To Life!

^{28 Nisan 5776 | May 6, 2016}

Parshat Acharei Mot

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Director of Spiritual Development

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track

Class of 2018

After weeks of focus on purity and impurity, Parshat Achrei Mot ​shifts to a focus on obedience. The first chapters address the penitence rituals of Yom Kippur; the latter the "holiness code" outlining sexual boundaries. In between, a set of verses famously calls for the separation of the Israelites from other nations and their commitment to God's commands.

With Egypt behind them and Canaan ahead of them, the Jewish people are enjoined to forge an identity of otherness. As the midrash ​says, not to fall prey to the routines of the past nor to be allured by the novelties of the future, but to pledge allegiance to the path of the Jewish God alone. "You shall fulfill [only] My ordinances and observe [only] My statutes," says God. The consequence of doing so is that "[you] shall live by them" ("v'chai ba'hem​).

This final phrase, "v'chai ba'hem​," took on a distinctly halakhic ​meaning in the Talmud. To live by the word of God is to not die on account of it.

In the event that one is asked under duress to transgress a law or die, choose life over the law, says R. Ishmael. Do not give up your own life so that God's dictates might live. There are limits to obedience and religious zeal. Do not be overly pious.

Complicated as these laws of competing interests become, the fundamental claim of this and similar legal texts is that human life trumps divine command. Where they conflict--when a human life is at risk on shabbat, for example--side with life and do whatever it takes to preserve it. Echoing our verse and channeling BT Yoma 85b, the Aruch HaShulchan ​codifies the following as law in perpetuity:

"To live by" the law is to resist the pulls of deathly fundamentalism in favor of a more sober, life-affirming path.

But what does it really entail to live "by" (or, alternatively, "in") God's commands? For these legal scholars, it means to physically endure; to stay alive long enough to perform the next obligation. For mystical and Chassidic thinkers, though, it came to mean something quite different. "V'chai ba'hem​" is a call to greater life--not to live "by" God's word, but to gain life by virtue of it.

Consider the words of the Zohar​:

Or the Sefat Emet​:

To live in ​Torah is to become more alive, more awake, more integrated, and more complete through it. For the Zohar, just the engagement with Torah alone can yield transformative results (though fulfillment is privileged). For the Sefat Emet, ​action is the key. By doing mitzvot​, we align ourselves with the Source of Life and thereby draw ourselves closer to life--its mystery, color, intensity, and grand complexity. In the process, says the Sfat Emet ​repeatedly throughout his work, we gain "חיות," vitality. "V'chai Ba'Hem​" thus becomes a charge to utilize Torah, the Tree of Life, as the grounds for one's deeper engagement with life, with the dynamism of spiritual awakening. It is not offered as a restraint on religious passion, as argued by rabbis of the Talmud, but as a prod toward ever-greater passion.

How does the Tree of Life bind one to life? The Shelah Ha-Kadosh​, Rabbi Isaiah Horovitz, writes:

When the wisdom of Torah reveals to us to our essential, universal humanity; when we can see in the details of Torah an engagement with the highest and the lowest aspects of our beings; when we use our actions to root us even more deeply in the world, then we might experience the "חיות," the vitality, of "v'chai ba'hem.​" May it be so.