“It is that command to be holy that calls us to a partnership with the Divine to make God’s vision of justice and peace real here on Earth, to create a better and more hopeful future for all God’s children. You shall be Holy for the Eternal your God is Holy.”
There is to me no more exalted formulation of the human condition and our role in the universe than these words of Lev.19:2 and the evocative rules exemplifying the implementation of that idea described in the ensuing verses.
We are reminded that we are created in the image of God, capable of being holy through the way we live our lives, just as the Eternal is holy. Infusing a sense of God’s presence into every aspect of our lives remains at the core of our religious values and identity."
So the verses go on to exemplify that holiness resides in every aspect of life: in religious observance, in the way we treat our family, in the way we treat our neighbor, in the way we do our work, in our sexual relations. Everything is capable of manifesting holiness.
Above all, in the powerful call of those verses that remind us that to seek to be holy, as God is holy, we are required to feed the hungry and remove the stumbling block before the blind, create courts of justice and marketplaces that are fair and honest, to pay the laborer a fair and timely wage, we hear the Bible’s revolutionary call to ethical monotheism, a vision that has transformed the history of humankind.
It is exactly that call that has ennobled humanity, -- as Prof. Isadore Twersky once wrote, raising us above mere biological existence and giving to our lives meaning, destiny and purpose.
It is that command to be holy that calls us to a partnership with the Divine to make God’s vision of justice and peace real here on Earth, to create a better and more hopeful future for all God’s children.
And that is a code -- this so-called Holiness Code -- which can and must bring together all the Abrahamic faiths in common vision and purpose.
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