NJ Jewish News | Too much holiness

by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman,
an author and speaker on Jewish ritual, prayer, and spirituality, is a professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

Most people have heard of tithing; fewer know that Judaism calls not for one tithe but for three, corresponding to a three-year cycle. In all three years, a first tithe went to support the Levites, who had been assigned to temple service and so had no land holdings of their own. Year three yielded a third tithe for the poor. Most interesting, however, is the second tithe, collected in years one and two: produce that farmers kept for themselves but were allowed to consume only on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. No doubt, this second tithe went a long way toward sustaining Jerusalem’s economy, but if we limit our understanding to the p’shat (“the plain meaning,” in this case, socioeconomic), we miss the lesson for our time.

How many of us, after all, are farmers living in Eretz Yisrael, able to trek to Jerusalem with produce from our landed inheritance? Why in the world should urbane Diaspora Jews study the details of a tithe that assumes we are farmers?

But study it we do, especially our sedra’s provision of a public statement whereby farmers were to attest to having collected the second tithe with picayune concern for every detail. The most fascinating line of the affirmation promises, “I have removed hakodesh (the sacred) from the house.” Why would anyone remove the sacred from their home? Can we ever get enough of the holy that we need to dispense with some of it as if we do not need it? What does Torah mean by “the holy” here anyway? And why does it say “from the house,” when, in fact, it came from the field?

All our classical commentators say “the holy” means “holy tithes,” not holiness itself. So certain does this interpretation appear, that Targum Onkolos inserts the word “tithes” into his Aramaic translation, as if it must originally have been there and then dropped out by accident.

But like the socioeconomic interpretation, this institutional identification of “holy” is just p’shat. We are looking for something deeper.

A good starting point is the phrase “from the house.” Ritually speaking, Jewish tradition extends “our house” to mean “our self.” When we clean out pre-Passover hametz (leaven) from our house, for example, we are expected simultaneously to rid our inner selves of sin, which is likened to spiritual leaven that puffs us up enough to claim entitlement to live by our own rules rather than by God’s.

Here, too, then, the farmer promises that he has removed not just holy tithes from his literal home but holiness itself from his personal makeup. Apparently, too much personal holiness is not necessarily a good thing!

This should come as no surprise given the English designation of some people as “holier than thou” — self-appointed critics who are so sure of their own righteousness that they stand in absolute judgment on everyone else. That’s the problem with religion: it preaches virtue, but then prompts extremists to become so pumped with pride in their own holiness that they stand in absolute judgment on the rest of us.

Overly righteous zealotry concerned our rabbis at the very beginning. The Talmud discusses the recipe for spiritual piety proposed by Pinchas ben Yair. Start with z’hirut (special care) and even z’rizut (zeal) to do God’s will. These lead to n’kiyut (cleanliness); p’rishut (separating oneself from the masses); and, eventually, tohora (purity), k’dusha (holiness), and hasidut (piety). Pinchas does modify the negative potential of this upward pietistic spiral by introducing anava (humility) next, but in the end, of all these fine attributes, piety rooted in exceptional holiness “is greater than all the rest.”

But the Talmud implicitly rejects that conclusion: It tacks on a critique by Yehoshua ben Levi, for whom anava g’dola mikulan, “humility is greater than all the rest.” Hence the spiritual significance of the tithing declaration even for us modern Diaspora urbanites! When we feel ourselves overly filled with holiness, we ought to dump some of it to make room for humility.

There is nothing wrong with holiness — some of our greatest teachers (like the kabalist Isaac Luria, the Ari), are regularly designated “the holy one.” But our model, as we prepare for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, should be Moses. He alone met God, as it were, “face to face” and descended the mountain with holy light streaming from his countenance. Notice, however, how our High Holy Day liturgical poetry (piyyutim) ignores all that: It prefers to remember how Moses remained silent before the critique of Aaron and Miriam and became known as “the humble one.”

This is the time of year to speak less and listen more. Ironically, especially on the High Holy Days, God wants high humility not high holiness from us.