holiness

n.

1. The state or quality of being holy; sanctity.
2. Holiness Roman Catholic Church. Used with His or Your as a title and form of address for a pope.

noun

The quality of being holy or sacred: blessedness, sacredness, sacrosanctity, sanctity. See religion.

n

Definition: religiousness
Antonyms: agnosticism, atheism, sin, unholiness, wickedness

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(Heb. kedushah). A religious quality or value invested in special objects, places, times, and persons. The root meaning of kedushah and its derivatives is "to be set apart" or "distinguished." The source of all holiness is the holiness of God, "the Holy One, blessed be He." Several times in the Bible, the people of Israel is exhorted to be holy because God is holy (e.g., Lev. 19:2). To describe God as holy in this context means to say that He is totally transcendent. He is the great Other, over and above the universe and all things in it. When the attribute of holiness is ascribed to God, it also embraces His awesomeness. Thus, the liturgy for the High Holidays celebrates God as Kadosh ve-Nora, "holy and awesome."

The Bible describes the Sanctuary, its furnishings and utensils as holy (Ex. 26:33, 28:2-4, 29:1, 30:29ff., 37). In Jewish teaching, Jerusalem is the Holy City and Erets Israel is the Holy Land (Kel. 1:6; Ta'an. 5a). The special days of the calendar, starting with the Sabbath and including all the biblical Festivals, are holy days (Ex. 31:12ff.; Lev. 23; Num. 28-29). While there is a certain reluctance in Judaism to identify holy men, there is a special degree of holiness attached to the Priests (Lev. 21).

Some identification of the awesome with the holy seems to apply, at least in the Bible, to the Temple, its sacred objects, and service. Thus no one other than the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies in the Sanctuary; and at that time he pronounced the otherwise unspoken, ineffable Name of God. Further, no layman could touch an object of the Temple ritual; to handle such an object was a grave sin (Ex. 30:33, 38; Num. 1:51, 3:10, 38, 18:7). When David attempted to bring the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, Uzzah was killed in a fatal accident because he handled it (II Sam. 6:1ff).

When, however, the concept of holiness is applied to the people of Israel and held up to its members as the ultimate religious ideal, only the idea of separateness is invoked. Thus, just as God is holy, i.e., separate and distinguished from all other existences, so Israel should be separate and distinguished from all other peoples (Ex. 19:6; Lev. 19:2, 20:7). Holiness as a quality of life for the people of Israel is not an abstract concept. The rabbis maintained that Israel's holiness, experienced in its separateness from other peoples, is to be translated in practice into a distinctive pattern of behavior. In the Pentateuch, the call to holiness is first and foremost a call for imitatio Dei (see Imitation of God): "You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2). The Talmud states that holiness is attained by modeling individual and communal life upon the attributes of God: "As He is merciful, you be merciful; as He is gracious, you be gracious" (Shab. 133b). Leviticus 19:2 (see above) is explained not in philosophical but in practical terms by the 11th-century commentator Rashi (ad loc.): "You shall distance yourselves from sexual immoralities." It is the pure, moral, and ideal behavior of the individual man which can bring him to a state of holiness. Thus the Talmud asserts, "Purity leads to holiness, holiness leads to humility," and elsewhere: "The fear of sin leads to holiness, holiness leads to the spirit of God" (TJ Shek. 3:3; Av. Zar. 20b). The rabbis also relate the achievement of holiness by the Jewish people to the observance of the Dietary Laws, since the Pentateuch itself makes this connection (Lev. 11:45, 20:26). The Jewish ideal of holiness, however, requires neither asceticism nor withdrawal from the world. It is rather a call to separate oneself from that which contaminates without sacrificing involvement in the world. The prophets emphasized that the ceremonial holiness of the festivals and Temple service was meaningless in the absence of moral excellence and Social Ethics.

The rabbis taught that holiness was to be achieved through the sanctification of the most mundane affairs. This ideal received its greatest articulation in ḥasidism. Martin Buber (The Way of Man) wrote: "Man, according to Ḥasidism, contributes to the unity of the sacred and profane by living in relationship to the world in which he has been set, at the place on which he stands."

HOLOCAUST: Religious Responses among the Victims, and Subsequent Religious Thinking Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust of European Jewry in World War II. Religious responses to the Holocaust as experienced by its victims were expressed in an abundance of reactions, which have still been inadequately voiced and studied. To make some simple, general statements:1. Jews and non-Jews entered the camps and other sections of the Kingdom of Hell. They lived and died there. Some lived again, often in an incomplete manner, after surviving the ordeal.2. Each of the six million Jews who died was an individual, was unique, and responded uniquely. There were believers who became unbelievers and unbelievers who became believers. Certainties became doubt, doubt could become a certainty. Many did not understand and waited for an understanding which never came.3. Some of the responses in these moments were written down in the shadow of the death camps. Some were recorded in diaries, in letters, in remembered or forgotten conversations. Nothing represented a definitive answer, even when it was declared to be one.

4. Religious responses were not confined to the rabbis. Musicians, poets, children, and many others spoke out.

5. Religious resistance to evil took on many forms: active and passive, silent and unspoken, violent and non-violent.

Starting with these general statements, a beginning can be made in charting various religious responses. For Rabbi Nahum Yanchiker of the Slobodka Musar movement yeshivah, the response was clear enjoining: to remember those who died and the institutions that died; to surround oneself with the Law and try to live by it. When one rabbinical student wanted to sacrifice his life to save a brilliant colleague, his rabbi refused to let him do so.. Pious Jews could not comprehend the evil any more than the others. They lived with the traditional answers: Mi-pené ḥata'énu ("Because of our sins we suffer exile and death"), they continued to pray, and they spoke of yissurim shel ahavah (God's inflicting tribulations upon those He loves in order to test them).

Psychologists have concluded that those who believed anything strongly had a better chance of surviving, in part, because they had a support group (Zionists, Communists, landsmanshaft) and in part because they could oppose an inner reality to the surrounding evil. It can be argued that the post-camp teachings of Victor Frankl or of Eugene Heimler belonged to the realm of religion as much as to the realm of of psychology. Any human response, any awareness of the other, of the tradition, shines with a special light: a child watching his father save fat to make a Ḥanukkah candle; workers finding water in the forest and sharing it; a father comforting his child on the way into the gas chamber---these are religious responses, acts of spiritual resistance, affirmations. Every religious response imaginable took place inside the camps.

The post-Holocaust response within the Jewish community took on many forms. It was partly dictated by the language used. The term ḥurban ("destruction") was mainly employed by the traditionalists, who linked it with the First and Second Ḥurban (destruction of the two Temples); they saw a difference only in terms of scope and therefore did not see it as unique. The Holocaust was viewed as the third ḥurban, to be understood as part of God's plan which man cannot fully understand. A Reform rabbi, Ignaz Maybaum, formulated the concept that God used the Jewish people as sacrificial victims in an act of creative destruction. The old feudal world of Europe had to be ended, and Hitler was God's tool in reshaping the world. The Jews became God's suffering servants, who will bring the rule of God through their anguish, with a "righteous remnant" surviving as God's witnesses. It was a "crucifixion," "Auschwitz as analogue to Golgotha," which instructs the world.

The traditionalist position is clearly expounded by Menahem Immanuel Hartom, who developed the mi-pené ḥata'énu (punishment for sin) concept within history, showing that living in the dispersion (Galut), suborned by the freedom of living outside the Torah, made the Jews deserving of God's long-delayed punishment. Jewry has not yet repented, and can only hope for God's mercy; a new Sho'ah (Holocaust) would therefore not be unjust punishment.

Rabbi Isaac Hutner rejects the term Sho'ah (lit. "calamity") as a historical limitation. Ḥurban remains the proper term for him, harking back to the notion that Jews carry the burden of the Chosen People, and that the truth of Jewish existence can only be approached when "we turn to the Torah as the only sign-post leading us through the interwoven pathways of history to find the truth all of us seek."

The most creative traditional thinkers have written largely in North America. Eliezer Berkovits sees Judaism as a developing faith, and rejects the disillusioned thinkers who often stood outside the anguish itself. God was in the camps, and many found him, and Berkovits does not hesitate to set the faith of the suffering Jew against the complacency of the guilty Christian whose religion contributed to the Holocaust. "After Auschwitz, leave us alone!" is Berkovits' response to missionary Christianity and modern skepticism. In his view, Jews have earned the right to go their own way.

Irving Greenberg reaches out to Progressive Jews through Orthodoxy. He subsumes Auschwitz under Sinai, challenging Richard Rubenstein's and Emil Fackenheim's notion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Using Buber's concept of a God who is in hiding, he urges the Jewish community to reestablish its links with God by reentering the Covenant as a new existential reality. He also calls on Jews to abandon modernity and follow Job in searching for God. Jews must bear witness to God even when He is in hiding, and to life itself.

Emil Fackenheim's concept of the "Commanding Voice of Auschwitz" as formulating the 614th Commandment, "The Jew must survive," is a major statement on the Holocaust. There must be no final victory for Hitler. Jews and Judaism must survive; for Fackenheim, this means complete loyalty to the State of Israel since the Diaspora has proven a false haven. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War was, for him, a Divine revelation: "Israel is collectively what every survivor is individually, a 'No' to Auschwitz, a 'Yes' to Jewish survival."

Richard Rubenstein remains a challenging American thinker, having moved from a "God-is-dead" stance in his After Auschwitz, which rejected the theological premise and promise with a humanistic stance (but left the mystic En-Sof the Ultimate Nothingness, within its framework). Rubenstein moved from the problematics of traditional belief toward Lurianic premises and new insights deriving from Far Eastern thought. His philosophy of history places the Holocaust within the framework of the abandonment of the human being as inviolable, which commenced centuries ago (see his Triage). Affirmation of the State of Israel is also basic to Rubenstein's thought.

The philosopher Hans Jonas rewrote his Ingersoll Lecture on "Immortality" as a German text on "The Concept of God after Auschwitz." The original had contained a "Platonic" myth in which God surrenders part of Himself to the finite world, letting it pass through the changes of time and space, and enduring suffering with the anguish of human lives etched upon His countenance. Now, God is defined as a limited God who must accept the freedom granted to humanity and suffers with every evil act. God cares, and needs the world He has created.

Jonas taught in New York, as did Arthur A. Cohen, a deeply believing writer, editor, and novelist who challenged most of the above-mentioned positions. Cohen uses the term tremendum (derived from Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum describing the holy) to define the Holocaust as that absolute evil beyond comprehension, calling the death camps the tremendum, as "the monument of a meaningless inversion of life to an orgiastic celebration of death, to a psychosexual and pathological degeneracy unparalleled and unfathomable to any person bonded to life." Cohen also turned to Lurianic mysticism in an effort to believe in God after Auschwitz, postulating three criteria for post-Auschwitz theology: (1) God must abide in a universe in which neither evil nor God's presence is accounted unreal; (2) God must be related to all of creation, including the evil, in a meaningful way; (3) the reality of God is linked to a real involvement in the life of creation. Unless these criteria are accepted and sustained, the word "God" can best be used as a metaphor for the inexplicable. God gave man freedom, but not full rationality; the result was the Holocaust. Past and present are therefore dark; but God as Teacher gave Jews the Halakhah to find their way into a future where God awaits them. In a sense, Cohen links up with Fackenheim here, in that the return to God is the beginning of Tikkun, the rebuilding of the world according to God's teachings. However, Cohen's vision is darker; he sees the ultimate evil, the abyss to which he can point but which he cannot cross. Yet he joins Eliezer Berkovits in placing this darkness and the cause of the tremendum in humanity: it is not God's punishment but the obscene use of freedom which brought this ultimate crime into the world.

This theological discussion continues in the United States, where Holocaust studies are prominent (although the theological dimension is often ignored). Teachers continue their search, including Michael Wyschogrod, as the devout traditionalist awaiting God's redemption, Eugene Borowitz, as the questioning, scholarly Reform theologian with a Covenant theology stressing personal responsibility, and a younger generation of rabbis, in every type of pulpit, continue to confront the tragedy in a variety of ways.. The issue is kept especially alive within the Interfaith dialogue.

The Holocaust has led to upheaval and doctrinal changes within Christianity. Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism have not been eliminated, but the evil of anti-Semitism and the responsibility of Christian teachings in creating an atmosphere in which a Holocaust became possible are increasingly understood. Some Christian theologians have been saying that Christianity had to change after Auschwitz. In the United Sates, Roy and Alice Eckardt and Franklin H. Littell have created a whole body of work which particularly challenges Christian notions of mission and triumphalism after Auschwitz. Father John Pawlikowski and Paul van Buren have made advances within Catholic and Protestant thinking which draw far more strongly upon the Jewish roots of the Christian faith.

In Germany, the discussion has been intense and painful. Synods have made declarations in which Christianity admits its guilt, recognizes the validity of the Jewish faith, which Christians may no longer attack, and in various other ways press the Christian traditionalists, who prefer to forget the past. Once Johann-Baptist Metz proclaimed that "the Christian living after Auschwitz must change his faith fundamentally," the battle lines were drawn. Radical theologians like Dorothee Soelle (her book Suffering builds a new theology upon Elie Wiesel's book Night) work alongside traditionalists such as Jürgen Moltmann (who has altered greatly his initial approach, which linked Calvary and Auschwitz in an unacceptable way), Eberhard Bethge Dietrich (Bonhoeffer's amanuensis and biographer), Martin Stoehr (a Luther specialist who carefully examines the bad and good side of that tradition), and Peter von der Osten-Sacken, whose book on R. Akiva shows that Jewish teachings must enter Christian awareness after the Holocaust. Hans Hermann Hendrix's Catholic academy has brought Christian thinkers to a confrontation on these issues with Jewish teachers, including Emmanuel Levinas, Lord Jakobovits, Jakob Petuchowski, and Albert H. Friedlander.

The theologians after the Holocaust cannot be understood without discerning the Israel dimension contained inside them. The State of Israel itself, born out of the travail of Auschwitz, cannot think, hope, express anguish or despair without including a dimension of that darkness. All gradations of religious thought after Auschwitz can be found in Israel: in Jerusalem, at the Holocaust Memorial Center, Yad Vashem, and at Yad Mordekhai, the kibbutz established by Ghetto fighters. A creative dialogue exists between Israel and the Diaspora: between Fackenheim, who has moved to Jerusalem, George Steiner, who is in Cambridge and Geneva (a remembrancer and teacher who brought Freudian insights to the Holocaust, and whose A Season in Hell remains a clear and disturbing text), and Elie Wiesel, who is in New York, among others. The unique contribution of the State of Israel to religious thought after the Holocaust can be summed up very simply: Israel is there, it exists. It is one answer, no more than that, since it cannot provide solace or a solution to the ultimate anguish of Auschwitz.

Central to Jewish religious thinking after the Holocaust is the emphasis on Jewish life, no matter how dark the environment may be. Theology is not a formal area of Jewish thought. Judaism is to be lived. The people of Israel have come through a time of darkness which has maimed them, but they still exist as witness to God and for God. One of the outstanding modern Jewish teachers, Leo Baeck, refused to leave his congregation in Berlin and entered the world of the concentration camp. There he drafted his last book: This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence. Baeck envisioned renewal and rebirth for Israel, after the time of darkness, which he lived to see.

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The Hebrew root for holiness is k.d.sh., which means "distinguished, set apart"; it is the unique stamp of the divine.

In primitive Semitic religions the holy was intrinsic to objects, sites, rites and persons. Seldom was the quality of holiness attributed to a deity. In contradistinction, the holiness concept is extrinsic in biblical tradition, with God the prime and ultimate source of holiness. There is mention of holy garments (Ex 28:2, 4; 29:21; 31:10), holy offerings (Ex 28:36; Lev 19:8), even holy food (Lev 22:14). All of these, as well as other rites and sites, derive their holiness from their relationship to God.

Not only does holiness inhere in God, but it constitutes his very essence. This extends still further to God's acts in history, the election of Israel and human conduct and experience. Certain times are even deemed to be holy both by virtue of being decreed so by God, and by Israel's consecration of them as holy in response (Ex 20:8; Lev 23:2). The nation of Israel is sanctified and commanded to be holy because it has entered into a covenantal relationship with the holy God (Ex 19:6; Lev 11:44; 19:2; 20:7; Deut 7:6; 26:19).

A number of elements in the concept of holiness are common to ancient Near Eastern religions and to the Bible. In both traditions, the holy exists in various degrees: there are objects, places and experiences, that have a greater or lesser degree of holiness. The holy in both traditions has a contagious, communicable character; a biblical example being the altar that sanctifies those that touch it (Ex 29:37; 30:29; Lev 6:18, 27). In both traditions there is mortal danger in an unauthorized approach to the holy. To gaze on the divine manifestations, or even only sacred vessels when they are not in use, may cause death (Ex 33:20; Num 4:20; Judg 13:22; cf I Kgs 19:13).

The bible's understanding of holiness frequently involves the employment of fear-associated terms. The site of an encounter with the divine is described as "awesome" (Gen 28:17). This motif persists throughout the OT. God is holy, great and awesome (Ps 89:7; 99:3; 111:9), and holy in his terrible works (Ex 15:11; II Sam 7:23; Ps 66:3, 5; 145:6; Is 64:3). This attitude to the holiness of God is described in the verse "who is able to stand before this holy Lord, God?" (I Sam 6:20). This fear is also occasioned by God's unrelenting demand for exclusive virtue (Josh 24:19).

It is often erroneously claimed that the association of God's holiness with his moral perfection is the contribution of the prophets. However, the earlier priestly writings already point to this association as evidenced in the holiness code (Lev chaps. 17-26). The liturgy reflected in the Psalms stresses that only "he who has clean hands and a pure heart" can stand on God's holy mountain (Ps 24:3-4). Amos associates oppression of the poor and sexual decadence with desecration of God's holy name (Amos 2:7). On the other hand it would be equally incorrect to equate perfection or righteousness with holiness. There is much that is considered holy, but has no moral content, such as the ark.

Early Christian definitions of holiness are clearly based on Jewish notions which preceded them. At the same time there is probably no area in which Jesus clashed so openly with his contemporaries as in his view of holiness. On most major points he was a faithful practicing Jew but he differed with his coreligionists in his view of the Temple as a place of prayer for all (Mark 11:17), and in allowing his disciples to eat unclean food without washing of hands (Matt 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-8). His life pointed to a concept of holiness unlike that practiced by either his pagan or his Jewish compatriots.

Jesus declared: "There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man" (Mark 7:15). While mark applies this to foods, the reference can evidently be wider. What defiles is listed: evil thoughts, acts of fornication, of theft, murder, adultery, ruthless greed, and malice, fraud, indecency, envy, slander, arrogance and folly (Mark 7:21-23).

Jesus' contemporaries called him the "holy one of God" (Mark 1:24; Luke 4:34; cf John 6:69), and the Christians were most often referred to as "saints" or "holy ones." The term was derived from Hebrew words whose primary meaning is a person set apart for special devotion to God.

Essential to an understanding of holiness or sainthood is the fact that the term "saint" appears only once (Phil 4:21) in the singular form. To be a Christian involved belonging to a body of people. The only text in which Paul applies the verb "sanctify" to the action of one person upon another is in the context of marriage (I Cor 7:14) where it refers to what happens to children in a marriage where even one partner is Christian, or to an unbelieving spouse when married to a believer: in both cases, that person is drawn closer to the orbit of God's holiness and presence. It is the will of God that we should be holy and that means integrity of action towards one's own body, towards one's spouse and towards one's business partner (I Thes 4:3-8).

Furthermore the Epistle to the Hebrews warns that without holiness no one will see God (12:14) and that we are dealing with ultimate issues. The urgency of living a holy life, or being holy as God himself is holy (Heb 12:10, 14) is heightened under the lordship of Christ. Jesus tried to extend the Torah's demands and intensify their significance for his contemporaries. Paul simplified the Law for his Gentile converts, limiting it to its ethical precepts (Rom 13:8-10; cf Acts 15:20, 29). Both Christians and Jews were united in their commitment to the quest for holiness. They parted ways in their understanding of the relation of Torah to holiness, and in their interpretation of the command: "Be holy, for I am holy." (Lev 11:44; I Pet 1:15-16).

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Holiness

Dansk (Danish)
n. - hellighed

idioms:

• His Holiness    Hans hellighed (=paven)

Nederlands (Dutch)
heiligheid

Français (French)
n. - sainteté

idioms:

• His Holiness    Sa Sainteté

Deutsch (German)
n. - Heiligkeit

idioms:

• His Holiness    Seine Heiligkeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αγιότητα, αγιοσύνη

idioms:

• His Holiness    η Αυτού Παναγιότης

Italiano (Italian)
santità

idioms:

• His Holiness    Sua Santità

Português (Portuguese)
n. - santidade (f)

idioms:

• His Holiness    Sua Santidade

Русский (Russian)
святость

idioms:

• His Holiness    Его Святейшество

Español (Spanish)
n. - santidad

idioms:

• His Holiness    Su Santidad

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - helighet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
神圣, 洁白, 纯洁

idioms:

• His Holiness    对教皇的尊称, 教皇陛下

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 神聖, 潔白, 純潔

idioms:

• His Holiness    對教皇的尊稱, 教皇陛下

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 신성함

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 神聖なこと, 聖下, 神聖
adj. - 聖潔派教会の

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) قداسه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קדושה‬

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