20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Holiness

Holiness ilrtJ"l' Allen Grossman H oliness, in Hebrew, kodesh, indicates the highest value, or -more precisely-what can be said by men (or . angels) when God comes immediately to mind, as in Isaiah 6:3: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." Holiness is the word by which men describe God and therefore the ultimate doxological predicate, because it is the word by which God describes himself. "You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2). Hence, holiness is the abstract term taught man by God to mark God's difference and the nature of everything that comes to be included (obedient to the absolute ~mperative impliCit in the idea of "highest value") within his difference. The vital life of holiness in the human world is primarily transactive. The root of the word holiness (k-d-sh) occurs most often in the Bible as an adjective , the result of an ascription (for example, "holy ground," "holy nation," "holy name," "holy spirit," "holy mountain," "the Holy One of Israel"), or as a verb that comm~nds or' accomplishes the inclusion of something within the category of holiness (as in the sanctification of the Sabbath, or of Aaron and his sons, or of anything consecrated to the Lord, such as a 390 HOLINESS beast or a house or a field). In this latter sense, words formed from the root of holiness are related in function to words meaning to sacrifice, and especially to the root ~-r-m, which is found in relation both to cult and also to God-commanded warfare, as in Lev. 27, 28:1. "Every proscribed thing is consecrated to the Lord" [kol ~erem kedosh kedoshim] and Joshua 6:16-17: "For the Lord has given you the city. The city and everything in it are to be proscribed [~erem] for the Lord." The transactions of holiness, by which anything is included in its category, of which God is a member, may be violent in proportion as the difference between God and his world as established in the creation is severe. The pacification of the transaction of holiness depends on the right use of freedom. More generally, the supreme human work (man's service and creativity) is the voluntary performance of the transactions of holiness, which reciprocate and complete God's creation of the world by restoring it day by day, fact by scattered fact, to his nature. The specification of such work, as in the 613 mi~ot or commandments, defines a culture of holiness, a system of transactions by which through the mediation of holiness man and God come to be included within the precinct of the same term. The Jew affirms this each time he recites the blessing that accompanies the performance of a commandment: "Blessed are you, 0 Lord our God ... who has sanctified us by your commandments...." As Philo remarked: "That which is blessed and that which is holy are closely connected to one another." 1 Holiness therefore specifies the coincidence of the wills of man and God and defines the freedom of both. That freedom expresses itself as the voluntary, continuous , cooperative maintenance of the world-sanctification, kedusha. The "highest value," which holiness indicates and which the transactions of holiness produce, is not in its fundamental nature ethical value, because the actions of holiness are performed in the relationship of man and God and not the relationship of man and man, which is the plane where ethical meanings occur. Indeed, inclusion in the category of holiness erases the intrinsic nature of a thing and returns it, as in the restoration of the literal meaning of a text from the alien intentionality of interpretation, to the source of all being where it has in itself (intrinsically) no nature at all except its freedom. From the standpoint of human experience, therefore (the point of view of language), holy is not in the ordinary sense a predicate, a word that asserts something about a term, but the sign of the withdrawal of all reference into its source, a determinator of the radical disablement of metaphor and the absolute preemption of the truth of discourse at the supremely privileged moment of reference to reality. Hence, when the Lord is in his holy temple (be-heikhal kadsho) all earth must be silent (Hab. 2:20), HOLINESS 391 because the order of sacred structure has superseded all other order...