To Become Holy, Become ‘Other’

If you were to write a magnum opus on Jewish ethics, you would find yourself parked within the text of Parashat Kedoshim for quite some time. 19th-century theologian August Klostermann titled this section “Das Heiligkeitsgesetz,” or “the Holiness Code,” arguing the text was distinct from other parts of the Torah and worth close study.

In Kedoshim, God makes a demand of the Jewish people: “You shall be holy (kedoshim), for I, your God, am holy (kadosh).” Moshe, Rashi notes, was to share this demand with “kol adat Yisrael” — the entire congregation of Israel. Everyone. Holiness, then, was a communal responsibility. 

And yet the commandments that immediately followed weren’t public policy but personal obligations. These mitzvot touched upon every bit of ancient life — on the ways the Jew behaved in business and at home; how he dressed, ate, spoke, even thought. They marked the Jew as different from the non-Jew, which is why, perhaps, many translate the word “kadosh” to mean distinct or separate. Today, these laws continue to mark the observant Jew as “distinctly other,” in the words of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.

Otherness is inherent in adherence to the Holiness Code, and it is a difficult experience. Rabbi Steinsaltz argued in The Thirteen Petalled Rose that the everyday struggle these commandments present is actually a scaffolding for “the fundamental struggle for holiness.” Holiness, he wrote, is a state created when Jews strive to uphold the Holiness Code’s rigorous and extensive requirements “without succumbing to jadedness and despair.”

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In Covenant and Conversation, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks argues that a qualifying aspect of ancient polytheistic religion was “the blurring of boundaries… between gods and humans, between life and death, between the sexes and so on.” 

In contrast, the Torah exhorts, there are boundaries not to be blurred. There is no holiness in the breaking of boundaries. There is holiness in the upholding of them. God created the world, the Torah tells us, through rupture. Vayavdel — and He separated. The world’s wholeness was borne in a split. Vayar ki tov — and He saw it was good. The world found its integrity in the fissure between light and dark, sea and sky. 

The list of commandments in Parashat Kedoshim are not random laws. The ethos of Judaism is in “an ordered universe in which each thing, person and act has their rightful place,” wrote Rabbi Sacks. “It is this order that is threatened when the boundary between different kinds of animals, grain, fabrics is breached; when the human body is lacerated; or when people eat blood, the sign of death, in order to feed life.” 

The 21st century has proven the world can move beyond many boundaries. Many limits have faded and frayed — in communication, medicine, identity, even mortality. The lines between people, the boundaries between life and death, the distinction between natural and unnatural, are ever in flux. And binaries are being left behind in the 21st century. “Binaries are social constructs composed of two parts that are framed as absolute and unchanging opposites,” reads Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. “Binary notions mask the complicated realities and variety in the realm of social identity.” 

Certainly, not everything in life can be broken down into two diametrically-opposed options. Some concepts and identities are better understood as a spectrum. Modern discourse rightly challenges rigid binaries in areas where human experience is more complex. But the Torah reminds us that not all distinctions are artificial, that some are sacred. Ironically, we are challenged to distinguish between what is a binary and what is a spectrum. The challenge is discerning the difference. Nuance and complexity are valuable traits — yet the world was created in binaries. God saw good in these binaries. In a world obsessed with transcendence, Kedoshim reminds us that holiness lies in boundaries, not beyond them. We are meant to stay within the strict standards of ethics determined by God, within bounds that leave us visible, separate, in some ways alone, other — but alone with kol adat Yisrael, all of the congregation of Israel.

There is no better archetype for the Kedoshim model than the way Jews have been “othered” since October 7th. The contemporary Jew finds himself at odds with a zeitgeist insistent upon Israeli evildoing and illegitimacy. You shall be holy, God said, and in the fight for our sacred independence and security, we have found ourselves with few allies. And so we are separate, distinct, lonely; but still, each week, we say the Misheberach for IDF soldiers: may He bless the fighters of the Israel Defense Forces, who stand guard over our land and the cities of our God…

And so as the world doubts the righteousness of the Jewish people, we find ourselves alone. But that is the price of holiness.

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In the Ancient Near East, polytheists generally perceived themselves as “being utterly powerless to act effectively or to succeed in anything.” Within this paradigm, humanity’s inefficacy led them to labor for the gods in the hopes that it might lead them to a better life. 

Judaism provided an iconoclastic alternative to Near Eastern theologies with the idea that humans might, in fact, be able to be kedoshim like God. 

God said, you can become holy through your confines. 

Do not believe you are most powerful, most human, when you push the limits. 

Kedoshim tihiyu. You will be holy. 

In your distinctions and limitations.

In committing to God’s laws.

You will be holy. 

Each of you, all of you.

And it will be good.