March 12, 2009
Judaism is inconceivable without the concept of the sacred (or “holy”; they have the same meaning). We are commanded to augment the world’s supply of holiness, and this week’s parsha explains how. After making the furnishings for the desert tabernacle, the Israelites are informed, “Whatever touches them shall become holy.” The sacred, apparently, passes the way a lot of things do: by contact.
How that happens becomes clear from a definition of the sacred, but the kind of definition we need is called “pragmatic,” rather than “essentialist.” Essentialist definitions work for simple substances like the elements on a periodic table: a particle with a single proton and electron is (by definition) hydrogen: that is just what hydrogen inherently is. More complicated things, however, are harder to define, and defining ultimates by some inherent essence is impossible. What, for instance, is love? We learn to feel it, recognize it, name it, and express it, but when Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to define it, all she could say was, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
So, too, with the sacred. If we cannot say what the sacred inherently is, we can at least count what counts as sacred. Jewish tradition calls things sacred if they measure up to standards we associate with God.
You don’t have to be a God-believer to try that out. If you are not sure about God, then if there were a God (ask yourself), what would be worthy of such a being? Only something that is loving, generous, beautiful, and so on. Holiness is the intangible quality that such things have in common; and in its most refined form, the Torah says, it is spread by touch. Think of holding hands in mutual affection or a loving embrace of consolation.
The sacred, however, is easily mutated into its opposite, so considerations of appropriateness become critical: Appropriate touch is holy; inappropriate touch is demonic.
“Appropriateness” applies to humans, not other animals — lions that maul their prey are not acting inappropriately; they are just being lions, and lions neither have nor pass on holiness. We humans, however, have overlaid instinctive responses with the sense of propriety. That is because we are the species that has a soul — another term defying definition but recognizable as the part of us that most resembles God, the holy part of who we are. Only humans can be blessed by the touch of the sacred or victimized by the touch of the demonic.
In Temple times, animate sacrifices and inanimate objects for offering them could contract holiness, but only, says Rashi, if they were fit to receive it. Presumably, fitness is required also of human beings, who are commanded to be holy as God is holy, but here we encounter a differentiation in degree. Sacrificial animals become holy so as to be offered to God; implements of sacrifice are holy so as to make those offerings. Humans, however, become holy “as God is holy.” For us, holiness is an end in itself. We transmit that holiness from person to person, without, however, losing any of it in the giving. As carriers and conduits of the holy, humans are peculiarly vulnerable to the experience of touching and being touched — for better and for worse.
Children bank on physical touch, but adults know that “touch” applies even at a distance — metaphorically, that is, not just literally; by words, not just caresses. Eulogies of loved ones touch us; so, too, does exquisite music and seeing a child laugh or cry. As technology expands the reach of human contact, we become able to extend the touch of the sacred to people living at a distance, halfway across the globe.
Jewish law best discusses action at a distance in the case of damages. We readily comprehend how a bull in a china shop causes damage directly, but how do we understand damages for which there is no immediate and proximate cause? The Talmud calls that “pebbles,” describing the way the same bull walking through town kicks up pebbles that shoot through the air causing damage far away.
I think, then, also, of pebbles of holiness, that we can send flying — the way smiles provoke other smiles, and a kind word here creates a kind word there; but also the way e-mails rapidly multiply in sacred or demonic ways. When I think of the damage human beings inadvertently cause, it may not be too much to say that we go through the world like bulls in a china shop, kicking up pebbles. But as bulls with mind and soul, we are able to propel the kind of pebbles we want, not the demonic that damages, but the sacred that enhances the God-like soul of people we will never even know.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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