, “are concerned with their own material needs and another person’s spirituality. But it should be the other way around: a person is obligated to be concerned with their own spirituality, and the material well-being of others. The material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs.”
It’s easy to get this backwards. When someone asks for us money for food, and we deny them for fear that they’ll use it on something we don’t see as spiritually fit, we are in essence getting this backwards.
There are many in this country, who celebrated in the wake of the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, who I believe have this backwards, as good as their intentions. They’re concerned with their material needs, and what they perceive to be the spiritual wellbeing of others.
They are concerned with what they see as the spiritual problem of a woman choosing what happens to her body, and less concerned with how she and her child will be clothed, fed, have access to healthcare, or to education. I think America has it backwards.
And actually, although this commandment in our parashah, to love your neighbor as yourself, is cited as the source of Rabbi Hillel’s summary of the Torah on one foot, he actually says something slightly — but significantly — different. If we read in BT Shabbat 31a, Hillel doesn’t summarize the Torah on one foot as “love your neighbor as yourself,” but rather “what is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor. All the rest is commentary. Go and study it.”
What gave Hillel the chutzpah to change one of the classic lines of the Torah, from our parashah? He knew the Torah by heart; he didn’t misremember it. There must have been a really good reason that he did not say “v’ahavta l’raecha kamocha;” he did not say “love your neighbor as yourself.”
And I think that reason is that there’s a big difference between loving your neighbor how you think they want to be loved, and forcing your understanding of what you think is best onto another person for whom it is hateful. And Hillel understood that.
The people making laws in this country, and interpreting the law, are often not the same people who have to bear the truly hateful consequences of those laws.
This is true in so many realms of our society — in access to affordable healthcare, to a safe place to live, to the right to be unapologetically and publically who you are as a queer or trans person. And I guarantee that carrying to full term an unwanted pregnancy would be a reality that most lawmakers find utterly hateful should they have to endure it. Many of those who have been encroaching on reproductive rights for years lack the imagination to comprehend the degree to which they are inflicting on their neighbor something that would be truly hateful to them.
To love your neighbor, again, according to Yisrael Salanter, does not mean to be concerned for their soul. That’s their own business. It means being concerned with your neighbor’s material needs.
This is where anger comes in, in this moment. The question remains for me, of how we, the people who are angry, who are furious, who are channeling a prophetic anger — how will use it? What wine barrels are we going to unleash? What prophetic cries will we bring to the street? How will we use our anger to bring to bear Hillel’s teaching, that no person should do to another what is hateful? How will we channel this anger into feeding our neighbors, into housing our neighbors, into our neighbors’ healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, which is a material need? And how will we do it in a way that nourishes rather than depletes us?
We cannot allow our anger to metastasize into hate. Audre Lorde, in her groundbreaking 1981 essay The Uses of Anger, about white women’s racism within the feminist movement, which rings sadly relevant in 2022, she defines, crucially, the difference between hatred, and anger. “This hatred and our anger,” she writes, “are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”
Anger is a grief of the distortion of what we are taught in Parashat Kedoshim: you — human beings — are holy. Leviticus 20:26. Anger is a grief of the distortion of our divine image, which means our divinely given agency.
Our object is change. Our object is a society like the one that Parashat Kedoshim aspires to, though it may fall short — a society based on justice, in which we do not inflict what is hateful to us unto others, but rather view their material needs as our spiritual needs. May our anger pave the path to justice, a world in which we, like God, are holy. May we realize our essential holiness in the way that our parshah ultimately aims for — by creating a just society in which human beings are free from oppression, and are free to determine our own destiny.
A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
Most people are concerned with their own material needs and another person’s spirituality. But it should be the other way around: a person is obligated to be concerned with their own spirituality, and the material well-being of others. The material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs.
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, quoted in Every Day, Holy Day by Alan Morinis
This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger," Sister Outsider