Main news for 27 February 2026

All the commandments in this chapter concern holiness (dedication to the Lord) and purity before God in one way or another. It is very important that the call to holiness embraces literally every aspect of an Israelite's life—from prayer and relationships between people to the manner of attending to bodily needs. We may need to learn this from them, for we so often divide life into the sacred and the profane, into “lofty spirituality” and daily routine. Yet God does not wish to be content with only those particular aspects of life that we set aside for Him. Scripture warns unequivocally: “The Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp... therefore your camp must be holy, so that He may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you” (verse 14).

Some norms of the Torah and, in particular, of the Book of Deuteronomy may seem strange. Not cruel, but precisely strange, awkward, meaningless. What, for example, does physical mutilation have to do with the possibility of standing before God? After all, this is a spiritual question far more than a physical one. Of course, a Levitical priest could not be physically absolutely helpless - an absolutely helpless person simply could not perform sacrifices - but that is not the case being discussed here, and it is not about physical weakness. One may, of course, think that this is not about ordinary mutilation but about ritual castration, practiced in antiquity in some pagan cults.

Another possibility, however, is a simple reminder that God is always offered the best, not the worst, of what the community has at its disposal. If the Torah forbids sacrificing maimed animals, why should a maimed person perform the sacrifice? This is not about disdain, or humiliation, or the idea that God has no need for a cripple. The question here is whether the sacred service should be entrusted to someone who does not possess the fullness of his own existence, his own life, even if the fullness in question is physical.

This fullness of life, the wholeness of experiencing it, becomes the main meaning of the Torah, its observance, and following it. Here there is both physical hygiene and spiritual-moral hygiene. It is strange to see a prescription about a shovel next to prescriptions forbidding usury or sexual immorality - especially since quite a lot has already been said about both usury and immorality. Here, however, they are spoken of as something ordinary and everyday, something that has become part of daily uncleanness.

Such things are usually present in the life of a person and a society as something inseparable from it and therefore ordinary, as a kind of "acceptable sin." People usually say of such sins: it is bad, of course, but... who is without sin? This is precisely a refusal of repentance, a refusal to resist sin, consent to it and agreement with it. Sometimes such a life in sin may even seem acceptable, but the sacred writer quite unambiguously, and even somewhat naturalistically, dots every i: living this way is the same as living amid one's own unremoved excrement. With all the resulting consequences for spiritual health.

All the commandments in this chapter concern, in one way or another, holiness (being consecrated to the Lord) and purity before God. It is very important that the call to holiness embraces literally every aspect of an Israelite’s life—from prayer and relations between people to the manner of attending to bodily needs. Perhaps we should learn this from them, for we so often divide life into sacred and profane, into “lofty spirituality” and everyday life. Yet God does not wish to be content with certain aspects of life that we set aside for Him. Scripture warns unambiguously: “The Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp... therefore your camp must be holy, so that He may see no indecent thing among you and turn away from you” (v. 14).