Being Holy
Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
Leviticus 19:2
What does it mean to be holy? More pointedly, what does it mean to be holy because God is holy? Surely holiness is precisely what separates God from human beings. “For I am God, and not a man – the Holy One among you” says the prophet Hosea (11:9). Kadosh, “holy,” means “distinct, set apart,” above, beyond. Holiness is what makes God, God: transcendent, eternal, all-powerful, beyond image and imagination. How can we, mere mortals – this quintessence of dust, as Hamlet put it – be like God?
Yet that is the paradox stated bluntly at the outset of the great chapter 19 of Leviticus. God is not like us, but we are commanded to be like God. How are we to understand this idea?
The sages1Sifra, Parashat Kedoshim 19:1. understand the command to be holy to mean “be perushim” (from which the word Pharisee comes), that is, “be separate, practise abstinence, exercise self-restraint.” Rashi in his commentary to the Torah understands this narrowly, applying it specifically to sexual conduct.2Rashi is influenced here by the fact that the command appears immediately after Leviticus 18, which details prohibited sexual practices and relationships. Chapter 20 also returns to this theme.
Nahmanides, as we will see below, disagrees and holds that it applies more generally to moderation and self-restraint in all matters. The sages also add that the phrase “for I the Lord your God am holy” means, “If you sanctify yourselves, I will account it to you as if you had sanctified Me.”3Sifra ad loc.
The idea is that by being distinctive in their behaviour, Jews testify to God. Just as God stands outside the natural universe though He acts within it, so the Children of Israel, though they live in the world, stand at a calibrated distance from it. They are called on to do so by setting an example of self-restraint. They should not give way to instinct or desire. They must practise self-control. They thereby show that Homo sapiens is not a mere biological phenomenon. Human beings are not simply “naked apes” or “a gene’s way of making another gene.” We can transcend the network of causality that sees human behaviour as genetically determined, a set of responses to stimuli. Animals have desires, but only humans can engage in “second-order evaluations,”4I borrow this way of putting it from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 1992), 62–65. choosing which desires to satisfy and which not. That is the freedom God gave us by making us in His image. Being holy means showing that we have a soul as well as a body, that we have spiritual principles, not just physical appetites. Sigmund Freud held that the mark of civilisation was the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. That is precisely how the sages understand the idea of holiness in human behaviour.
Nahmanides takes the idea further in a powerful formulation:
The meaning is as follows: the Torah has warned us against immorality and forbidden foods, but it permits sexual relations between man and wife, and the eating of certain kinds of meat and wine. Since this is so, a person could think that it is permitted to be passionately addicted to intercourse with his wife, or many wives, and be “among those who guzzle wine or glut themselves on meat” (Prov. 23:20) and speak freely of all profanities, since this is not explicitly forbidden. The result is that he will become a scoundrel within the permissible realm of Torah [naval bireshut HaTorah]. Therefore, after listing the specific conduct that is forbidden, the Torah continues with a general command that we practise moderation even in matters which are permitted.5Nahmanides, Commentary to Leviticus 19:2.
Nahmanides goes on to explain that this is a general feature of Jewish law: detailed examples followed by a general command. Thus in the case of ethics, the Torah explicitly forbids certain kinds of conduct, such as theft, robbery, and overcharging in business. But it also contains general rules such as, “You shall do that which is right and good” (Deut. 6:18) – which include going “beyond the strict requirements of the law” and a willingness, for the sake of equity, to forego the full extent of one’s legal rights.
Maimonides arrives at a similar idea, though from a different source:
For the Lord will establish you as His holy people, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and walk in His ways. (Deut. 28:9)
From this, he infers6Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Deot 1:5. that we are commanded to develop certain traits of character – to be gracious, merciful, and holy, as God is gracious, merciful, and holy. As his son, Rabbi Abraham, explains in one of his responsa,7Teshuvot Rabbi Avraham ben HaRambam, 63.
Maimonides holds that in addition to prescribing or forbidding specific actions, Judaism requires us to develop certain virtues – what Alexis de Tocqueville called “habits of the heart.” The Torah is concerned not only with behaviour but also with character; not just with what we do but also the kind of person we become.
The point is fundamental. To put it technically, Maimonides and Nahmanides oppose halakhic reductivism and positivism. The first, reductivism, is the idea that Halakha, Jewish law, is all there is to Judaism: the belief that if we have obeyed every law in the Shulḥan Arukh, we have done all that is required of us. There is nothing else. Judaism is a set of laws, a code of conduct, a choreography of behaviour and no more.
The second idea, halakhic positivism, is that Jewish law is a self-contained, self-sufficient system with no underlying logic other than obedience to the word of God. It has no further purposes, no ultimate aim, no rationale – at least none that can be known to us.
Maimonides and Nahmanides believe otherwise. They hold that there are matters of great religious significance which lie beyond the scope of precise legislation. They cannot be spelled out in terms of exact, exhaustive rules, because life does not obey exact, exhaustive rules.
You can keep all the laws of kashrut, implies Nahmanides, and still be a glutton. You can drink only kosher wine and still be a drunkard. You can be faithful to the laws of marriage and still be a sensualist. He calls such a person a naval bireshut haTorah, meaning, one who is coarse, crude, self-indulgent, but who justifies his conduct by claiming, perhaps sincerely, that he is a strict observer of the law. Likewise, Maimonides is concerned to refute the idea that you could be an observant Jew and at the same time arrogant, insensitive, tactless, prone to anger or pride. Both believe that such people profoundly fail to understand the nature of Judaism.
The law itself points to something beyond the law. Nahmanides locates this in the command, “You shall be holy.” Maimonides finds it in the phrase, “and walk in His ways.” Both, however, are convinced that there is a dimension of the moral and spiritual life that cannot be specified in the form of precise legislation. It has to do with self-restraint, moderation, gentleness, sensitivity, and the many other forms of moral literacy which you cannot learn from a book of rules, but only from experience and example.
The Talmud says that R. Akiva followed R. Yehoshua wherever he went, to see how he behaved.8Berakhot 62a.
One of the great Jewish mystics, Rabbi Leib Saras, used to say that he travelled to Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezeritch, not to learn biblical interpretations but to see how the rabbi tied his shoelaces. The Talmud speaks of the “foolish” Jews of Babylon who “stand in the presence of a Torah scroll but not in the presence of a great human being.”9Makkot 22b.
A great sage is a living Torah scroll. There are textbooks and there are textpeople. We learn rules from books. But we learn virtue by finding virtuous people and observing how they behave.
Law is not the whole of Judaism. That is why the Torah contains not only law but also narrative, and why the rabbinic literature includes not only Halakha but also Aggada: stories, speculations, and ethical reflections. Along with commentaries and codes, medieval Jewry produced ethical treatises such as Baḥya ibn Pekuda’s Duties of the Heart (Ḥovot HaLevavot) and Rabbi Judah of Regensburg’s great work of German-Jewish spirituality, The Book of the Pious (Sefer Ḥasidim). The tradition was continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the hasidic movement in one direction, and Rabbi Israel Salanter’s Musar movement in another.
To be holy, for Nahmanides, or to walk in God’s ways for Maimonides, is to undergo an extended process in character formation and moral growth. In this sense, ethics is like art. There are rules for constructing a sonnet, but obeying them does not turn you into Shakespeare. The same applies to leadership. There are a few basic rules, but beyond that, leaders have little in common. The best way of learning about leadership is to study leaders (in life, or through their biographies) and see how they behave. Halakha defines the basic parameters of a Jewish life. It is within those parameters that the search for moral wisdom takes place. Halakha is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a life lived in pursuit of the ideal. That is why we have such works as Mishna Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and why Maimonides composed his Laws of Ethical Character (Hilkhot Deot).
Wittgenstein once wrote: “Amongst Jews ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man.”10Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 18e.
The command to be holy is God’s call to us to become a different sort of person from one who believes that the physical world is all there is, that there is no authority beyond mere power, and that there is no meaning to existence. It is not easy to define what makes people holy, but you recognise it by their demeanour, their way of relating to people, their gentleness, their gravitas, their humility. In their presence you feel a little better than you thought you were. In themselves, they radiate a presence beyond themselves. That, says Nahmanides, is the challenge of those simple words at the beginning of Parashat Kedoshim: “Be holy.” Holiness is not just what we do but also the kind of person we become.