From the Heart

Aharei Mot-Kedoshim 5778 / 28 April 2018

I’ll preface this story by saying it was far from my proudest moment: I was probably in ninth or tenth grade, at lunch in yeshiva high school, when a friend who was in the remedial Hebrew class was lamenting his teacher’s refusal to answer any student speaking in English — even if he was asking to go to the bathroom. I don’t remember who got us started, but I will admit I gleefully went along when we started to teach him various swear-words under the guise of teaching him how to ask for a bathroom pass.

In the moment, it seemed like a hilarious gag; looking back, it’s also clear to me that we flagrantly violated one of the best-known mitzvot from this morning’s parshah: לֹֽא־תְקַלֵּל חֵרֵשׁ וְלִפְנֵי עִוֵּר לֹא תִתֵּן מִכְשֹׁל וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּֽאֱ־לֹהֶיךָ אֲנִי ה’:, “Do not curse a deaf person, nor place an obstacle before the blind; but you shall fear your God, I am Adonai.”^[1] The literal meaning of the verse is clear, but our Sages of Blessed Memory read it as a metaphor: do not take advantage of someone who is deaf or blind to what you are doing.^[2] Don’t take advantage of someone who doesn’t know better, someone unable to defend himself — someone who, if not for the righteous intervention of one of the girls at our table, would surely have ended up in detention.

Returning to our verse, it’s easy to gloss over the middle phrase, וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּֽאֱ־לֹהֶיךָ, “you shall fear your God.” At first blush, these words seem to be a rhetorical flourish, something the Torah throws in to say, “Hey guys, I’m serious about this.” When we take a closer look, however, it turns out that this phrase is quite unusual: it shows up only five times in the Torah, only in the book of Leviticus, only in the second half of the book — known as the Holiness Code, for its intense focus on matters of Holiness — and only here, at the start of the Holiness Code, and in chapter 25, at the end of the Code.

In addition to this verse, the phrase וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּֽאֱ־לֹהֶיךָ, “you shall fear your God,” turns up again in the commandment to show respect to elders;^[3] not verbally or emotionally abusing outsiders;^[4] not taking interest;^[5] and not subjecting a servant to needless work.^[6] Examining these five mitzvot, the Sages conclude that the Torah invokes “you shall fear your God” whenever we encounter a דבר המסור ללב, “a matter turned over to the heart.”^[7] For all of these things, it would be simple for a person to feign innocence. “Put an obstacle before the blind? I gave advice that I genuinely believed was good, I can’t be responsible if it turned out bad.” “I didn’t rise out of respect for that elder? Why, I didn’t even see him there!” Is there any way for us to know the truth behind these claims?

In an episode that always gives me chills, the Talmud describes the scene around Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai’s deathbed. He has reached his final day, death is imminent, and his students call out: רבינו, ברכינו! “Our Rabbi, bless us!”

Rabbi Yohanan blessed them, “May you fear Heaven the way you fear flesh and blood.”

His students were incredulous. “That’s it?!” they shouted. “No more than that?”

“If only!” Rabbi Yohanan scolded them. “You should know that when a person goes to commit a sin, he looks all around and thinks, ‘I hope no one sees me!’”^[8] 

Rabbi Yohanan’s point is clear: people worry that others might catch them up to no good, but pay no mind to the simple fact that, no matter what, God will see.^[9] He asks his students — and us — one simple, devastating question: are you the same person when no one is looking?

Let’s turn up the heat a little bit. Sure, we all know that some people are up to no good, and will use any excuse to cloak their wrongdoing. But you don’t need malicious intent to run afoul of these דברים המסור ללב, matters turned over to the heart. Clayton Christensen ends his masterful book, How Will You Measure Your Life, with a short chapter entitled, “Just this once…” Christensen sums up the entire chapter’s theme when he writes, “Life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances.”^[10] There will always be a compelling reason tempting otherwise honest, law-abiding people to bend the rules “just this once” — and that thought almost always comes up in relation to a דבר המסור ללב, a matter turned over to the heart. These things are matters of integrity — demanding of us to live as integrated people, people who are the same inside and out, no matter who is — or, more importantly, isn’t — watching.^[11]

In my fourth year of Rabbinical School, I was treated to the single most difficult and high-stakes class I think I have ever taken. The head of the Bible department assigned literally hundreds of chapters of Tanakh, from parts of the Bible that I didn’t even know were there; then he presented us with an exam consisting of just eight questions. If you’re not feeling like math today, it means that each question accounted for 12.5% of the grade, and an A required at least partial credit on each and every question. A little bit more than halfway through the exam, I got up to go to the restroom; at the same time, one of my classmates walked to the front of the room and turned in her exam. As sometimes happens, I caught a word out of the corner of my eye: just one word, “Hiram,” the name of the Tyrian king who was a close friend to King Solomon and a key player in building the first Temple in Jerusalem. By the time I reached the men’s room at the far end of the hall, it hit me that I had answered question #2 completely wrong — and, having seen Hiram’s name, I now remembered a substantial portion of the correct answer.

Now the fun began. Would it really be cheating to go back and revise my answer? It’s not like I was copying off another student’s paper. I only saw that one word, Hiram’s name. I remembered the rest of it for myself. Now that I remembered the right answer, why not go back and fix it? And who would ever know, anyway? I wasn’t copying, it would all be my own words and ideas, so why would the professor even question whether the work was my own?

But I quickly understood that this was a classic דבר המסור ללב, and in my heart I knew the right answer: had I not seen the other paper, there is no way I would have caught my error. My answer to question #2 — so completely wrong that I answered from the wrong book of the Bible altogether — needed to stay as is. My teacher never would have known — but I knew, and I knew what kind of person I wanted to be when no one else was looking.

John C. Maxwell writes, “People with integrity have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.”^[12] Sitting back down at the desk, taking up my pencil, and finishing the exam was torment. No matter how hard I worked, even if I got everything else perfect — which I knew was not going to happen — any hope of an A was gone. Even a B-, at this point, was a stretch. But as soon as I handed in the test, I felt lighter, freer. In the end I passed the class, by an uncomfortably slim margin — but more important, in that moment I passed the crucial test laid out in this morning’s Torah portion, doing the right thing when it was דבר המסור ללב, a matter turned over to the heart.

I would be thrilled to tell you that, from that day forward, I always did the right thing in the face of this kind of temptation. I would also be lying. The integrity that our parshah demands doesn’t come easily and it’s hard to hold on to. Each encounter is a struggle. No one gets it right all the time; that’s where accountability comes in, when we must own up to our missteps. The important lesson for us to carry away from this morning’s Torah reading is that if we aspire to holiness — which Aharei Mot-Kedoshim explicitly sets up as our goal — we must start with personal integrity. Who will you be the next time no one is looking?

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