Our Buddies, Our Selves
Our culture is besotted with regard for the self: self-care, self-promotion, self-love. And so, anything that can leverage this base human tendency toward a higher good is a transcendently effective balm for our default focus inward.
In this week’s Torah portion, K’doshim, we take a needed break from the Book of Leviticus’s viscera of animal sacrifices and human bodily emissions to embrace what I like to call the minimum requirements for menschlichkeit. Chapter 19 couches a list of moral and societal goods into a form of imitatio Dei, or modeling ourselves after God.
The twin challenges of the first verse seem as mysterious as they are unattainable: to achieve some ambiguous state of kedusha/holiness, and to thus model ourselves after God. Fortunately, Torah does not leave us to imagine some esoteric process available only to the elite or the initiated. Through acts like tzedakah, the establishment of fair courts and marketplaces, and not acting vengefully, we can bring God into our hearts and into our midst. The sum of all this is our tradition’s contribution to Western civilization’s foundational concept—the basis for the Golden Rule: love your neighbor as yourself. Thus, self-love becomes—ironically if not intentionally—the basis for empathy and compassion. In many ways, care for others marks the true completion of a whole self.