by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman,
an author and speaker on Jewish ritual, prayer, and spirituality, is a professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

My computer regularly receives unsolicited, unanticipated, and undesirable e-mail. This month’s offering features mail-order colleges promising a quick and easy degree. For only $4,400 I can get a PhD.

Trust me on this: The last thing I need is another doctorate. Do you have any idea how many years I went to school — for a BA, then rabbinic ordination, and a PhD on top of that?

As an expert on going to school, I personify the Jewish ideal. We are the best-educated population in America. For Jews ages 35 to 44, 88 percent have been to college, 68 percent have a college degree, and 33 percent have a further graduate degree as well.

We should take pride in our academic achievement, but there is a definite downside: a neurotic fixation on college acceptance — as if nothing, absolutely nothing, affirms our self-worth as much as a fat envelope from a prestigious school inviting our attendance for four years. I dub it CAN, “College Acceptance Neurosis.” This is high season for the disease. All across America, but especially in the New York area (where CAN approaches epidemic proportions), high school seniors and their parents are watching anxiously for the right piece of mail to arrive.

This week’s sedra provides an antidote to CAN. Nowhere in Torah do we find the commandment, “Thou shalt receive a degree from a first-rate university.” What we get instead is the regularly repeated demand, especially in this parsha, “You shall be holy, because, I, Adonai your God, am holy.” Knowledge is fine; wisdom is better; wisdom is knowledge pursued toward the end of being holy.

Imagine the implausible: a university department in holiness. In many ways, it would outfit us for life far better than the usual degree in arts and sciences. It would even be better than a professional degree in law, let us say, or medicine. Those courses of study emphasize constant upward achievement, always making more of ourselves than we are. Some burden!

Not so holiness, which we can successfully practice just the way we are. We need not aspire to be angels, says Itturei Torah; we can be holy at every moment in life’s path. Honoring parents, observing sacred time, caring for the poor — these are the unordinary marks of an ordinary life, the life devoted to goodness and to God.

One issue here is virtual space, the way we conceptualize who we are. Remember the tale of the ship’s passenger thrown overboard during a storm. In the midst of blinding rain, the captain shouts through a megaphone, “I know you are out there somewhere. We want to save you. Tell us your position.” The drowning passenger responds, “I am president of a bank!”

So what is our lifespace made of? How do we chart our position? From the time we enter college to the time we reach retirement age, society defines us by what we achieve through our academic and professional capacity. Read The New York Times obituaries: So-and-so was president of that, founder of this, on the board of one cause after another. I disparage none of this, but I yearn for a memorial that says, “She practiced holiness all her life.”

My hypothetical department of holiness offers two graduate courses. One is called “Contingency.” Everything except holiness is contingent, dependent on conditions beyond our control. You cannot profit in the stock market if it unexpectedly falls. If your son or daughter is fighting in Iraq, you know how war changes everything. But no matter what, wherever we are and whatever we are doing, no one stops us from helping, loving, caring, and doing good for others. We can always be holy.

The second post-graduate class is humility. “You shall be holy, as I am holy,” says Torah. Pretty much all our commentators add, “Well, not exactly. Our holiness will always fall short of God’s. But falling short does not mean falling off the route to holiness altogether. No one can right all the wrongs of this poor planet. But we can try.”

So if you are a high school senior (or a parent of one), keep some perspective. What matters more than getting good grades is doing good deeds. After you die, your tombstone will not read “Verbal 720, math 760.” It just might say, however, that, made in the image of God, you tried to make the world a better place.

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