APRIL 28 • 2022 | 39 It is more complex and subtle. It contains not one perspective but three. There is the prophetic understanding of morality, the wisdom point of view and the priestly per- spective. PROPHETIC PERSPECTIVE Prophetic morality looks at the quality of relationships within a society, between us and God and between us and our fellow humans. Here are some of the key texts that define this morality. God says about Abraham, “For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his house- hold after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right [tzedakah] and just [mishpat].” God tells Hosea, “I will betroth you to Me in righteousness [tzedek] and justice [mishpat], in kindness [chesed] and compassion [rachamim].” He tells Jeremiah, “I am the Lord, who exercises kindness [chesed], justice [mishpat] and righteousness [tzedakah] on Earth, for in these I delight, declares the Lord.” Those are the key prophetic words: righteous- ness, justice, kindness and compassion — not love. When the Prophets talk about love, it is about God’s love for Israel and the love we should show for God. With only three exceptions, they do not speak about love in a moral context, that is, vis-à-vis our relationships with one another. The exceptions are Amos’ remark, “Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts” (Amos 5:15); Micah’s famous statement, “ Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8) and Zechariah’s, “Therefore love truth and peace” (Zech. 8:19). Note that all three are about loving abstractions — good, mercy and truth. They are not about people. The prophetic voice is about how peo- ple conduct themselves in society. Are they faithful to God and to one another? Are they acting honestly, justly and with due concern for the vulnerable in soci- ety? Do the political and religious leaders have integrity? Does society have the high morale that comes from people feeling that it treats its citizens well and calls forth the best in them? A moral society will succeed; an immoral or amoral one will fail. That is the key prophetic insight. The Prophets did not make the demand that people love one another. That was beyond their remit. Society requires jus- tice, not love. THE WISDOM POINT OF VIEW The wisdom voice in Torah and Tanach looks at character and consequence. If you live virtuously, then by and large things will go well for you. A good example is Psalm 1. The person occupied with Torah will be “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither — whatever they do prospers. ” That is the wisdom voice. Those who do well, fare well. They find happiness (ashrei). Good people love God, family, friends and virtue. But the wisdom literature does not speak of loving your neighbor or the stranger. THE PRIESTLY PERSPECTIVE The moral vision of the Priest that makes him different from the Prophet and Sage lies in the key word kadosh, “holy. ” Someone or something that is holy is set apart, dis- tinctive, different. The Priests were set apart from the rest of the nation. They had no share in the land. They did not work as laborers in the field. Their sphere was the Tabernacle or Temple. They lived at the epicenter of the Divine Presence. As God’s ministers, they had to keep themselves pure and avoid any form of defilement. They were holy. Until now, holiness has been seen as a special attribute of the Priest. But there was a hint at the Giving of the Torah that it concerned not just the children of Aaron but the people as a whole: “You shall be to Me a Kingdom of Priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). Our chapter now spells this out for the first time. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy’” (Lev. 19:1-2). This tells us that the ethic of holiness applies not just to Priests but to the entire nation. We, too, must be distinctive, set apart, held to a high- er standard. What in practice does this mean? A deci- sive clue is provided by another key word used throughout Tanach in relation to the Kohen, namely the verb b-d-l: to divide, set apart, separate, distinguish. That is what a Priest does. His task is “to distinguish between the sacred and the secular” (Lev. 10:10), and “to distinguish between the unclean and the clean” (Lev. 11:47). This is what God does for His people: “You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy, and I have distinguished you [va-avdil] from other peoples to be Mine. ” (Lev. 20:26). There is one other place in which b-d-l is a key word, namely the story of creation in Genesis 1, where it occurs five times. God separates light and dark, day and night, upper and lower waters. For three days, God demarcates different domains, then for the next three days He places in each its appro- priate objects or life-forms. God fashions order out of the tohu va-vohu of chaos. As His last act of creation, He makes man after His “image and likeness. ” This was clearly an act of love. “Beloved is man, ” said Rabbi Akiva, “because he was created in [God’s] image. ” Genesis 1 defines the priestly moral imag- ination. Unlike the Prophet, the Priest is not looking at society. He is not, like the wisdom figure, looking for happiness. He is looking at creation as the work of God. He knows that everything has its place: sacred and pro- fane, permitted and forbidden. It is his task to make these distinctions and teach them to others. He knows that different life forms have their own niche in the environment. That is why the ethic of holiness includes rules like: Don’t mate with different kinds of animals, don’t plant a field with different kinds of seed and don’t wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. Above all, the ethic of holiness tells us that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. God made each of us in love. Therefore, if we seek to imitate God — “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” — we, too, must love humanity, and not in the abstract but in the concrete form of the neighbor and the stranger. The ethic of holiness is based on the vision of creation as God’s work of love. This vision sees all human beings — ourselves, our neighbor and the stranger — as in the image of God, and that is why we are to love our neighbor and the stranger as ourself. I believe that there is something unique and contemporary about the ethic of holi- ness. It tells us that morality and ecology are closely related. They are both about creation: about the world as God’s work and humani- ty as God’s image. The integrity of humanity and the natural environment go together. The natural universe and humanity were both created by God, and we are charged to protect the first and love the second. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have been made available to all at rabbisacks.org.