Shabbat shalom everyone! Thank you for coming to my Bat-Mitzvah! My Torah portion is Kedoshim, a collection of the laws to be holy, or as I learned from the My Jewish Learning newsletter, part of the Holiness Code. In the beginning of my parsha, there are normal, general laws (no murder, don’t steal). In the second half, the laws get a bit unreasonable and absurd. First of all, they are very specific. They are specific to a point where I don’t think that anyone is committing these crimes. There are many particular punishments for doing something that, from my modern perspective, no one has ever done!
As I was reading this, it made me think of when in fourth grade, my English teacher gave a lesson on instructions. He brought in ingredients for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and told us to tell him how to make one as if he had never even heard of a PB and J. We learned that some things we are sure people know are actually not obvious, like that you need to open a jar of peanut butter before spreading peanut butter on the bread, not simply put the jar itself on the bread in a spreading motion. In the end, we had some strange sandwiches.
In my Torah portion, we are instructed on how to be “holy.” First of all, what does holy even mean? What sandwich am I trying to make? Second of all, the laws don’t give all the details, and are largely negative, in other words, telling you what not to do. At first I thought that negative laws were completely useless. If someone was told to not spread the jelly yet, what are they supposed to spread? If I were to make a sandwich following
vague and negative directions, I don’t think it would end with the intended sandwich. Then I realized that in different circumstances, negative laws might be needed. If you know someone is going to do something wrong, you may as well say don’t do that.
The site Judaism 101 told me that in traditional Jewish law, there are two types of mitzvot: positive and negative mitzvot or mitzvot aseh and mitzvot lo ta’aseh. Positive mitzvot give commandments of what to do, and negative mitzvot give commandments of what not to do.
In the PB&J analogy, very specific instructions are required to complete the task, and in a way, the Torah also needs to have specific instructions. If you just told someone to “be holy”, they would have no idea what to do. Being holy, however, is a very different thing than having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Whereas in the making of a sandwich, you do need specific instructions, when I read the Torah as a Jew today, I find that some laws in the Torah are too specific to the time they were created, and it is therefore nearly impossible to see them as relevant to today. There is a very careful balance for rules to both be relevant enough to break in more than one time period, but specific enough to follow.
So: What do we do when the Torah - our holiest of books - feels irrelevant? How do we interact with the Torah when it is offering us instructions that feel really distant from our current lives? Right now, as I’m becoming a Bat Mitzvah, there are many laws in the Torah that I don’t follow. I think that many laws from the Torah are just not
relevant in my life. There are many punishments for crimes that just don’t happen in modern industrial society. Most of us don’t have crops, and we certainly don’t make animal sacrifices anymore. So right now, as a reconstructionist, I’m thinking that I should follow laws from the Torah that are applicable today and make sense and that help me to be more “holy” in the way I define holiness. According to research, many people see the Holiness Code as the exact laws to become holy. They think of it in a very black
and white way: either you follow the laws and become holy, or you aren’t holy. I think that the end goal of “holiness” is something you believe about yourself, and there are many ways to get there. My version of holiness includes caring for everyone, including animals, so for my Mitzvah Project I’m going to volunteer at a cat shelter.
I wouldn’t be here today without the help of many people. Firstly, I would like to thank my tutor, Missie. Thank you for being supportive and always being forgiving, even when I clearly hadn’t practiced my Hebrew that week. You are truly so fun to be around, and your positive energy is infectious. Next, I would like to thank Rabbi Aliza. You are so amazing at pushing my thoughts to be more than what I imagined. Even though you are new to our community, you are already a great rabbi and a very kind person. I would also like to thank my B’nai - Mitzvah cohort for being there for me through all of this.
We have experienced a lot of change as a cohort: always switching teachers and getting a new rabbi, but we stuck through it all. Thank you for being such a tight cohort that I could always count on. Another person I would like to thank is my sister, Rosalie. Thank you for being an awesome sister who also typed this sentence. I also would like to thank my parents. I appreciate how you cook amazing food every night, but also get take-out when I want it. You always make sure my needs are met. Finally, thank you to the entire HBT community for being such a safe and supportive synagogue to grow up in.