From priest to people

Something fundamental happens at the beginning of Kedoshim, and the story is one of the greatest, if rarely acknowledged, contributions of Judaism to the world.

Until now, Vayikra has been largely about sacrifices, purity, the Sanctuary, and the priesthood. It has been, in short, about a holy place, holy offerings, and the elite and holy people — Aaron and his descendants — who minister there.

Suddenly, in chapter 19, the text embraces the whole of the people:

“The L-rd said to Moshe: Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them, ‘Be holy, because I the L-rd your G-d am holy’” (Lev. 19:1-2).

This is the first and only time in Leviticus that so inclusive an address is commanded. It is the people as a whole who are commanded to be holy, not just an elite, the Priests. It is life itself that is to be sanctified, as the chapter makes clear. Holiness is to be made manifest in the way the nation makes its clothes and plants its fields, in the way justice is administered, workers paid, and business conducted. The vulnerable — the deaf, the blind, the elderly, and the stranger — are to be afforded special protection. The whole society is to be governed by love, without resentments or revenge. What we witness here is the radical democratization of holiness.

All ancient societies had priests. We encounter four such non-Jews in the Torah: Avraham’s contemporary Malkizedek, Yosef’s father-in-law Potiphar, the Egyptian priesthood as a whole, and Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law. Priesthood was not unique to Israel. But here, for the first time, we find a code of holiness directed to the people as a whole. We are all called on to be holy.

This comes as no surprise. The most explicit hint is in the prelude to the covenant at Mount Sinai, when G-d tells Moshe, “If you obey Me fully and keep My covenant, then out of all nations you will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a kingdom of Priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5-6).

The first intimation is much earlier, in the first chapter of Genesis, with its assertion, “‘Let Us make mankind in Our image, in Our likeness’ … So G-d created mankind in His own image, in the image of G-d He created them; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:26-27).

What is revolutionary is not that a human being could be in the image of G-d. That is precisely how kings of Mesopotamian city-states and pharaohs of Egypt were regarded — as representatives of the gods. The Torah’s revolution is the statement that all humans share this dignity. Regardless of class, color, culture, or creed, we are all in the image and likeness of G-d.

Thus was born a cluster of ideas that led to the distinctive culture of the West: the nonnegotiable dignity of the human person, the idea of human rights, and eventually the political and economic expressions of these ideas: liberal democracy on the one hand, and the free market on the other.

These ideas were not fully formed in the minds of human beings during the period of biblical history. The concept of human rights is a product of the seventeenth century. Democracy was not fully implemented until the twentieth. But in Genesis, the seed was planted. That is what Jefferson meant by, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and what John F. Kennedy alluded to when he spoke of the “revolutionary belief” that “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of G-d.”

The irony is that these three texts — Genesis 1, Exodus 19:6, and Leviticus 19 — are spoken in the priestly voice Judaism calls Torat Kohanim. On the face of it, priests were not egalitarian. They all came from a single tribe, the Levites, and from a single family, Aaron’s. So deep is the concept of equality written into monotheism that it emerges precisely from the priestly voice.

Religion in the ancient world was a defense of hierarchy. With the development of agriculture, then cities, what emerged were highly stratified societies with a ruler on top, surrounded by a royal court, beneath which was an administrative elite, and at the bottom, an illiterate mass conscripted from time to time as an army or a labor force.

What kept the structure in place was an elaborate doctrine of a heavenly hierarchy, whose most familiar natural symbol was the sun, and whose architectural representation was the pyramid or ziggurat, a massive building broad at the base and narrow at the top. The gods had fought and established an order of dominance and submission. To rebel against the earthly hierarchy was to challenge reality itself.

This belief was universal in the ancient world. Aristotle thought that some were born to rule, others to be ruled. Plato constructed a myth in which class divisions existed because the gods had made some people with gold, some with silver, and others with bronze. This was the “noble lie” that had to be told if a society was to protect itself against dissent from within.

Monotheism removes the mythological basis of hierarchy. There is no order among the gods because there are no gods, there is only One G-d, Creator of all. Hierarchy will always exist: armies need commanders, films need directors, and orchestras, conductors. But these are functional; they are not a matter of birth. So it is all the more impressive to find the most egalitarian sentiments coming from the world of the priest, whose religious role was a matter of birth.

The equality we find in the Torah is not an equality of wealth; Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is G-d.

Hence the elaborate political and economic structure set out in Leviticus. Every seventh day is free. Every seventh year, the produce of the field belongs to all, slaves are liberated, and debts released. Every fiftieth year, ancestral land returns to its original owners. Thus the inequalities that are the inevitable result of freedom are mitigated.

The logic of these provisions is the priestly insight that G-d, creator of all, is the ultimate owner of all: “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you reside in My land as strangers and temporary residents” (Lev. 25:23). G-d has the right, not just the power, to set limits to inequality. No one should be robbed of dignity by poverty, servitude, or debt.

What is truly remarkable, however, is what happened after the biblical era and the destruction of the Second Temple. Faced with losing the entire infrastructure of the holy — the Temple, its priests, and sacrifices — Judaism translated the entire system into the everyday life of ordinary Jews. In prayer, every Jew became a priest offering a sacrifice. In repentance, he became a High Priest, atoning for his sins and those of his people. Every synagogue became a fragment of the Temple in Jerusalem. Every table became an altar, every act of charity a kind of sacrifice.

Torah study became the right and obligation of everyone. Not everyone could wear the crown of priesthood, but everyone could wear the crown of Torah. A Torah scholar of illegitimate birth, say the Sages, is greater than an ignorant High Priest.

Out of the devastating tragedy of the loss of the Temple, the Sages created a religious and social order that came closer to the ideal of the people as “a kingdom of Priests and a holy nation” than had ever previously been realized. The seed had been planted long before, in the opening of Leviticus 19: “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them, ‘Be holy because I the L-rd your G-d am holy.’”

Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of G-d, and society into a home for the Divine Presence.