By Talia Behrmann

This week's parshat is a double parshat: Acharei Mot and Kedoshim. Acharei Mot starts off with the death of Aaron's two sons, and a reminder that the holy priest (Kohen Gadol) is the only person allowed to enter the holy temple and he is only to do so once a year, on yom kippur). The parsha continues by describing the service that is to take place on the day of Yom Kippur itself, ending with the reminder not to sacrifice animals anywhere but the temple, not to consume blood, and not to perform acts of incest or other deviant sexual acts.

Kedoshim starts off with "You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your G-d, am holy." and then continues to list various miztvot that you should fulfill to be able to relate your holiness to that of God himself, ending with "And you shall be holy to Me, for I, G-d, am holy, and I have separated you from the nations, that you should be Mine."

For more a in depth summary of both readings check out this or this.

But for right now, I want to talk a little bit about the various miztvot that are put forth in Kedoshim and what true meanings are behind acting upon them. A lot of these miztvot in life are often seen as passive acts that occur in everyday life - do not make idols, do not steal, respect your parents - things that exist in society today as almost "common laws", or as deviant acts.

However, I was really interested by one particular mitzva in this parsha: "You shall do no unrighteousness in judgment--you shall not give special consideration to a poor man, nor honor the great; in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor." This mitzvah caught my attention because of a conversation I'd had with my brother a few weeks ago. I had told him about a recent encounter I'd had on a bus where I had looked at a family and

automatically due to their clothes, skin tone, general appearance, kids with them and that fact that they were taking the bus assumed a stereotype of them. I realized a few seconds later what I had done, and was ashamed of myself. When later discussing the event with my brother he told me how our brains need to sort things into different categories so that we don't implode with various bits and pieces of information. His comments left me questioning a lot of things (that I would like to share with all of you) about how we can approach others as equal in society today. Is it okay to sort people into a stereotype in our minds, if we then go on to acknowledge the presence of that? How much of these categorizations in turn effect our interactions with people, especially if they are "subconscious" and "automatic"?

This brings me to the parsha and what I got out of the above mitzvah. Something that I don't think occurs frequently enough in our society is the act of assuming good in people. Specifically in a movement context, I think assuming the best of people is something we should be continuing to improve upon and strive for. If everyone makes the personal effort perhaps we can begin to see larger changes.