Chapter 19 of Vayikra is about the right, the good, and the holy. It contains some of Judaism’s greatest moral commands. But it’s also surpassingly strange. It contains what looks like a random jumble of mitzvot, many of which have nothing to do with ethics and holiness. To understand this seemingly random combination of laws, we have to engage in an enormous leap of insight into the moral/social/spiritual vision of the Torah, which is unlike anything we find elsewhere.
Western society has made many attempts to define a moral system. Some focus on rationality or on emotions like sympathy and empathy. They all try to simplify it in order to understand it. Judaism insists on the opposite: moral complexity. The moral life isn’t easy. Sometimes, duties or loyalties clash. Sometimes, reason says one thing, emotion another. More fundamentally, Judaism identifies three distinct moral sensibilities, each of which has its own voice and vocabulary: the ethics of the king, the ethics of the priest, and the ethics of the prophet.
Kings and their courts are associated in Judaism with wisdom – chochmah, eitzah, and their synonyms. Wisdom is practical and pragmatic, based on experience and observation; it is judicious and prudent.
The prophetic voice is quite different, impassioned, vivid, and radical in its critique of the misuse of power and the exploitative pursuit of wealth. Prophets speak on behalf of the people, the poor, the downtrodden, the abused. They think of the moral life in terms of relationships between G-d and humanity and between human beings themselves. The key terms for the prophet are tzedek (justice), mishpat (retributive justice), chessed (loving kindness), and rachamim (mercy, compassion). The prophet has emotional intelligence, sympathy, and empathy and feels the plight of the lonely and oppressed. Prophecy is never abstract. It responds to the here and now of time and place.
The ethics of the priest, and of holiness generally, is different again. The key activities of the priest are lehavdil – to distinguish and divide – and lehorot – to instruct people in the law, both generally as teachers and in specific instances as judges. The key words of the priest are kodesh and chol (holy and secular), tamei and tahor (impure and pure). The task of the priest is to be like G-d at Creation. To make order out of chaos. The priest establishes boundaries in both time and space. There are holy times and holy places, and the kohen’s protest is against the blurring of boundaries so common in pagan religions – between gods and humans, between life and death, etc.
The strange collection of mitzvot in Kedoshim turns out not to be strange at all. The holiness code sees love and justice as part of a total vision of an ordered universe in which each thing, person, and act has their rightful place, and it is this order that is threatened when the boundary between different kinds of animals, grain, and fabrics is breached; when the human body is wounded or fed the wrong foods.
The priestly voice is therefore central and essential. It is the voice of the Torah’s first chapter, the voice that defined the Jewish vocation as “a kingdom of Priests and a holy nation.” It dominates Vayikra, the central book of the Torah. And whereas the prophetic spirit lives on in Aggadah, the priestly voice prevails in halachah. And the very name Torah – from the verb lehorot – is a priestly word.
