Holy, Holy, Holy

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thank you for joining me. I'm Rabbi David Lyon from
Congregation Beth Israel in Houston. When we open the Torah
this week, we come to the portion called the Holiness Code.
It's found in the Book of Levitigus, beginning in chapter nineteen.
Call the Holiness Code because one of the very first
verses comes in verse two, where it says in Hebrew

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kiddoshim tu in English, you shall be holy, for I
the Lord your God am holy. Kidoshim is a Hebrew
word in which you can also hear the word kadosh.
Kadosh is holy. It's also part of the word kidouche
the Kiddish, the blessing we say over the wine, not

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because the wine is holy, but we use wine to
sanctify special moments, especially times of joy. For example, we
fill the Kiddish cup, the Holy cup, with wine, a
symbol of joy, to the very brim. In some cases,
there's even a saucer under the cup to catch the

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overflow in the case that one's cup truly runneth over.
It's also found in the word kiddushin kidous. Sheen is
a Hebrew word we use to describe marriage because it too,
is a holy union. And when we really ask ourselves
the question, what does it mean to be holy? For

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anything to be holy? It sounds so religious, and perhaps
it is, But the truth is it's something that we
make holy. Is something set apart for a very special purpose,
like the wine used to sanctify the Sabbath, holidays, special moments.
A marriage that is set apart from all other relationships

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in the world, to be celebrated by a couple who
finds in their union holy purposes, set apart from all others.
And the Hebrew in the verse in chapter nineteen suggests
two other interpretations which the Rabbis of Old lift up
for us. First, it says you shall be holy, written

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in the imperfect grammatical tense. It suggests that one day
in the future you will be holy. It's something to
work towards. It's something to find in our own life
by way of good deeds we call midst vote in
other faith traditions. Many good deeds are commanded of us,
expected of us, and we find our way through a

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difficult and complex world how to rise above, to set
ourselves apart, to make our lives holy, to do the
right thing, and to find holiness along the way, even
if it isn't permanent. But another Rabbitic interpretation suggests you
shall be holy, for ither Lord or Goddam. Holy is
simply a fact of holiness. It exists right now. Because

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God is holy, so are we. But the Rabbis didn't
want us to misunderstand expectations. God is holy. We get it,
But what kind of holiness can human beings ever reach
or even imagine coming to know? The Rabbi say that
we should try to be humanly holy, that is, to

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acknowledge that we are not God. We are human beings
of flesh and blood. We do good things, we make mistakes,
We make tashuva, that is, we atone and try to
repair the wrongs we've done to do better later. Human
holiness is something that we reach again and perhaps again
over the course of our lifetime. Because the Rabbis taught

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that it isn't our obligation to complete all the work
that needs to be done in the world, and there
is so much to do, but neither are we free
to desist from trying, And so as we appreciate when
we get up in the morning that the world needs
us so badly and there's so much for us to do,
we could be so overwhelmed that we wouldn't even try.

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But to know that our tradition urges us to be
humanly holy, then there are ways that we can make
a difference, contribute to the well being of our own life,
our family and community, those who are touched by our
words and deeds, even far away from us. That human
holiness leaves us lots of room to get the job done.

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It leaves lots of room for improvement, and ultimately, when
our days come to an end, even the privilege, if
we have the time to assess, to evaluate and consider,
how did we use our days? How did we use
the privilege of gift, skills and talents? Did we use

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them for good? To make a positive difference and to
leave an impression that others might use to mad while
their own lives after ours. Not to be just like us,
even as we cannot be God, But each of us
is created with a humanly holy possibility, a spark of

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the divine that we wish to flame and burn so
that we can do good with it. So what are
some of the things that we can do good with?
In the same chapter in the Book of Leviticus. In
chapter nineteen we find many ethical teachings. I know that
some people assume that the Torah and the Talmut itself

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are filled with many ritual matters. In fact, they are
filled with many ritual matters. But if you laid side
by side all the matters of ritual and all the
matters of ethics and moral behavior, you would find that
the stack of ethical and moral behaviors far exceeded the
number of ritual matters. Because lighting candles and reciting prayers

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and conducting worship just so is one way of bringing
our best offering to God and letting God know that
we understand what God needs of us. But what God
also needs of us are the ethical and moral behaviors
that we perform and conduct between us, between human beings.
For the sake of humanity. God created to make a

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difference in the world. And so the Book of Leviticus,
while a priestly book filled with many offerings and rituals
and rights, is really to be sure that we create
a community in which we can find holiness, a community
set apart to do special things for special purposes, and
within that context, when we get it right from time

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to time, not only do we as individuals feel blessed
and fortunate, but so does everybody in that holy community.
That's why we strive for moral justice, for moral deeds
that lift all of us up in God's sight and
in each other's. No matter how we pray or to
whom we worship, there is a constant thread and underlying

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expectation of what is moral, right and good, and when
we contribute to it as a community, we all rise.
We all feel like we are in the best place
we can be because we feel blessed and fortunate. In
the list of the holiness code found in Leviticus nineteen,
beginning in verse one and two, where we read you

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shall be holy, we also find the failary familiar in
verse eighteen, love your neighbor as yourself. I know that
many of you know it from the Gospels, from Christian literature,
but the reality is that it begins in Leviticus because
it is at the heart of what it means to
find our way as human beings with each other. And

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when we can with each other find the moral and
ethical way, we bring honor to go God. It is
not just circular logic, but it does help us appreciate
that just praying to God is not enough. We have
to do the deeds that bring us together's human bringings,
who are created in God's image. Then we bring honor

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to God, and the blessings of God help us to
feel that we have done the right thing. We have
lifted up humanity and we can carry on. Loving your
neighbor as yourself has been parsed and interpreted so many
different times over the ages. It does begin, as some
have suggested, with love of oneself, because what we project

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to others is very often only what we have within.
If we have been given love, if we've been shown love,
if we've been embraced when we're hurting to know that
we can recover, repair and be welcomed back, that is
a source of love that we can project in a
healthy way and share with others too. The challenge is

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that while the golden rule to love our neighbor as
ourselves in Christianity and Judaism too is Rabbi Akiva lifted
it up centuries ago, is not the only place from
which we do the best we can do. Loving our
neighbor is one thing, but also welcoming the stranger is another.

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Thirty six times in the Torah itself. Welcoming the stranger
is commanded of us. What does it mean to welcome
the gare the stranger among us? It's a reminder that
the Israelites were strangers in the land of Egypt, and
God redeemed them from Egypt with an outstretched hand, mighty
forces and wonders and signs and portents, and so we

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know the heart of the stranger. Therefore, well, we're commanded
thirty six times to welcome them into our own community,
to be a part of us, to grow with us.
Why is thirty six emphasized because every Hebrew letter is
equated with a number, and so all of the first

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letter of the Hebrew alphabet is number one. When we
speak of eighteen, it's letter het and letter you'd, And
when we actually put those two letters together, we spell
the word high. High means life. And so when we
wear a high those two letters or make a donation

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of eighteen dollars or a multiple of eighteen dollars, the high,
the hete and the yud together make eighteen. And so
it's always a symbol, an interesting sign of life and
hope and goodness. And so when we talk about thirty
six times that the commandment to welcome the strangers is

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inscribed in the Torah. That's double high, double eighteen. It
means a lot in a symbolic way, but it goes
back to the root of the word kadosh. How do
we lift up this spec commandment to welcome the stranger?
It's connected to the forces of life. It's connected the
expectations that when others join us who were once were strangers,

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they become more familiar friends. They might even become family.
What I have found in Houston, Texas and what I've
found around the country among others who are part of
inner faith work, where we welcome strangers into our midst
When we look at each other, we might see somebody
who looks entirely different from us. We might even be afraid,
because we fear the things we don't understand. But when

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we take it upon ourselves to enter into conversation with them,
to ask them who they are, what are their expectations,
what are your dreams? What do you want for your family?
Where do you see yourself in five or ten or
twenty years. The answers to those questions are no different
than the way we would answer them for those of

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us who have been settled in this country or settled
wherever we might live many years or generations. Everyone wants
basically the same thing, prosperity, peace. We want our children
to do better than we did. We want to have
a home, we want to have neighbors. We want to
live according to our faith tradition. So when we listen

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to each other and the narratives that we tell, it
reduces fear and anxiety and helps us find that. Whether
we're reading from the Torah or the Christian Bible, or
from another faith traditions text like the Quran, there are
differences between us, but many more similarities, and all of
them point us to a universal God. Of the three

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Abrahamic traditions, there are particular pathways to one God, a
universal God. We should find the commonalities and begin to
break down the differences so that we can build bridges
of kindness and friendship and community. That's what it means
when it says you shall be holy for I the

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Lord your God, and holy, and love your neighbor as yourself.
For goodness sakes, It's time, and especially in this world
filled with brokenness and complexity, we would do best to
adhere to the text the lift us up and our
neighbors too. I'm Rabbi David Lyon from Congregation Beth Israel
and Houston, and to listen again or to share this message,

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please find it on my podcast called Heart to Heart
with Rabbi David Lyon at Sunny ninety nine dot com,
are on the iHeartRadio app. As the week unfolds, there
is so much in the news, some that if it
is good, and some of it is challenging. That is
the way of the world. But as our world celebrates

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all of its goodnesses, we attach it to the sources
of our texts that urge us to know. Created in
the image of God, we have a duty to listen
to and learn from the sacred texts that have been
given down throughout the ages. What makes them holy is
that they've endured. What makes them set apart is that

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they have advised and guided generations of our people for
so long that now we are the inheritors of them.
What will we do with them? How will we be
sure that we can bequeath them to the future generations
in good form, in wholeness, and adding interpretations that don't diminish,
but rather enrich. What we have enjoyed for ourselves, then

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we can be all that we can be and know
that holiness is not only something present but also something
for the future. That's my hope for my people. It's
my hope for you too, in all the places where
you live, work, and play. Let's make a contribution this
week to a better world and enduring peace. Thank you

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for joining me, and I look forward to being with
you again next time.