Holiness in Body and Spirit Through the Community

1“Speak to the entire assembly of Bnei Yisrael and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, Hashem your God, am holy.”¹

2Rashi comments: “This teaches that this parshah was said behakhel, at a gathering of the whole people.” The Ohr HaChaim, the Sifsei Chachamim and the Maskil LeDavid all find this difficult.² Surely the whole Torah was taught in the presence of all Israel, as the Gemara describes,³ and not just this parshah! We must also ask: at first glance, it would seem that a person can be privileged to reach holiness more easily by keeping apart from other people than by joining them in a hakhel, a gathering.

3Right after this the Torah says, “Every man shall fear his mother and his father, and you shall keep My Shabbosos.”⁴ Why are these mitzvos placed next to the mitzvah of “You shall be holy”?

4The Midrash says: “‘You shall be holy.’ Could it be that you are to be holy like Me? The verse says, ‘for I am holy’: My holiness is above your holiness.”⁵ Others have asked: how could anyone have imagined that we could become holy as Hashem is holy? And what do Chazal mean by “My holiness is above your holiness”? Surely that is obvious!

5Let us begin with what my holy father and teacher, zt"l, taught on the verse “You shall be holy.”⁶ The holy sefarim connect the verse with Chazal's saying “They shall be: they shall be as they are.”⁷ My holy father explained it this way. Once a person has enjoyed the other desires of this world, he no longer longs for them. With holy things, such as Torah and avodas Hashem, the service of Hashem, it is the opposite. Once a person has been privileged to do a little of them, he longs to do still more good deeds. This is “You shall be holy”: “they shall be as they are.” Holiness draws more holiness after it, and in this way the holiness remains even after the deed. Those are his holy words.

6How can we answer all these questions, and how can we, at our level, be privileged to reach this holiness that leads to more holiness? It seems we may say the following. A person must keep in mind that it is not only when he is busy with physical things, such as eating and drinking, that he must set his heart on doing them in holiness, for the sake of Heaven. He must do so even when he is busy with spiritual things, serving Heaven through Torah and mitzvos. One might think that since these are holy in themselves, there is no need to work at bringing them into holiness. But that is not so. Even the things of Heaven, if they are done with an improper intention, such as to glorify oneself and gain honor, or for money, are like something mundane compared with the lofty holiness within the mitzvah, and they have no connection to that holiness. The Gemara says this explicitly: “Do not make them a crown with which to make yourself great, and do not make them a spade with which to dig,” [and Rashi explains: to profit from them for one's food]. “It is a kal vachomer, an argument from the lesser to the greater: if Belshatzar, who used only holy vessels that had already become ordinary vessels, was uprooted from the world …” See there.⁸ So Torah and mitzvos too call for great effort: they must be done for the sake of Heaven, so that they are brought into holiness.

7Holiness in physical things does not apply to the Holy One, blessed be He, for He is beyond all bodily qualities, and He has no connection at all with physicality, that He should need to become holy in it. With Him, as it were, we find holiness only in spiritual things. So one might have thought that the mitzvah we were given, “You shall be holy,” also means only holiness in spiritual things: doing the things of Heaven for the sake of their Maker and speaking of them for their own sake. That is what Chazal meant by “Could it be that you are to be holy like Me?”: holy in spiritual things alone. “The verse says, ‘for I am holy’: kedushasi lemaalah mikedushaschem,” “My holiness Above is from your holiness.”⁹ This is as taught in the name of the holy R' Michel of Zlotchov, zt"l. All the holiness Above, “My holiness Above,” comes, as it were, “from your holiness.” It comes when we make ourselves holy below in physical things and bind ourselves to our Father in Heaven while we are busy with them. This is in the spirit of the Zohar's words, “Israel sustains its Father in Heaven.”¹⁰

8This is the meaning of the next verse: “Every man shall fear his mother and his father, and you shall keep My Shabbosos.” “His mother and his father” hint at the physical forces in a person's body, which came to him through his parents, and in these he must make himself holy. The holiness of Shabbos, though, is spiritual, for Shabbos is made holy from Heaven. And the holiness of “You shall be holy” must be in both, the physical and the spiritual.

9A person can be privileged to reach this holiness through the power of Shabbos. We find that the holy day of Shabbos has a special power to bestow holiness. As Chazal said, even an unlearned man has the awe of Shabbos upon him and is afraid to lie.¹¹ The power of Shabbos made him so holy that he is afraid to lie. We also find that through Shabbos a person can eat in holiness. Chazal said, “The Holy One, blessed be He, gives a person an additional soul on the eve of Shabbos,” and Rashi explains: “An expansive heart for rest and joy, open to ease, so that he eats and drinks and his soul does not grow weary of it.”¹² As explained elsewhere, through the power of the additional soul a person can be privileged to raise up his eating and eat all his food in holiness. That is why “and you shall keep My Shabbosos” comes right after the mitzvah of “You shall be holy”: to hint that the way to bring holiness into oneself is through the power of Shabbos.

10The desired goal is to draw this holiness of Shabbos onto all the weekdays. Of this the verse says, “Remember the day of Shabbos to sanctify it; six days you shall labor.”¹³ Through the power of the holiness of Shabbos, holiness can rest on the thirty-nine kinds of creative work done during the week. This is like what Chazal tell of Shammai the Elder, that all his days he ate in honor of Shabbos: “If he found a fine animal, he would say, ‘This one is for Shabbos.’ If he then found one finer than it, he would set aside the second for Shabbos and eat the first.”¹⁴ That is, he drew the holiness into the weekdays, so that they would be bound to Shabbos. In the same way, whenever my holy great-grandfather of Biala, zy"a, did a kind of work on a weekday that is forbidden on Shabbos, he would say aloud that it is forbidden on Shabbos. We can explain his practice this way: besides wishing to fulfill the mitzvah of “Remember the day of Shabbos to sanctify it,” he also meant to draw the holiness of Shabbos onto the work of the week.

11That is why this parshah was said at a gathering of the whole people.¹⁵ This level, bringing every spiritual and physical thing into holiness, can be reached only through the power of the many. As the holy sefer Noam Elimelech writes: “How can a person do any holy thing with his limbs, once some sin, Heaven forbid, has been done with them and that limb has been blemished? How can he make the holiness of that deed rest upon it? But the tikkun, the remedy, for this is to join himself to the whole of Israel. For there is a world called ‘all Israel,’ and that world is whole, without any blemish, since Israel as a whole is righteous, as the verse says, ‘And your people are all righteous.’ So even though individuals sometimes sin, the whole always endures in its holiness, and there is no Satan and no evil occurrence among them, Heaven forbid.”¹⁶ Those are his holy words.

12May Hashem grant that we be privileged to serve Him as we should and to bind ourselves to Him in holiness, especially in the days of the Sefirah, the counting of the Omer. In these days we need to take hold of holiness, as we say after the mitzvah of counting: “And may I be purified and sanctified with the holiness Above.”¹⁷ May this be true of us all, and through it may we bring near the coming of the Redeemer. Amen, may it be His will.