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.

