"Y'all shall be holy, for I, Adonai your God, am holy." (Lev. 19:2)

That's the first line of this week's Torah portion, Kedoshim -- "Holy (Shall You Be)." But what does it mean to be holy as God is holy? It seems that the subsequent verses offer our answer. Treat our parents with respect and honor their needs. Keep Shabbat. When we make offerings to God -- remember, this arose at a moment when we still made physical sacrifices -- we are to eat them that day, or the next day, but not to let them linger. Wait, what? The first two things in that paragraph still resonate: honor our parents and honor Shabbat, so far so good. But what's with the need to eat sacrifices quickly?

We could regard that as an instruction pertaining to food safety. Meats, even meats cooked over fire, will go bad after a few days. Maybe this is an ancient precursor to germ theory? But I think there's more here than that. "When you make a wholeness offering to God," when you're seeking to draw-near to God because you feel that your life is whole, inhabit that feeling of wholeness... wholly. Make the offering and consume the offering. Experience your emotions completely. Inhabit your gratitude completely. Trust that the way to keep the abundance flowing is to celebrate and accept and enjoy the good you've received.

Read this way, it's a teaching about trusting that feelings of wholeness and gratitude will keep arising. It's a teaching about trusting that reasons for wholeness and gratitude will keep arising. It would be easy to want to cling to our reasons for gratitude, hoarding them, doling them out in little bits so that they will last -- like a box of chocolates eaten bit by tiny bit. But if we cling for too long, the thing we were grateful for may turn sour. The correct response to life's gifts is to celebrate them, express gratitude for them, and enjoy them -- now -- in the moment -- trusting that more will come.

Notice the interweaving of internal and external ways of cultivating holiness. Honor your parents -- which our tradition expands to include, honor your teachers, because one who teaches you Torah is like a parent, expanding your insights and showing you how to live. That's an ethical teaching about how to treat others. Honor Shabbat -- our tradition's core spiritual practice for experiencing abundance and blessing in our lives. Experience abundance and don't hoard your sense of blessedness -- trust that more good things will flow if you open your hands in gratitude. Those are internal teachings about how to carve healthy and holy grooves on our hearts so that blessing can flow in and gratitude can flow out.

Then we get a series of ethical and interpersonal instructions. When we harvest, leave the margins of the fields uncut so that those in need can glean. It is not holy to keep abundance for ourselves: holiness lies in ensuring that all who are hungry can eat and be satisfied. Don't steal or deal deceitfully with each other, or keep a laborer's wages until morning. Judge others fairly, not giving undue deference either to the poor or to the rich. Do not act vengefully. Do not engage in rechilut, gossip, or stand idly by when someone else's blood is shed.

Ordinarily I follow our sages in reading that one metaphorically. Harm to someone's reputation is considered tantamount to shedding their blood. Therefore we are commanded not to stand by when someone is being slandered, because that slander harms their integrity. But in a week that has contained yet another school shooting, the simple or surface reading of this verse leaps out at me anew. In allowing our nation's lax gun laws to stand, I fear that we are standing idly by on the blood of children who are slaughtered in schools where they should be most protected and safe. That is the opposite of holiness.

The culmination of the verses we read this morning is "Love your neighbor as yourself: I am Adonai." Love others: that is what it means to be holy as God is holy. The great sage Rabbi Akiva called this "The core principle of Torah." As though to underscore its centrality, this verse is at the literal heart of the Torah scroll -- in the middle of the middle book. This is the heart of Torah. Be holy as God is holy. The way to be holy is to love the other. Those are the words we've been singing all morning: "Here I take upon myself the mitzvah of the Creator, to love my neighbor as myself, my neighbor as myself."

These are our instructions for holiness:

1) Unclench our hands and trust that blessing will keep coming.

2) Share our abundance.

3) Be scrupulously ethical in feeding the hungry, treating workers fairly, enacting justice, and protecting the vulnerable.

4) And do all of these things not reluctantly or grudgingly but from a place of love.

Kein yehi ratzon -- may it be so.

This is the d'varling I offered at CBI this morning (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.) Related: How to be holy: boundaries come first.