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Your donation will be tax deductible in the US to the extent allowed by the IRS.
To make a tax-deductible donation by wire transfer in the US, please contact:
Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
To make a tax-deductible donation in Israel, please contact:
Dina Gudai, Israeli Representative
Phone: 074-7800643
Email: dina@schechter.ac.il
Please mail your check to:
The Schechter Institutes, Inc. (a 501(c) 3 tax exempt organization)
Box #3566
PO Box 8500
Philadelphia, PA 19178-3566
Attn: Mr. Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
Please indicate the donation is "for your joint Schechter Institutes program."
Checks should be made payable to the Jewish Theological Society of Canada and mailed to:
Jewish Theological Society of Canada
c/o Camp Ramah in Canada
3845 Bathhurst St., Suite 310
Toronto, ON, M3H 3N2
Phone: 416-789-2193, ext. 2139
E-mail: accounting@campramah.com
Please mail a check to:
The Schechter Institutes
Attn: Dina Gudai, Finance Department
PO Box 16080,
Jerusalem, 9116002
Israel
For assistance, please call Dina Gudai at 074-780-0643 (8:00 AM – 3:00 Israel time Sunday through Thursday).
Iconoclastic thinker, social critic, and public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s opinion on holiness is very clear: Only the Divine is Holy! Prof. Ari Ackerman explains.
One prevalent approach to holiness among Jewish thinkers and scholars is the claim that certain people, territories and objects have innate and immanent holiness. God’s presence resides in the holy land of Israel, among the Jewish people and in certain objects such as a Torah scroll. In a previous Dvar Torah of Shavuah Tov at Schechter, I examined a Jewish thinker who rejected this view. I touched upon the view of Abraham Joshua Heschel who argues that Judaism eschews holiness of objects and only believes in holiness of time.
Today, I want to explore briefly the views of another Jewish thinker who also takes issue with the idea that God’s presence resides in our world in things and territories. This notion of holiness is rejected even more forcefully by the Jewish philosopher and social critic, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Indeed, he claims that the view of holiness as immanent and innate in our world is pure idolatry. It is not a Jewish view but represents the penetration of foreign and pagan conceptions into the heart of Judaism.
So what is the proper Jewish understanding of holiness according to Leibowitz?
He argues firstly that holiness is confined to God who is transcendent and cannot be attributed to anything human or worldly. As he states in his article, ‘Mizvot Masiyot‘, “The idea of holiness as an immanent property of certain things – persons, locations, institutions, objects, or events – is a magical mystical concept which smacks of idolatry. There is no holiness outside the sphere of divinity.”
Thus, our world is bereft of divine presence and even our greatest efforts to worship God will not allow the divine presence to descend unto this world.
Instead, the Jew must fight against those who falsely attribute the divine category of immanent holiness to human phenomena such as the Jewish people. Thus, at the center of Leibowitz’s own political and social criticism was the belief that much of the problems of the state of Israel are a product of a discourse of actual holiness that has become so dominant among religious and even secular Israeli leaders.
In trying to root his approach in Jewish sources Leibowitz turns to the opening of this week’s Torah portion, Kedoshim and the verse: קדושים תהיו כי קדוש אני ה’ אלהיכם
“You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
For Leibowitz, what is most significant in this verse is that the only thing that currently possesses holiness is God and when it talks about humans having holiness pushes it off to a distant and unobtainable future.
This signals that we should act in a way that is conducive to being holy but that we do not and can never actually possess holiness.
SHABBAT SHALOM FROM SCHECHTER
Prof. Ari Ackerman is the President of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies.
President Ackerman is Associate Professor for Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Education. Prior to his elevation to president, Ackerman held the (David) Golinkin Professor of TALI Jewish Education. He received his PhD in Jewish thought from Hebrew University and was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University. His most recent book is a Critical Edition of the Sermons of Zerahia Halevi Saladin (Beer Sheva University Press, 2013). Prof. Ackerman’s new book on creation and codification in the philosophy of Hasdai Crescas – Hasdai Crescas on Codification, Cosmology and Creation (Brill Press, 2022) is newly published. President Ackerman lives with his family in Jerusalem.
