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.