This post originally appears at Kevah.org.

What is holiness?

The concept of holiness (or ‘sanctity’) is central to Jewish theology, but commentators have struggled throughout the ages to give it precise definition. The word in Hebrew, kedusha (קדושה), has the connotation of ‘distinct,’ or ‘separate.’ Hence the first usage of the term in the Torah, to describe the Shabbat: 

God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it (vaykadesh oto), because on it God ceased from all the work of Creation that he had done. (Gen. 2:3)

וַיְבָרֶךְ אֱלֹקים אֶת-יוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי, וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֹתוֹ:  כִּי בוֹ שָׁבַת מִכָּל-מְלַאכְתּוֹ, אֲשֶׁר-בָּרָא אֱלֹקים לַעֲשׂוֹת.  

Holiness also seems to have something do with closeness to God, who is the source of the sacred. This is the impression we get from the first appearance of the word in the Book of Exodus. In Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush, God tells him: 

Do not come any closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. (Exod. 3:5)

 וַיֹּאמֶר, אַל-תִּקְרַב הֲלֹם; שַׁל-נְעָלֶיךָ, מֵעַל רַגְלֶיךָ–כִּי הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עוֹמֵד עָלָיו, אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ הוּא.

We continue to see references to holiness, here and there, throughout the Book of Exodus, and it becomes clear that this is a value to be pursued. So we are told that we are to be “holy people” to God (22:30), and even that the Israelites will be known as a “holy nation” (19:6). 

Yet it is not until the construction of the Tabernacle and the appointment of the priesthood that holiness truly comes into center stage in the Biblical text. The Tabernacle, meant to serve as a dwelling place for God on earth, is called a mikdash, or sanctuary – literally a ‘holy thing.’ And the High Priest who will oversee the sacrifices offered there is to wear a golden headband, upon which we are told to engrave: ‘Kodesh L’Hashem’ - Holy to the Lord.

So by the time we enter Leviticus, which presents itself as entire book devoted to detailing the work of the priests and the rituals of the Tabernacle, we have fully entered into a religion of holiness. The sacrifices themselves are described, again and again, as ‘holy’; the inner chamber of the Tabernacle is ‘The Holy of Holies’; and the priests themselves, dressed in their ‘holy garments’ are the official representatives of this holiness. In fact, it is in our parsha that they receive the most explicit description of their role:

To distinguish between the sacred (hakodesh) and the profane, and between the impure and the pure. And to teach the Children of Israel all the laws that the Lord spoke to Moses. (Lev. 10:10-11)

 וּלְהַבְדִּיל, בֵּין הַקֹּדֶשׁ וּבֵין הַחֹל, וּבֵין הַטָּמֵא, וּבֵין הַטָּהוֹר.  וּלְהוֹרֹת, אֶת-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל–אֵת, כָּל-הַחֻקִּים, אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר ה אֲלֵיהֶם, בְּיַד-מֹשֶׁה.

It is clear by now that holiness is to be an essential feature of this new religious community. And it is equally clear that the priests will be the mediators of holiness, sanctifying themselves in order to enter into the holy place and carry out the holy rites on behalf of the people.

What remains unclear is what exactly this holiness is, and whether or not the people themselves will have any access to it. So far, holiness seems entirely outside of them. God is holy, the Tabernacle and its offerings are holy, perhaps the priests themselves are holy men – but all of these things stand at a distinct remove from the average Israelite. So how are they to fulfill the charge to become “holy people”? Is such a thing even possible?

The first indication that the Children of Israel will be able to move holiness from the priesthood into their own lives comes here in Parshat Shemini, with the listing of kosher and non-kosher animals. This is the first set of laws we have in Leviticus that do not directly tie back to the sacrificial rites. Instead, we get the categories of mammals, fish, birds, insects and reptiles that may or may not be eaten. The whole thing is rather technical and detail-heavy, until we come to the end, when we get this sweeping statement of the purpose of these dietary restrictions: 

For I the Lord am your God: you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves unclean through any swarming thing that moves upon the earth. For I the Lord am the One who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:44-45)

 כִּי אֲנִי  ה, אֱלֹקיכֶם, וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים, כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי; וְלֹא תְטַמְּאוּ אֶת-נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם, בְּכָל-הַשֶּׁרֶץ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל-הָאָרֶץ.  כִּי אֲנִי ה, הַמַּעֲלֶה אֶתְכֶם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, לִהְיֹת לָכֶם, לֵאלֹקים; וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים, כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי.

The practice of keeping kosher, these verse make quite clear, is meant to sanctify the practitioner. Just as the priests have to carefully monitor what animals are offered in the temple and how they are prepared, so the whole Children of Israel will monitor what animals come in their bodies. Remember that the priests were supposed to teach the people how to distinguish between the pure and the impure, the sacred and the profane. Why was that necessary if the sacrifices were to be handled exclusively by those same priests? Yet now it is clear that the people will use what they have learned in order to make such distinctions in their own food preparation. One gets the sense that the body has become the new sanctuary, with every person treating their own mouth and stomach as a kind of mini-altar, upon which only holy things can be placed.

Holiness, then, has already made a remarkable transition, from the official realm of the Tabernacle, into the very personal sphere of eating. Through our food choices, we purify and sanctify ourselves. Here is the first hands-on method we, the common people, have for becoming holy.

Yet this is only a first step. For we have still not answered the question of what holiness is, and why we ought to seek it. Is sanctity really just about maintaining bodily purity? Eating is undoubtedly one of the basic human activities, but it seems unlikely that our entire quest for personal holiness would begin and end with food.

The careful reader of the lines above, however, will see that they are pointing us towards a much broader destination. For while the words, “you shall be holy, for I am holy,” are first stated here, they are most famously repeated further on, as the opening to Chapter 19:

Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the, Lord your God am holy. (Lev. 19:2)

דַּבֵּר אֶל-כָּל-עֲדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם–קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ:  כִּי קָדוֹשׁ, אֲנִי ֿה אֱלֹקיכֶם.

The language is almost the same. This time, however, the injunction to be holy like God comes as the introduction to an entire corpus of laws, one of the longest in the Torah, often referred to as – what else? – the Holiness Code. 

The character of these laws, however, are surprising here in the middle of Leviticus. For they (mostly) do not focus on the sacrifices or purities and impurities. Instead they contain commandments like these: 

You shall revere your mother and father… I am the Lord your God (Lev.19:3)

אִישׁ אִמּוֹ וְאָבִיו תִּירָאוּ, וְאֶת-שַׁבְּתֹתַי תִּשְׁמֹרוּ:  אֲנִי, ה אֱלֹקיכֶם. 

You shall leave the [the corner of your field, and the fallen fruit of your vineyard] for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:10)

  לֶעָנִי וְלַגֵּר תַּעֲזֹב אֹתָם, אֲנִי ה אֱלֹקיכֶם. 

You shall not steal. You shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another… I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:11-12)

 לֹא, תִּגְנֹבוּ; וְלֹא-תְכַחֲשׁוּ וְלֹא-תְשַׁקְּרוּ, אִישׁ בַּעֲמִיתוֹ… אֲנִי ה.

You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind… I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:14)

 לֹא-תְקַלֵּל חֵרֵשׁ–וְלִפְנֵי עִוֵּר, לֹא תִתֵּן מִכְשֹׁל; וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּאֱלֹהֶיךָ, אֲנִי ה. 

You shall not render an unfair judgment: do not favor the poor, nor show deference to the rich, with justice shall you judge your kinsman… I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:15-16)

 לֹא-תַעֲשׂוּ עָוֶל, בַּמִּשְׁפָּט–לֹא-תִשָּׂא פְנֵי-דָל, וְלֹא תֶהְדַּר פְּנֵי גָדוֹל:  בְּצֶדֶק, תִּשְׁפֹּט עֲמִיתֶךָ.   אֲנִי, ה.

Respect; Charity; Honesty; Compassion; Justice – values such as these are all over the Holiness Code. Very lofty principles, to be sure… but what do they have to do with holiness itself? This body of rules seems more reminiscent of the laws we heard just after the revelation at Sinai, before we started dealing with the Tabernacle, than anything we have seen so far in Leviticus.

Yet that seems to be precisely the point. This is a return to a religion centered around Justice, the one we thought we were getting before we took a turn into the arcane realm of Holiness. For the priests have been, ever since the glory days of Mount Sinai and the subsequent downfall of our worshipping the Golden Calf, redirecting us away from the ethical message of the Covenant to a new, singular focus on Sanctity and the purity required to maintain it. Yet the Book of Leviticus, which starts off seeming to run wholeheartedly into the priestly realm, ends up slowly redirecting us back to justice – first by shifting the responsibility for maintaining holiness on to us through personal dietary laws, and then by redefining the very holiness we are to be seeking as: the construction of a just society.

However – and this is key – Leviticus never leaves holiness behind. The message is not: forget the sacred and focus on the ethical. Rather, the message is: true holiness is justice. We find the sacred and the pure not only in the Tabernacle, and not only in our bodies, but out in the real world, in living human society. We encounter holiness in the respect with which we treat one another, in the way we care for the most vulnerable among us, and even in the gritty work of resolving conflicts with fair laws. Holiness is not so mysterious, after all. For it is bound up in the pursuit of all the just principles that make for a well-functioning and compassionate society.

But wait - what about God? Does this vision of holiness not reduce the sacred to mere ethical humanism? Don’t we lose, in the midst of such pragmatic calculations, the transcendent encounter with Divinity that the priests had been so carefully cultivating?

No, not if the wording of Leviticus itself is to be taken seriously. For note that all the laws we listed end with the phrase, “I am the Lord your God.” Just so, the kosher laws were meant to keep us holy, “for I am holy.” And this is also the language of the Holiness Code: “be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” These practices are not merely good in themselves, but also because they serve as acts of imitating God. “Just as God is merciful and compassionate,” goes a Talmudic saying, “so you should be merciful and compassionate.” (Shabbat 133b) 

This merging of Justice and Holiness is a radical move, but also a brilliant one - for at least two reasons. The first is that it resolves the problem we started with. That is, we knew that God was supposed to be holy, and that we wanted to become holy like God – but how ? What was this mysterious force called ‘holiness’ anyway? Now we have an answer. For if God’s holiness is intertwined with God’s justice, then we have a principle we can actually understand and attempt to emulate. We can actively seek holiness, even without intermediaries, because it is something that makes sense to human beings and directly applies to the world we live in.

But the other great advantage that this synthesis provides is that it addresses a classic tension in religious life. For there have always been some voices that preach service towards mankind as the primary goal of religion, and other voices that describe the ideal religious life as one of pure devotion to the sacred. What then, we are left to wonder, is the true spiritual path? Is it to go out to repair a broken world, or to stay intensely focused on clinging to God? The genius of Judaism was to figure out a way to answer: both. Both at once.

More from ParshaNut on Parshat Shemini:

http://parshanut.com/post/142018471761/come-close-parshat-shemini

http://parshanut.com/post/116543538931/the-sound-of-silence-parshat-shemini

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© 2014 David Kasher