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CHAPTER 1
Holiness and Judaism
PHILOSOPHY ASKS peculiar questions, rubbing the obvious against its grain. Everyone in Socrates's world "knows" what courage or justice or friendship or piety is, but when pressed by him, they list examples rather than penetrate to something more genuinely explanatory. So too with holiness. Euthyphro became perplexed by it. We, on reflection, are bewildered as well. When we use the word, we wave at something religious. Mentioning a holy place or time or person is likely to pick out one connected with a religion. Why not then just use "religious"? What does "holy" add? We need to do what Socrates did and ask ti esti or "what it is" questions. We need to get beyond merely giving examples and try to find an underlying pattern. We want to know: Is holiness a property of places, times, objects, or persons? Is it a status conferred by an agent, perhaps by pronouncing a consecrating formula, or by God? Is the status a relation, such as possession, between a person (or God) and a thing? Is it a value, a way of designating worth? (And, if so, on what is that worth based?) Is it an artifact of a legal system, with no deeper significance than as a local convention of the way of life that the legal system helps to order? Is it a way of seeing things, of letting their ordinariness fall away and noticing something wonderful or awe-inducing in them? If so, is such "seeing-as" a psychological state or is there something in the world that guides our seeing?
We begin our inquiry with the Bible. The Bible, primarily in the writings attributed to the Priestly Source (P) and the related Holiness Code (H), described later, has much to say about holiness. The fact is, however, that Israel did not discover the sacred in a cultural vacuum. The world was full of intuitions and cultural constructions of the sacred long before the Israelites came on the scene. Indeed, Israel's thinkers ranged their understanding of holiness against that of their ancient Near Eastern predecessors and contemporaries. More generally, cultures around the world have made distinctions between the sacred and the profane, identifying places, times, objects, and persons as having special significance.
Twentieth-century scholars like Emile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade regard the sacred/profane distinction as basic to all archaic cultures. For Durkheim, the idea of society as a mysterious collective composed of individuals yet transcending them in power and reality lay at the root of the distinction. Society is natural but is represented in our minds as a higher reality. What the members of a society take to be holy are unacknowledged symbols of the uncanny power of society itself. Most people, most of the time, lead mundane ("profane") lives, but at special times and in specially designated places they enter into an experience of the holy. This dimension of experience, although it presents itself as a link with a higher realm, is really an encounter with society in symbolic, transfigured form. The encounter builds social solidarity and enables society to endure. The sacred, in Durkheim's view, has nothing to do with genuine transcendence. It has to do with how societies represent themselves in the minds of their members and replicate themselves in patterns of action known as ritual. The "mystery" of the sacred is a mystification of the social.
For Eliade, Durkheim's deflation of the sacred will not do. Archaic and ancient cultures divide the world into sacred and profane because there is a sui generis reality to the sacred, a genuine supernatural realm. This realm discloses itself in forms appropriate to the particular culture. The self-revelation of the sacred is a "hierophany." Eliade does not say what the sacred is in itself, only, echoing Rudolf Otto, that it is "wholly other" (ganz andere) than the profane. He is concerned, rather, with how it becomes manifest and with what its effects are. Attentiveness to the disclosure of the sacred — and longing for it in the midst of quotidian life — is a pervasive trait of archaic humanity. This is something that modern men and women have, sadly, lost. Eliade is unapologetically romantic about the antique enchanted world. The sacred for him is both a mysterious thing-in-itself capable of disclosure in natural objects, artifacts, special places, times, and persons. It is also a "mode of being." Sacred and profane divide the world both ontologically and existentially. That is, the terms describe both the character of reality and how we live within it. Ordinary natural and social reality can be ripped open by a genuine hierophany. Whether we notice depends on whether we are dull, hapless creatures of disenchanted cultures or humans who by the luck of birth or by disciplined effort are attuned to the sacred.
Durkheim rightly sees that sacred occasions have important, solidarity-building functions and that these are not limited to aboriginal cultures. In the United States, such secular celebrations as Super Bowl Sunday, Independence Day, and Memorial Day are in some ways functionally equivalent to religious holidays and their attendant rituals. No one who walked through Red Square in Soviet times and saw Lenin entombed in his mausoleum could fail to sense the religious role that his remains played in the secular, communist cult. (The significance of the embalmed and still visible Lenin in post-Soviet Moscow is harder to gauge.) Rousseau called this phenomenon "civil religion" and recommended that his ideal republic have a public cult where citizens could celebrate the polity and demonstrate their fidelity to it. Durkheim recognized that sacred symbols — whether archaic totems or modern political sancta like flags, monuments, founding documents, and so on — have a numinous quality reflecting their importance in the life of those who cherish them. He rightly stressed the character of ritual. No society, if it is to be more than a mass of anonymous individuals, can do without public practices of self-representation and affirmation. Society must assert its claim to reality; it must articulate what it stands for.
Durkheim goes wrong in his positivism, however. For him, abstract and general ideas (including categories like sacred and profane) have society itself as both their origin and their content. In his view, we encounter only particulars. To reach the abstract and universal, the mind turns to the experience of human sociality. The sense that the group is more than a collection of individuals is for Durkheim the key to all the problems of epistemology. It is our first, formative step toward universality. There is a genetic fallacy here. Categories and concepts do have social functions and cultural histories. Human thoughts are the thoughts of social beings with an evolutionary history. But once emerged, thought has its own integrity. It cannot be reduced to its presumed origins. Furthermore, it is hard to see how human beings could communicate about matters on which early society depended, such as cooperation, curbing asocial behavior, dividing food, or assigning roles, without at least the rudiments of concepts antecedent to the social exchanges themselves. Durkheim goes overboard in making society the hidden content of all general ideas, especially those of the sacred and the profane.
Eliade was right to reject Durkheim's equation of the sacred with society. He took what his predecessor Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mysterious, sublime, and fascinating power of the sacred as having reality in its own right. Reductionists of Durkheim's bent still exist today. But they tend to see the veiled power of society, concealed by "discourse," as primarily exploitative rather than integrative. And they look to evolutionary theory or neuroscience for the real story of the holy. There is a cottage industry of debunkers who see attestations of religious (or mystical) experience as nothing but deviant brain activity. "In a more promising way," Pascal Boyer writes, "neuroscientists have found that particular micro-seizures, in which some part of the normal communication between cortical and other brain areas is impaired, do give people a subjective sensation very close to that described by mystics." Eliade can be read to resist, once again, such genetic fallacies. Origin in the brain or in natural selection (or in the naturally selected brain) does not have a lock on destiny. The circumstances, environmental and genetic, that favored manual dexterity in humans did not foreordain that Beethoven compose — or that some lucky few prove able to play — the "Appassionata" sonata. There is a wealth of human creativity that reaches far beyond the underlying organic and dispositional capabilities that enable it. No evolutionary or neuroscientific account of religion, however explanatorily rich, will ever be rich enough. Eliade courts obscurity, but he does well to discern that the sacred is a category deserving of nonreductive exploration.
He overreaches, however. Worldwide attestations of sacred presences or powers cannot be taken to prove that people have veridical experience of supernatural entities or forces. One can resist neuroscientific reductionism — what William James called "medical materialism" — as a sufficient explanation of religious experience without accepting every supernatural claim. One can believe that religion, like art or ethics, should be treated with respect as a unique human dimension of experience without rushing to debunk it. Eliade tried to keep religious phenomena from sliding into the purely psychological or sociological. But he unduly reified the sacred and overly generalized the sacred/profane dichotomy. It is not clear that all ancient cultures dichotomized the sacred and the profane in the way that he asserts. As Mary Midgley points out: "The stark division of life into sacred and profane often posited in the west has not been attempted in China." Nor, we might say, was it attempted in ancient Israel and subsequent Judaism in so strictly dichotomous a manner. There are relevant distinctions between the holy and its contraries, but they do not precisely fit into Eliade's binary grid. To get beyond the dichotomy, we need to explore biblical ideas of the holy more closely.
Biblical Holiness
Both Joseph Dan and Philip Jenson point out that the antonym to "holy" or "sacred" (kodesh) in biblical literature is generally not "profane" (hol) but "unclean" (tamé). This seemingly small semantic distinction is significant. Consider a parallel distinction between good and evil. For this distinction to be robust, one must believe that evil is substantive rather than privative. That is, one must believe that evil is something in and of itself, rather than an absence of good. If good is fundamental and evil is privative of or parasitic upon good, the distinction between good and evil needs to be understood in a subtler fashion than the surface grammar might suggest. This is also true of the sacred/profane dichotomy. On the surface, the two neatly divide the world. Whatever is not sacred is profane. And because the sacred is rare, most of what remains is a profane world. The profane has a comparable status to the sacred; it has its own durable reality. Thus, the majority of the world, which is nonsacred, is intrinsically isolated from the sanctum where holiness resides. (Indeed, our English "profane" derives etymologically from Latin pro fanum, before, thus outside, the gates of the sanctuary.) Given this framework, it is but a small step to the belief that the profane is broken, fallen, corrupt, contemptible, or worse. So our ordinary lives in the profane sphere are fundamentally flawed or wanting. Access to the sacred compensates for the truncated possibilities of life in the mundane. The world is entzaubert, disenchanted, but if we allow ourselves to achieve a special "mode of being," enchantment awaits. Ours is a misbegotten world from which we must be saved.
But if the antipode of the holy is the unclean, then there is no durable profane world that opposes it. Uncleanness, in biblical priestly thought, is a temporary condition. The natural world is ritually clean, but human action — ritual infractions or inadvertent or intentional moral sins — bring impurity. Uncleanness, however, is not evil; it entails temporary exclusion from cultic places or practices. It is as if one came in contact with a chemical or biological agent and needed to remain in quarantine until the agent became inert or was neutralized. Rather than one-half of a dichotomy, holiness is a spectrum or field. It maps onto stronger and weaker expressions over a range. The "holy of holies" in the Tabernacle is more sacred than the utensils on the altar outside it — which then grade off further into various stages of purity and impurity. God's presence in the Tabernacle or Temple establishes a hierarchy of sacred intensities, whose contrary is a range of impurities of increasing magnitude. There are distinctions to be made within the spectrum, but no fixed dichotomy carves up the universe.
The world, however, is God's Creation. God created a good, indeed, a very good world in Genesis, chapter 1 (a text most scholars ascribe to P). That world is not profane. Nature is God's handiwork. Within this good order, divine holiness enters and engenders a set of sacred domains, spatial (Tabernacle, later Temple, Jerusalem, the Land of Israel), temporal (primarily the Sabbath, then festivals), and personal (priests, then Levites, then Israelites). Human beings through errors, ignorance, or recklessness negatively affect the sacred domains. They do not, however, diminish the underlying goodness of Creation. Nor do they irreparably harm the sacred domains. Human reparative action can banish the impurity and restore the world, so the holy, and its divine source, can continue to abide in their midst.
As a result, Judaism at its biblical foundation is not well described by the term "religion" in its familiar sense. Religion implies a sacred way of life, set off against a profane world. The faithful "religionist" will be something of an alien in a strange land (I Peter 2:11–12). The hallowed life must take place at an alienated distance — if not a physical one, then a mental one. The Christians whom the author of the Epistle of I Peter addresses as aliens and strangers in a strange land are to live in inner exile. They must not let their souls be corrupted by the ambient opportunities for sin. They should hold up an image of holiness before a profane world. The biblical and rabbinic Jewish view is less categorical and sectarian (although analogues to this estrangement from the world can often be found). As bearers of a comprehensive divine way of life, the Jews seek to extend holiness from the sanctuary, so to speak, into the world. Religion is not a department of life, cleanly separated from the everyday. It has as much or more to do with how one conducts one's business as with the time, manner, and content of one's prayers. This suggests that the world is not to be rejected but perfected; it is something whose intrinsic worth must be realized in the sacred order. The holiness of the sacred domain can be spread into the world, elevating its inherent, primordial goodness and bringing it to its full potential. Holiness in Judaism is worldly.
Dan claims that Western scholars of religion inherited a fundamentally Christian conception of the sacred, which writers like Eliade unwittingly secularized and generalized. The early Church's dichotomous construal of holiness was based on Christian experience. Unlike Jews, born into a people in covenant with the divine, Christians came as individual converts from other, highly developed cultures. Ideally, they left these behind in a strongly committed way, entering a new and higher life discontinuous with their past. The new, higher life was holy; the earlier sinful and profane. Although their civil status remained unchanged, Christians now had a religion. The Church was to one degree or another set against the world. The basic idea of holiness entering into and opposing a fallen, profane world was buttressed by the early missionaries. The Greco-Roman culture in which they worked was civilized and sophisticated but at best it needed either salvation or abandonment. Dan infers from this that the idea of holiness, conceived as a disclosure or an eruption of a special quality of being into quotidian life, which figures so strongly in the work of thinkers like William James, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, bears traces of its Christian origins. Were we to start with a native Jewish idea of holiness, we would work from the hallowing of all aspects of human life, not just from extraordinary moments where the sacred/profane equilibrium is tipped in one direction.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Does Judaism Condone Violence?"
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