The following d’var Torah originally appeared on the website for the Board of Rabbis of Southern California,

in the spring of 2005, for Parashat B’chukotai 

Keep upright

by Rabbi Rick Brody

            In college, I had a friend who decided that her yearbook entry for “favorite saying” would be the words, “Keep upright.”  The catch was the unlikely source of this wisdom — a bottle of contact lens cleaning solution!  The multiple meanings behind the idea of uprightness have long been evident to the human mind.  This week’s Torah portion, B’chukotai, presents this multiplicity through the unique use of a single word; that word conveys a powerful image that compels us to consider our essence as both physical and spiritual beings.

            Like my friend’s pharmaceutical product, we human beings are “designed” to be physically upright.  As opposed to most other creatures, we stand and walk two-legged.  Yet when we think of uprightness, we also have a notion of moral and spiritual strength.  To stand or walk tall are not merely physical phenomena — they are idioms for carrying oneself with conviction, faith, and dignity; to choose the path of the upright is to conduct oneself in a morally scrupulous fashion, aiming for the heights in one’s ethical behavior.  In B’chukotai, we encounter a word for upright that appears nowhere else in the entire Bible.  The word is kom’miyut.  In the very beginning of the parashah, the Israelites receive a list of blessings that God will bestow upon them if they adhere to the mitzvot.  After this incentive towards proper behavior, God reminds B’nai Yisrael of a fundamental contribution that God has made to their lives:

Some may recognize the word kom’miyut from Birkat Hamazon, the Grace after Meals, where it appears in one of the short blessings near the end:  We ask that God will lead us (hu yolicheinu) upright to our land (kom’miyut l’artzeinu).  Both the Biblical and liturgical appearances of this word capture an image of redemption, a physical state that celebrates the triumph of human dignity.  When we go from slavery to freedom, we stand tall — we recover from the physical and spiritual oppression that weighs us down and inhibits our free movement in the world.  When we are free, we actualize our humanity.  God is reminding us that freedom is essential to our role as beings created b’tzelem elohim (in the Divine image).

            Freedom has both physical and abstract dimensions.  It means the independent exercise of will, the liberation of self from the confinement of pure instinct.  This blessing is not divorced from the physical uniqueness of our species.  Physical anthropology reminds us that, over the course of millions of years, we human beings literally straightened out our bodies, evolving into bipeds.  In scientific terms, God truly did enable us to walk upright.  Many researchers understand this shift to bipedalism as occurring alongside the development of human intelligence.  As we “straightened out,” we gained many freedoms, most obviously of our hands — allowing for greater dexterity and mobility, and ultimately the gift of language.  First, we used our newly freed hands for signs, and then our bodies developed the physical capacity of speech, freeing us even further.  From these leaps, along with unparalleled growth of the brain, consciousness emerged.  These various strengths allowed us to build civilizations, to reflect on our own nature, and perhaps most profoundly, to contemplate God.  Thus, our physical evolution allowed for us to discover new, amazing experiences of freedom.  We can then see God’s words to the Israelites as a template for the very process of the emergence of humanity: “By enabling you to walk upright, I led you into physical and spiritual freedom.”  The Israelites’ Exodus symbolizes these freedoms.

            The above metaphor also works in reverse.  Not only can we appreciate the gift of freedom that God bestowed on humanity through the very unfolding of nature; we also can recreate that gift in history time and again:  When we fight for freedom and human rights, when we break the yokes of oppression so that people can walk free — i.e., when we perpetuate the experience of the Exodus from Egypt — we mirror God’s hand in the evolutionary process; we help advance humanity, bringing more of us closer to realizing our God-given potential.  In understanding the meaning of the word kom’miyut, a midrash in B’reishit Rabbah (12:6) teaches, in the name of Rabbi Hiyya: “That means, with an erect bearing, fearing no creature.”  Indeed, one who can stand tall has conquered fear and achieved great power, leaving behind the fear of one’s surroundings — fear that limits human growth and freedom.  On the other hand, Egypt, the paragon of power at its time, symbolizes the potential for moral bankruptcy amidst mere physical uprightness.  The huge pyramids and all the other celebrations of human capability went as far as to deify certain human beings while subjugating and oppressing others, thus asserting inequality.  While the perpetrators of such cruelty might stand tall and proud and elevate themselves further through their own building projects, we know that there is a moral and spiritual lens through which we see them:  They are hunched over, diminished in their own humanity, far from displaying the qualities we believe are our species’ imperative.  They are demonstrating that beneath the hieroglyphics and palaces, the baser, animal elements of dehumanization can still easily win out.  Humanity does not triumph automatically.

            Advancing the cause of freedom is not only a victory for the oppressed, but for all who engage in the struggle.  As moral creatures, we cannot escape the meaning of “upright” that refers to our embrace of righteousness, of just action.  We who already possess power — physical uprightness — must also exercise our moral uprightness in order to fulfill that other element of Divinity we possess, the ability and the obligation to fight for justice, to repair the world.  Thus, God is telling us, “By freeing you from Egypt, I have made you more human; and I have planted within you the Godly quality of freeing others, making you even more human.”

            Human beings have an innate desire to walk upright.  My one-year-old daughter Noa stands up at virtually every opportunity and is trying so hard to walk without the use of her hands.  As she engages in her physical pursuit of uprightness, she is also discovering language and consciousness.  She is achieving more freedom in many respects.  Thus, the evolution that occurs within the life of a single human being mirrors the history of our species — again, both physically and spiritually.  Noa and all growing human beings wish to bring their arms upward — to raise them to the heavens; for millennia, our ancestors have looked to the heavens for their connection with God, in their desire to be more human.  We understand God to be helping us to climb higher, to become closer to God, more like God, more upright.  My wife and I are now becoming aware of the moral responsibility we have to instruct Noa that being human means not only walking proudly, but also respecting and ensuring the freedom and dignity of others.

            Being human means standing in the unique space between the animals and the angels.  B’reishit Rabbah (8:11) explains that God created human beings

with four attributes of the higher beings [i.e. angels] and four attributes of the lower beings [i.e. beasts]. [The four attributes of the higher beings are] standing upright, like the ministering angels; speaking, like the ministering angels; understanding, like the ministering angels; and seeing, like the ministering angels. ….  Human beings have four attributes of the lower beings: they eat and drink, like animals; procreate, like animals; excrete, like animals; and die, like animals.

We cannot escape certain elements of our animal nature, and it is vital for us to remember our origins from the dust of the earth.  Yet the Divine spark within us — that which allows us to resemble the angels, that which allows us to walk upright and be free in a unique way on this planet — is a gift we also cannot forget.  May we continue to evolve, with God’s help, to spiritual and moral (as well as physical) heights, ever reaching for the heavens.