The Jewish democratization of holiness: From Sanctity and priesthood to peoplehood

It is the people as a whole — not just an elite of priests — who are to ‘be holy.’”

Something fundamental happens at the beginning of this week’s parsha, Kedoshim, and the story is one of the greatest, if rarely acknowledged, contributions of Judaism to the world.

Until now, Vayikra has been largely about sacrifices, purity, the sanctuary, and the priesthood. It has been, in short, about a holy place, holy offerings, and the elite and holy people — Aaron and his descendants — who minister there. Suddenly, in chapter 19, the text opens up to embrace the whole of the people and the whole of life:

The L-rd spoke to Moses: “Speak to all the community of Israel. Say: ‘Be holy, for I am holy; I, the L-rd your G-d’.” Lev. 19:1–2

This is the only time in Leviticus that so inclusive an address is commanded. The sages explained this to mean that the contents of the chapter were proclaimed by Moses to a formal gathering of the entire nation (hak’hel). It is the people as a whole — not just an elite of priests — who are commanded to “be holy.” It is life itself that is to be sanctified, as the chapter goes on to make clear.

Holiness is to be made manifest in the way the nation makes its clothes and plants its fields, in the way justice is administered, workers are paid, and business conducted. The vulnerable — the deaf, the blind, the elderly, and the stranger  are to be afforded special protection. The whole society is to be governed by love, without resentments or revenge.

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What we witness here, in other words, is the radical democratization of holiness.

All ancient societies had priests. We have encountered four instances in the Torah thus far of non-Israelite priests: Malchizedek, Abraham’s contemporary, described as a priest of G-d Most High; Potiphera, Joseph’s father-in-law; the Egyptian priests as a whole, whose land Joseph did not nationalise; and Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, a Midianite priest. The priesthood was not unique to Israel, and everywhere it was an elite. Here for the first time, we find a code of holiness directed to the people as a whole. We are all called on to be holy.

In a strange way, though, this comes as no surprise. The idea, if not the details, had already been hinted at. The most explicit instance comes in the prelude to the great covenant-making ceremony at Mount Sinai when G-d tells Moses to say to the people: ]

“Now, if you faithfully heed My Voice and keep My covenant, you will be My treasure among all the peoples, although the whole earth is Mine. A kingdom of priests and a holy nation you shall be to Me.” Ex. 19:5–6

Meaning, a kingdom all of whose members are to be in some sense priests, and a nation that is in its entirety holy.

The first intimation is much earlier still, in the first chapter of Genesis, with its monumental assertion:

“Let Us make humankind in Our image, in Our likeness.” So G-d created humankind in His own image: in the image of G-d He created him; male and female He created them. Gen. 1:26–27

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What is revolutionary in this declaration is not that a human being could be in the image of G-d. That is precisely how kings of Mesopotamian city states and Pharaohs of Egypt were regarded. They were seen as the representatives, the living images, of the gods. That is how they derived their authority. The Torah’s revolution is the statement that not some but all humans share this dignity.

Thus was born the cluster of ideas that, though they took many millennia to be realized, led to the distinctive culture of the West: the non-negotiable dignity of the human person, the idea of human rights, and eventually, the political and economic expressions of these ideas – liberal democracy on the one hand, and the free market on the other.

The point is not that these ideas were fully formed in the minds of human beings during the period of biblical history. Manifestly, this is not so. The concept of human rights is a product of the seventeenth century. Democracy was not fully implemented until the twentieth. But already in Genesis 1 the seed was planted. That is what Jefferson meant when he wrote:

G-d who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of G-d?

The irony is that these three texts — Genesis 1, Exodus 19:6, and Leviticus 19 — are all spoken in the priestly voice Judaism calls Torat Kohanim.

On the face of it, priests were not egalitarian. They all came from a single tribe, the Levites, and from a single family within the tribe — that of Aaron.

To be sure, the Torah tells us that this was not G-d’s original intention. Initially it was to have been the firstborns (those who were saved from the last of the Ten Plagues) who were charged with special holiness as the ministers of G-d. It was only after the sin of the Golden Calf, in which only the tribe of Levi did not participate, that the change was made. Even so, the priesthood would have been an elite, a role reserved specifically for firstborn males. So deep is the concept of equality written into monotheism that it emerges precisely from the priestly voice — from which we would least expect it.

The reason is this: religion in the ancient world was, not accidentally but essentially, a defense of hierarchy. With the development, first of agriculture, then of cities, what emerged were highly stratified societies with a ruler on top, surrounded by a royal court, beneath which was an administrative elite, and at the bottom an illiterate mass that was conscripted from time to time either as an army or as a corvée, a labor force used in the construction of monumental buildings.

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What kept the structure in place was an elaborate doctrine of a heavenly hierarchy whose origins were told in myth, whose most familiar natural symbol was the sun, and whose architectural representation was the pyramid or ziggurat, a massive building broad at the base and narrow at the top.

The gods had fought and established an order of dominance and submission. To rebel against the earthly hierarchy was to challenge reality itself. This belief was universal in the ancient world. Aristotle thought that some were born to rule, others to be ruled. Plato constructed a myth in his Republic in which class divisions existed because the gods had made some people with gold, some with silver, and others with bronze. This was the “noble lie” that had to be told if a society was to protect itself against dissent from within.

Monotheism removes the entire mythological basis of hierarchy. There is no order among the gods because there are no gods, there is only the one G-d, Creator of all. Some form of hierarchy will always exist: armies need commanders, films need directors, and orchestras, conductors. But these are functional, not ontological. They are not a matter of birth. So it is all the more impressive to find the most egalitarian sentiments coming from the world of the priest, whose religious role was a matter of birth.

The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and in Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is G-d.

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Hence the elaborate political and economic structure set out in Leviticus, organized around the number seven, the sign of the holy. Every seventh day is free time. Every seventh year, the produce of the field belongs to all, Israelite slaves are to be liberated, and debts released. Every fiftieth year, ancestral land was to return to its original owners. Thus the inequalities that are the inevitable result of freedom are mitigated. The logic of all these provisions is the priestly insight that G-d, Creator of all, is the ultimate Owner of all:

“And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine. You are merely migrants and visitors to Me. Throughout the land that you possess, you must allow land to be redeemed.” Lev. 25:23-24

G-d therefore has the right, not just the power, to set limits to inequality. No one should be robbed of dignity by total poverty, endless servitude, or unrelieved indebtedness.

What is truly remarkable, however, is what happened after the biblical era and the destruction of the Second Temple.

Faced with the loss of the entire infrastructure of the holy, the Temple, its priests, and sacrifices, Judaism translated the entire system of avodah, Divine service, into the everyday life of ordinary Jews. In prayer, every Jew became a priest offering a sacrifice.

In repentance, each became a High Priest, atoning for their sins and those of their people. Every synagogue, in Israel or elsewhere, became a fragment of the Temple in Jerusalem. Every table became an altar, every act of charity or hospitality, a kind of sacrifice.

Torah study, once the speciality of the priesthood, became the right and obligation of everyone. Not everyone could wear the crown of priesthood, but everyone could wear the crown of Torah. A mamzer talmid chacham, a Torah scholar of illegitimate birth, say the sages, is greater than an am ha’aretz Kohen Gadol, an ignorant High Priest. Out of the devastating tragedy of the loss of the Temple, the sages created a religious and social order that came closer to the ideal of the people as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” than had ever previously been realised. The seed had been planted long before, in the opening of Leviticus 19:

“Speak to all the community of Israel. Say: ‘Be holy, for I am holy; I, the L-rd your G-d.’”

Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of G-d, and society into a home for the Divine Presence. That is the moral life as lived by the kingdom of priests: a world where we aspire to come close to G-d by coming close, in justice and love, to our fellow humans.