APRIL 27 • 2023 | 71
they will no longer be liked, or
even loved by their children if
they chastise them for any rea-
son.
” They are afraid to damage
their relationship by saying
“No.
” They fear the loss of their
children’s love.
THE BENEFIT OF RULES
The result is that they leave
their children dangerously
unprepared for a world that
will not indulge their wishes or
desire for attention; a world that
can be tough, demanding and
sometimes cruel. Without rules,
social skills, self-restraints and
a capacity to defer gratification,
children grow up without an
apprenticeship in reality. His
conclusion is powerful:
“Clear rules make for secure
children and calm, rational
parents. Clear principles of dis-
cipline and punishment balance
mercy and justice so that social
development and psychological
maturity can be optimally pro-
moted. Clear rules and proper
discipline help the child, and
the family, and society, establish,
maintain and expand order.
That is all that protects us from
chaos.
”
That is what the opening
chapter of Kedoshim is about:
clear rules that create and
sustain a social order. That
is where real love — not the
sentimental, self-deceiving
substitute — belongs. Without
order, love merely adds to the
chaos. Misplaced love can lead
to parental neglect, producing
spoiled children with a sense of
entitlement who are destined
for an unhappy, unsuccessful,
unfulfilled adult life.
Peterson’s book, whose sub-
title is “
An Antidote to Chaos,
”
is not just about children. It is
about the mess the West has
made since the Beatles sang (in
1967), “
All You Need is Love.
”
As a clinical psychologist,
Peterson has seen the emotion-
al cost of a society without a
shared moral code. People, he
writes, need ordering principles,
without which there is chaos.
We require “rules, standards,
values — alone and together.
We require routine and tradi-
tion. That’s order.
”
Too much order can be bad,
but too little can be worse. Life
is best lived, he says, on the
dividing line between them.
It’s there, he says, that “we find
the meaning that justifies life
and its inevitable suffering.
”
Perhaps if we lived properly, he
adds, “we could withstand the
knowledge of our own fragility
and mortality, without the sense
of aggrieved victimhood that
produces, first, resentment, then
envy, and then the desire for
vengeance and destruction.
”
That is as acute an explana-
tion as I have ever heard for the
unique structure of Leviticus 19.
Its combination of moral, politi-
cal, economic and environmen-
tal laws is a supreme statement
of a universe of (Divinely cre-
ated) order of which we are the
custodians. But the chapter is
not just about order. It is about
humanizing that order through
love — the love of neighbor
and stranger. And when the
Torah says, don’t hate, don’t
take revenge and don’t bear a
grudge, it is an uncanny antic-
ipation of Peterson’s remarks
about resentment, envy, and
the desire for vengeance and
destruction.
Hence the life-changing idea
that we have forgotten for far
too long: Love is not enough.
Relationships need rules.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
served as the chief rabbi of the
United Hebrew Congregations of the
Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings
are available to all at rabbisacks.org.
This essay was written in 2018..
SPIRIT
High Standards
for Society
K
eep the Sabbath.
Revere one’s parents.
Refrain from idolatry
and from theft.
” Where have
we heard these phrases?
The first three verses of
Parashat Kedoshim are rem-
iniscent of the Ten
Commandments, already
presented in Exodus.
Later in Kedoshim, we
learn about the Torah’s
standards for society: to
provide for the poor, to
judge fairly, to show def-
erence toward the elderly,
to love one’s neighbor
as oneself, to not place a
stumbling block before
the blind and to not bear
grudges.
These instructions,
among the most well-known
in the Torah, are essential to
understanding the meaning of
living a Jewish life. The Jewish
project is, so to speak, to part-
ner with God by sanctifying
and elevating ourselves with
behavior that respects, honors
and uplifts our fellow human
beings.
Because God is concerned
with decency, we must not
only abstain from making poor
choices in regard to our fellow
man, but we must continually
practice good behavior in our
everyday interactions with one
another, whether at home, at
work or merely walking down
the street.
Clearly, our relationships
with one another matter. Why
then, are respect and good
behavior often hard to master?
Why does the Torah insist on
repeating the commandments
here, and then a third time
in the Book of Deuteronomy?
How many times must they be
drilled into our consciousness
for them to stick?
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
of blessed memory offers an
insight taken from the field of
anthropology: Use of language
may help individuals
achieve meaning, but
communities are truly
held together when
individuals are unit-
ed by ritual. In other
words, it is not enough
to read or reread the
commandments; we
must continually prac-
tice the compassion,
fairness and deference
that are held as ideal in
our tradition. We must
ritualize proper, moral
behavior as the best way to
achieve harmony in society.
Tragically, the Jews have
suffered throughout history
when others have fallen short
or recused themselves from
upholding universal principles
like “love thy neighbor as thy-
self.
” We know this all too well
at the Zekelman Holocaust
Center. That’s why we have a
desecrated Torah on exhibit
from WWII Europe and why
we have it open to the “Love
Thy Neighbor as Thyself” pas-
sage from this Torah portion.
Every person, Jewish and
otherwise, carries a responsi-
bility to treat one another as
we are commanded to by God.
May we all look to Parshat
Kedoshim as a blueprint for
the kind of society we are
expected to uphold.
Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld is CEO of the
Zekelman Holocaust Center in
Farmington Hills.
TORAH PORTION
Rabbi Eli
Mayerfeld
Parshat
Achrei Mot/
Kedoshim:
Leviticus
16:1-20:27;
Amos 9:7-15.