“Acharei mot shnei bnei Aharon”—after the death of Aaron’s two sons. That’s how Parashat Achrei Mot opens. It’s not just a timestamp. It’s a theology. The Torah names grief as the setting for the next revelation. Not as a footnote. As a precondition. And what follows is one of the Torah’s most urgent and morally demanding sections: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Kedoshim tihyu, ki kadosh ani YHVH Eloheichem). This is no accident. The demand for holiness comes precisely in the aftermath of trauma. It doesn’t wait for stability. It doesn’t require clarity. It arises after the death.
This year, that phrase feels unbearably timely. We are reading Achrei Mot–Kedoshim seven months after October 7, a day that shattered Jewish assumptions and Jewish safety across the globe. The deaths we mourn are not metaphorical. The trauma is not abstract. We are living in a time when Jewish grief has been not only ignored but denied, distorted, even mocked. The disorientation is total. People who stood with Jews a year ago now walk past our pain without flinching. Friends have gone silent. Allies have turned adversarial. Even speaking publicly as a Jew—on campus, in protest, or online—now requires a kind of courage that many of us were not prepared to summon. And yet, the Torah commands: You shall be holy.
What does that mean in this moment? What does it mean to pursue holiness not after healing, but in the thick of rupture? Leviticus 19—the so-called “Holiness Code”—answers with breathtaking precision. Holiness is not abstract piety or mystical retreat. It is interpersonal, ethical, and concrete. Don’t reap your fields to the edge—leave food for the poor. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t insult the deaf or place stumbling blocks before the blind. Don’t gossip. Don’t take revenge. Don’t stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. Love your fellow as yourself. These are not spiritual niceties—they are radical, embodied commitments to moral clarity and human dignity, made even more radical when issued in the wake of death.
The Hebrew word kadosh—holy—literally means “set apart.” But the Torah’s vision of holiness is not about elitism. It’s about distinct moral behavior. The midrash Torat Kohanim (Sifra Kedoshim 1:1) teaches that holiness requires separation from transgression—perushin min ha’arayot u’min ha’aveirah—as if to say: be holy by holding a line. But Ramban (Nachmanides) goes further. He teaches that one could technically follow all the mitzvot and still be a naval birshut haTorah—a scoundrel with Torah license. Holiness, for Ramban, means going beyond the law. It means living with restraint, humility, compassion, and moral imagination.
That’s the rub. Holiness is not difficult because it’s lofty. It’s difficult because it demands our best selves when we’re least likely to offer them. It demands empathy when we feel betrayed. Restraint when we feel attacked. Vision when all we want is vindication. The Torah doesn’t ask us to be holy in a vacuum. It asks us to be holy after the death. After loss. After rage. After our neighbors fall silent and our enemies grow loud. Holiness begins not in spiritual comfort, but in spiritual tension.
That’s what makes this parsha so achingly relevant right now. The Jewish world is angry. Wounded. Defensive. And rightly so. The past several months have stripped away illusions, exposed anti-Jewish animus in institutions we once trusted, and left many of us feeling spiritually raw and morally adrift. It would be easy—understandable even—to withdraw, to turn inward, to focus solely on our own survival. But the Torah warns us against mistaking woundedness for righteousness. Pain does not excuse cruelty. Injury does not cancel obligation. You can grieve deeply and still leave the corners of your field. You can feel betrayed and still tell the truth. You can be angry and still act with compassion.
“Love your fellow as yourself,” says Leviticus 19:18. Rabbi Akiva famously called this the great principle of the Torah (klal gadol baTorah). But Hillel, in Talmud Shabbat 31a, reframed it in the negative: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” The difference matters. Akiva commands love. Hillel demands restraint. And perhaps restraint is the holier virtue in an age of outrage. Restraint from vengeance. Restraint from dehumanization. Restraint from the seductive logic that says: because I have been wronged, I now have permission to stop caring about anyone else.
So what does kedushah look like after October 7? It looks like showing up for community even when you’re exhausted. It looks like making kiddush in a world that wants you constantly outraged. It looks like telling your children they can be proudly Jewish, even if it’s harder than it used to be. It looks like remembering the stranger, even when your own people are in pain. It looks like refusing to give up on ethics, even when others have given up on you.
To be holy is not to feel pure. It is to live bound by covenant. Covenant means we do not wait for the world to deserve our moral vision. We act because we are commanded. We love because it is written. We grieve, and then we feed the hungry. We lament, and then we tell the truth. We bury our dead—and then we go back into the world, carrying holiness like a fragile fire.
There is a line in the liturgy of Yom Kippur Katan—a monthly ritual of repentance practiced by some mystics before the new moon: “Lo alman Yisrael”—Israel is not widowed. It is a cry of defiance. A statement of faith. A refusal to believe that all is lost, even when everything feels broken. That’s what Kedoshim tihyu really is: a refusal to let pain define the future. A call to moral imagination even in the face of despair.
Holiness does not mean perfection. It means orientation. It means walking toward a standard higher than what the world demands of us. It means refusing to let trauma become cruelty, or grief become apathy. It means, in the simplest and most radical way: be holy anyway.
Because God is holy. Because Torah is holy. Because we are Jews—and that means something.
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