Why Holiness?

Finding Our Way Home Together

I am launching this blog on rosh chodesh Elul because this is the month on the Jewish calendar that has traditionally been given over to intense introspection and spiritual endeavour. The next 40 days leading up to Rosh Hashana is a time for fresh beginnings, wiping the slate clean and restarting the task of building a life that hews closer to the ideals we hold for ourselves.

The highest of those ideals is to get serious about the Torah’s injunction to be holy. We’ll eventually get to taking a look at holiness itself, but without even going there yet, that word no doubt points to a very high spiritual state. The instruction in the Torah that tells us to be holy is followed by the statement, “…because I the Lord your God am holy.” Holiness is a quality of divinity.

Yet when I look out at the world, I think, holiness? Is that what the world needs? It seems such a ridiculous idea for our time and place. How about basic decency and justice? We could do with leaders who tell the truth. And who see their office as serving the people, not just their egos and their interest groups. If people had food to eat and a safe place to live, dayenu!

Then I catch myself. Asking for other people to be holy, or even to aspire to holiness, or the world to be a holy place, is not my job. I do have responsibility to help feed other people, to be politically active in real ways, to stand up for the truth, yes, those are my responsibilities to others and the community. But what I have come to see is that my primary task as a human individual is to walk a path that leads toward holiness. And the trick is that there is no way I can ascend spiritually if I separate myself from engagement with the world around me.

Of course, I didn’t always see the world or my place in it in this way. Just by way of introducing myself, behind this blog stands a human being, born in 1949 in Toronto, and raised in a resolutely secular home by two thoroughly Jewish parents, both born in Europe, both speaking Yiddish as their first language. My upbringing was as normally suburban as can be and I dutifully (though eagerly) went off to university in that same suburb. My life took a radical turn when I surprised myself and everyone who knew me by being selected for a Rhodes Scholarship, which yanked me out of my familiar shtetl and plunked me down in Oxford, where my classmates included a Nigerian whose cheeks bore initiation scars, the son of a former prime minister of Ghana, Kofi Busia, and the daughter of a former prime minister of Pakistan who herself went on to serve as prime minister of that country, along with many other people who were not like me.

My field of study was social anthropology with a focus on India, and I chose to study Hindu pilgrimage for my doctorate. Looking back, what I find interesting is that even back then, and in such a different context from my life today, I was still interested in the journeys people take to get a closer connection to God.

I worked as an academic for a few years then took flight into the world of film where I acted as a producer for 14 years. That career fell apart in 1997, just before my wife and daughters were scheduled to make a long-planned trip to Europe. Despite the disaster in my worklife, we decided to go ahead with the trip, and one of the first stops was Oxford, where the president of my college had kindly agreed to show us around.

Reflecting back on the sites and objects the president had shown us, I was struck by how animated he got when talking about the one small residence building that had been added to the college on his watch. Magdalen college was founded in 1458, which is 34 years before Columbus sailed. The so-called “New Building” was built in 1733. The buildings are old and magnificent, the accumulated treasures dazzling, the grounds sublime, but what the president lit up for that day more than anything else was the small piece he added to the long and illustrious tradition which he had joined as a recent link in the chain.

That got me thinking. In my 47 years, I had always tried to innovate something new and different. The idea of adding to a tradition wasn’t something I gave thought to. But now I wondered, if I wanted to do something in line with what had filled the president with such pride, what tradition did I have that I could conceivably add to?

“Well,” I answered myself, “you are a Jew.” That remarkably uninspired insight set off a chain of events that led me to discover the Mussar tradition, to write five books, and to bring me to kick off this blog today.

In my 25 years of studying and practicing Mussar, I have gone from thinking of myself as a student, then an anthropologist, then a film producer, and along the way as a son, brother, husband and father, to come to deeply appreciate that my primary reality is that I am a soul. I have a name, a persona, a history, a place, but none of that is as profoundly real as my soul-nature. No one but me can walk the unique path of this soul that is me, and that is my responsibility. Caring for the needs of the world around me, however, is an essential aspect of that path.

Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who founded the Mussar movement in Lithuania in the mid-19^th century, said it clearly:

“The spiritual is higher than the material,” he said. “But the material needs of others are an essential part of my spiritual life.”

I doubt I would have come to see myself as a soul were that not something I learned from the Jewish tradition. And I am indebted to the same source for telling me that the soul that I am is charged to be holy, something I am sure I never would have come up with on my own. But both concepts are explicit in the Torah:

Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed the human from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a nefesh chaya – a living soul.”

Leviticus 19:2: “You shall be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

So there we have the core, foundational principle around which my life revolves. I am a living soul, and I am charged to be holy, and absolutely everything else flows from that. Our exploration in this blog will focus on the path we can walk to fulfill the injunction to become holy, and being on the path of Mussar, we’ll constantly see that becoming holy does not mean sticking your head into the sky, but quite the opposite.

Rabbi Moshe Chait (1921-2009), who was a student of Rabbi Dovid Leibowitz who, in turn, was a student of Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the great Mussar teacher known as the Alter of Slabodka (1849-1927), taught his students to walk the path of holiness in a way that I have come to appreciate.

It came to Rabbi Chait’s attention that some of the students in the yeshiva were not making their beds. This spurred him to focus a talk on gratitude, which in the terms of Mussar is called hakarat ha’tov, which literally means “recognizing the good.” He began by reminding everyone that we are all made in the divine image, a tzelem Elokim, a reflection of the Divine Spirit. He then called on everyone to reflect on what your bed is, and how it has served you by refreshing you and reviving your spirit. When you realize how indebted you are to your bed, he said, don’t you want to keep in its most dignified state? His students ran to make their beds. He was teaching them that the path to holiness is not a matter of transcending the mundane but lifting up the mundane to reflect its inherent holy nature.

In my next posting, I’ll focus on why so many Jews grew up without being introduced to this Jewish path to a holy life, and why even those who do know tend not to give these guiding principles as much attention or weight as I think they deserve.

I will be sharing my own life experience in this blog – not as a confessional but because I have learned over the years that I am not special, and many of the things I have experienced very likely have counterparts in your life, too. Let’s talk about that. Your comments and questions are an essential part of this blog and I welcome them. As I said to a friend last week, we may be walking different paths but we are lost in the same forest, and if we work together, we have a much better chance of finding our way home.

I intend to post every two weeks. In the next instalment, we’ll explore some things I have realized about the place where we are right now, the starting point from which we are departing on this shared journey.