Two Moments in the Biography of Qedushah (a.k.a. Holiness)

Abstract

This paper analyzes two transformative conceptions of qedushah (holiness) in medieval Jewish thought, Moses Maimonides’s and Moses Nahmanides’s. Maimonides reduces qedushah to the Mosaic commandments which he reconceives as communal institutions to constrain bodily desires and promote intellectualist values and as training for perfected individuals to de-corporealize themselves in imitation of God. Nahmanides argues that Maimonides’s legal reduction of qedushah leads to the absurd conclusion that the perfectly scrupulous law-abiding scoundrel who exploits loopholes in the law is qadosh! He therefore reconceives qedushah as a complement to the Mosaic commandments intended to counter the problem of the scoundrel. Thus qedushah is re-born as a corrective to abuse of the Law. Nahmanides then proposes two ways to achieve this goal: i) by rabbinic enactment of more laws to fill in (loop) holes in the Law and ii) by cultivating a virtue-oriented, non-legal conception of holiness as a character-trait that leads agents to act properly and spontaneously without legislation. For Maimonides the ultimate state of qedushah is the dis-embodied state of the intellect, for Nahmanides it is a state in which the whole person, body and soul, clings to the deity.

Introduction

Both God and creatures are said to be קדוש (qadosh, holy), but the predicate (and its nominal form, קדושה [qedushah, holiness]) is entirely unlike other divine predicates such as “merciful” or “just” of whose meaning we have some prior grasp insofar as we understand their application to creatures. ¹ We have no comparable antecedent creaturely understanding of qadosh or qedushah. To the contrary, verses like קדשים תהיו כי קדוש אני יי אלהיכם (qedoshim tihyu ki qadosh ani YHVH eloheikhem; “Holy you shall be because I, the Lord your God, am holy”; Lev 19:2, emphasis added) seem to presuppose that the qedushah of God is prior to that of creatures. To make matters worse, the term is applied to so diverse a range of subjects—from sacrifical animals to places, times, the priests, sanctuary, conduct or practices, objects of all sorts, the land of Israel, Sabbath, festival days, the battle camp, the Hebrew language, even the shekel coin—that one might be skeptical that all these applications share a single, unitary meaning.

Nonetheless we can distinguish three broad senses of the term qadosh in Scripture and classical rabbinic literature. The first takes qadosh to be the antonym, or opposite, not of the term חול (hol, the profane or ordinary) but of the term טמא (tame’, the ritually unclean or impure). ² The one who avoids the three sources of ritual טומאה (tum’ah, uncleanliness, impurity)—carcasses and corpses, genital discharges, and scale disease—is ipso facto qadosh, and because the three sources of ritual impurity are ultimately linked to death, the qadosh, as its opposite, comes to be associated with the source of life, the deity.

The second sense of qadosh derives from what some take to be its philological root קד (qd), which means “to separate apart” or “to be separated from,” not unlike the Roman sacer (what is walled off or set apart). In this sense, the term refers to a propriety rather than a property, the regard we hold toward the designated thing: that it is to be treated as distinctive, untouchable, off-limits, withdrawn from ordinary or common use. God is the paradigm of the qadosh because He is (regarded as) separated and different from everything in creation. The people of Israel is qadosh insofar as it is separated and different from all other nations by observing higher standards of conduct: its total abstention from idolatry, forbidden foods, and prohibited sexual relations. The priest is qadosh because he is separated from the lay populace by his more stringent code of behavior. In rabbinic terminology, this kind of separatedness is called פרישות (perishut), from which some think the title פרושים (Perushim, Pharisees) derives. In all these cases, qedushah consists in participation in a set of norms of behavior in virtue of which the subjects are regarded and regard themselves as held to a higher threshhold, separated from ordinary people and life.

The third sense is connected to the so-called Holiness Code in Leviticus. The subject who is qadosh is not only separated from things or peoples but also separated to God. To be qadosh is to be dedicated to living a godly life, the imitation of God or imitatio dei. In particular, because the divine is the seat of the ethical in Scripture, to be qadosh means living an ethical life, exemplified both by the commandments in the Holiness Code and by moral character-traits such as lovingkindness, justice, and mercifulness.

I have reviewed these biblical and rabbinic senses of qadosh and qedushah to set the stage for a later chapter in the biography of holiness on which this essay will focus—the twelfth-thirteenth century episode in which it undergoes a radical transformation in the hands of the two great medieval Moseses, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) and Moses Nahmanides (1194–1270). Despite their differences, their ideas of qedushah come closer to our contemporary notion of holiness as a virtue and character-trait of an agent. Both Maimonides and Nahmanides focus on Lev 19:2, the prescription to agents to be qadosh, or to act holy-ly. The question they both address concerns the relation between a holy life and the life of the Mosaic commandments and its rabbinic interpretation in halakhah. This relation raises difficult questions. Judaism is highly law- and rule-centered, whose core is the 613 Mosaic commandments, most of which enjoin the performance of particular actions. Where in such a Law is qedushah to be found? ³ Is Lev 19:2 a commandment to be holy and, if it is, what action(s) does it enjoin? If it is not itself a commandment, is qedushah the telos or end of the commandments or an ideal that shapes the way in which they constitute a way of life? Or perhaps qedushah is not part of the Law at all, but a perfection or virtue or state of an agent distinct from the actions enjoined by the commandments. But if that is the case, is there space in the Torah for such an extra- or supra-legal spiritual state, one that might even be in tension with the law in the way that the spirit or the spiritual is opposed by some to the legalistic and the letter of the law? I shall argue that in Nahmanides’s thought there emerges such an extra-legal conception of qedushah, but it must be understood as a critical reaction to Maimonides’s reductive law-centric conception of holiness. ⁴

Maimonides on Qedushah as Performance of the Mosaic Commandments

Maimonides’s starting point is the critique of a magical, supernatural, theurgic conception of holiness that ascribes special powers and capacities to people or things in virtue of their being holy. The idea of “spiritual forces” (Greek: pneumata; Arabic: al-ruhani’at) that bestow upon a thing or person to whom they overflow special powers was one legacy of the late Hellenistic and Oriental world to Islamic culture; its traces can be found in Ismaili writings as well as those of Islamicate Jewish thinkers like Judah Halevi and the sufi R. Abraham ha-Hasid. ⁵ Ritual objects like the mezuzah scroll affixed to the doorpost, phylacteries, and holy words like the names of God used in amulets and talismans (qami‘ot) were popularly believed to be holy objects with magical and miracle-working powers. In the course of explaining the Tetragrammaton, Maimonides digresses to warn the reader not to

let occur to [his] mind the vain imaginings of the writers of charms or what names you may hear from them or may find in their stupid books, names that they have invented, which are not indicative of any notion whatsoever, but which they call the names and of which they think that they necessitate holiness and purity and work miracles. ⁶

Maimonides goes on to identify the source of this popular, or vulgar, belief that holy names have supernatural or miraculous power as the Sabians, who were an ancient Near Eastern, star-worshipping, magic-practicing people among whom the biblical Israelites dwelled. But the Sabians play two roles in the Guide. First, Maimonides argues that, because the Mosaic Law was legislated to refute ancient Sabian idolatry, or to wean the ancient Israelites from its hold on them, details about the Sabian practices explain many obscure details of the commandments. ⁷ Second, “Sabianism” serves Maimonides as an umbrella term to refer to his own contemporary twelfth-century culture that was based on superstition and popular religion, the pseudo-science of astrology, itself a kind of star-worship, magic, hermetic doctrines, and popularized neo-platonic myth—a culture that revolves around holy men, holy relics, and holy words that work miracles through supernatural powers. For Maimonides what is wrong with this Sabian conception of supernatural holiness is not only that it derives from ancient idolatry but also that it is bad science—i.e., superstitious and false—and the stuff of bad character-training: it inculcates reliance on the miraculous rather than the development of autonomous moral responsibility. ⁸

Maimonides also rejects the idea that holiness is a metaphysical perfection. Such a view was held, for example, by Judah Halevi according to whom Hebrew is a “divinely created language which God taught Adam … and is undoubtedly the most perfect language … with regard to the essence of language and with regard to all that it embraces by way of meanings [in virtue of which it is called] the Holy Language.” ⁹ For Halevi, Hebrew is a holy language because it is both God’s own language, hence, divine, and semantically perfect. For Maimonides, in contrast, Hebrew is לשון הקודש (lashon ha-qodesh, the holy language) not because it is perfect but because it contains no explicit terms for sexual organs or activities, referring to them instead circumspectly, figuratively and allusively, one might say, piously. This is not merely a literary device for Maimonides; he personifies Biblical Hebrew whose concealed speech about these bodily organs and activities expresses a sense of shame when it cannot avoid referring to such subjects. In short, what makes Hebrew holy is an ethical trait. ¹⁰

Maimonides’s first thesis, then, is negative: rejection of qedushah, or holiness, as either a supernatural, miracle-working, theurgic state or as a naturally or metaphysically privileged perfection. The core of his positive conception emerges in two passages: 1) the fourth of his introductory methodological principles in the ספר המצוות (Sefer Ha-Mitzvot, Book of Commandments(and 2) Guide III:47 as part of his lengthy discussion of ta‘amei ha-mitzvot, literally, the reasons for the commandments, by which Maimonides means explanations why the Mosaic commandments were legislated as they were. ¹¹ In the latter passage, Maimonides writes:

As for His dictum, … Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy, for I am holy (Lev. 11, 44), it does not apply at all to uncleanness and cleanness. Sifra states literally: This concerns sanctification by the commandments (ad. loc.); they also say of His dictum, Ye shall be holy (Lev. 19, 2), that this concerns sanctification by the commandments (Sifra ad. loc.). For this reason, transgression of the commandments is also called uncleanness. This expression is used with regard to the mothers and roots of the commandments, namely, [the commandments concerning] idolatry, incest, and shedding of blood. . . . It therefore has become clear that the term uncleanness is used equivocally in three different senses: It is used of disobedience and of transgression of commandments concerning action or opinion; it is used of dirt and filth; … and it is used according to these fancied notions, I refer to touching or carrying certain things or to being under the same roof with certain things … Similarly the term holiness is used equivocally in three senses opposed to those three senses. (Guide III:47:595)

Recalling the first biblical-rabbinic sense of qedushah, Maimonides distinguishes three senses of the term whose opposites are three senses of tum’ah: i) “disobedience and transgression of commandments concerning action or opinion”; ii) “dirt and filth”; and iii) “touching or carrying certain things or to being under the same roof with certain things.” ¹² Of these, only iii) is a sense meant by the Torah and rabbis, but clearly Maimonides’s primary sense is qedushat ha-mitzvot, sanctification by the commandments.

Maimonides elaborates this sense of qedushah in his introduction to the Book of Commandments in the course of explaining how he arrived at his particular enumeration of the 613 Mosaic commandments, formulating rules to determine whether a scriptural verse expresses one of the 613. His fourth rule reads in full:

We should not enumerate [among the 613 Mosaic commandments] any charges [tzivuyim] that include (kollelim) the whole [body of the commandments of the] Torah. There are injunctions and prohibitions in the Torah which do not pertain to any specific duty, but include all commandments, as if to say: “Do whatever I have commanded you to do, and guard against anything I have admonished you not to do,” and “Do not transgress anything I have commanded you [not to do].” There is no reason to count this command as a commandment in its own right because it does not command one to perform any specific action so as to be a positive commandment and it does not forbid one from doing a specific action that it should be a negative commandment. It is like His saying, “Everything that I have said to you, you should keep” … With respect to this principle [other scholars] have erred, counting “Holy you shall be” as one of the positive commandments—not knowing that [the verses] “Holy you shall be” (Lev 19:2) “Sanctify yourselves, and be you holy” (Lev 11:44) are charges to fulfill the whole Torah, as if He were saying: “Be holy in doing all that I have commanded you to do and in guarding against all the things I have enjoined you from doing.” The Sifra states: “Holy you shall be (Lev 19:2), Separated (perushim) you shall be,” that is to say, Be separated from הדברים המגונים (hadevarim hamegunim, the contemptible things) of which I have warned you. And in the Mekhilta [it is written:] “קודש אנשי (’anshei kodesh, People of Holiness) you shall be for me” (Exod 22:30). Isi b. Judah says: Whenever God issues a new commandment to Israel, He adds to their holiness. This is to say that this צווי (tzivui, command) is not a command in itself but is a consequence of each commandment that has [already] been commanded. And the one who fulfills this command is called ‘qadosh.’ There is then no difference between His saying, “Holy you shall be” (Lev 19:2) and “Do My commandments.” Just as we would not say of this general admonishment to observe all commandments that it constitutes a positive commandment in addition to all other commandments, so we cannot say that “Holy you shall be” (Lev 19:2) and other similar [statements] constitute [separate] commandments, because they do not charge us to do anything other than what we already know [we should do]. As it states in the Sifre: “And you shall be holy” (Lev 11:44): this is the sanctification of the commandments. ¹³

There is, then, no specific action different from (all) the actions enjoined by the other 613 Mosaic commandments through whose performance one fulfils the commandment expressed by Lev 19:2, “Holy you shall be.” The prescription to be qadosh is not to do something specifically “holy-ing.” Rather, to be qadosh, or holy, is simply to perform the 613 Mosaic commandments, no more, no less. ¹⁴ But not only is the extension of prescribed actions that falls under qedushah the same as the extension of “one or the totality of the 613 Mosaic commandments”; the state of qedushah is nothing but, or more than, the state one is in when one performs the Mosaic commandments. There is no spiritual or religious condition of qedushah apart from or higher than the life constituted by the performance of (all) the commandments. If qedushah is the highest state of religious life, performance of the commandments is both necessary and sufficient for living it.

One might say that Maimonides reduces holiness to law. But we might also call his account a “redundancy theory of holiness” by analogy to contemporary “redundancy theories of truth.” According to these accounts of truth, to say that the statement or proposition that Maimonides was a medieval Jewish rabbi is true is nothing but to assert that Maimonides was a medieval Jewish rabbi. Adding, or appending, that what the proposition states is true does not assert an additional—and for some, a mysterious—property of the assertion, namely, Truth. It simply repeats, or re-asserts, the content of the assertion. The function or utility of the truth-predicate is not to signify a distinctive property but rather its generality. By means of possessing the truth-predicate in our linguistic repertoire we are able to state certain generalizations. For example, using the truth-predicate, we can assert in one statement “Everything that Moses asserts about numbers and genders of sacrificial animals is true” without requiring us to explicitly, and tendentiously, assert each relevant verse in Leviticus. Similarly, “Holy you shall be” means nothing but “Do all the Mosaic commandments,” which saves us from having to repeat each commandment one by one. So, if we conjoined all the individual 613 commandments and asserted “Do commandment 1 and do commandment 2 and … and do commandment 613,” and then were to add “Holy you shall be,” we would have added a conjunct with no additional legal, halakhic, or religious content. And once we have performed all 613 commandments, there is no additional action one need perform to be qadosh. The value of statements like “Holy you shall be” consists instead in their very generality: they equip us with a way of asserting what one ought to do without having to mention each and every one of the individual commandments on each occasion. There is no specific qedushah-action one enacts other than the other 613 Mosaic commandments.

The virtue of Maimonides’s account is that it gives us a conception of qedushah that does not require acknowledging mysterious spiritual or metaphysical powers or religious obligations or achievements independently of the legal system of commandments. Indeed, although it is a general commandment, and therefore not to be enumerated among the 613 Mosaic commandments, Lev 19:2 nonetheless prescribes a commandment. Hence it does not go beyond the Law. But for that very reason, the story is not entirely satisfying. Why should the fact that one is perfectly law-abiding render one qadosh or holy? The commandments may be divine, either because they were given by God to Israel or because they aim at the highest knowledge of God, but what makes the one who performs them holy, godly, or God-like? Not only is Maimonides’s account of qedushah as law reductive or redundant, it is also deflationary: it takes the spirit out of qedushah or, if you will, the air out of holiness.

Maimonides’s response to this objection lies in his conceptions of the aim or final end of the Law. Indeed in the Guide he works out two different accounts of the ultimate reasons for or purposes of the commandments, because of which they were legislated. The first account addresses the Law as a set of institutions that ensure the welfare of a community, the second takes the commandments to be exercises or training that guide individuals to their true perfection. The commandment to be qadosh figures in both accounts, sometimes as one of the commandments to be explained (as we saw in the passage cited from III:47) and sometimes as a reason, purpose, or end to explain particular commandments. I turn now to these two explanations that yield two different conceptions of qedushah.

According to the first, and most detailed, explanation of the Mosaic law, spelled out in Guide III:26–50, its commandments aim at the welfare (Ar. salah; Heb. תיקון, tiqqun) of the divine community, both the welfare of its “body” and the welfare of its “soul” (Guide III:27). ¹⁵ The welfare of the body of the community includes its material, economic, social, ethical, and political needs and goods, while the welfare of its soul refers to intellectual goods—the inculcation of correct beliefs and values in all citizens. ¹⁶ Qedushah enters this account i) as the general all-inclusive commandment—what Maimonides calls “sanctification by the commandments” in Guide III:47—which is what is to be explained and ii) as part of the general “intention of the Law” that explains other particular commandments.

One example of a particular commandment explained by qedushah is the “holy battlecamp” (mahaneh qadosh) of Deut 23:15 (Guide III:41:566–67). The explanation appeals to the sense of qadosh in which it is opposed to tame’ in the sense of “dirt and filth” (Guide III:47:595). What makes a battlecamp qadosh is that it is free of “dirt and filth,” although the goal is not physical cleanliness, but that the “cleansing of the outer [should] come after cleansing of the inner” (ibid.). That is, the qedushah of the battle camp aims not at a physical (or hygenic) state (nor, for that matter, at a metaphysical reality) but at a psychological attitude or state of mind: “Everyone should have in his mind that the camp is like the Sanctuary of the Lord and not like the camps of the Gentiles destined only to destroy and to do wrong and to harm the others and rob them of their property” (Guide III:41:567). Qedushah qua “cleansing of the inner” also has a political function here—to differentiate Jews from Gentiles by inculcating a distinctive, distinguishing state of mind, again recalling the biblical root of qadosh, to separate.

Elsewhere Maimonides appeals to “purity (taharah) and sanctification (qedushah)” as an “intention of the Law” that explains a variety of commandments all involving prescriptions to “renounce and avoid sexual intercourse and cause it to be as infrequent as possible” and “give up the drinking of wine” (Guide III:33:533). Examples are the commandment to the Israelites in the days before the Sinaitic revelation to “come not near a woman” (for sex) in order “to be sanctified with a view to receiving the Torah” and the prohibition of wine to the Nazarite in order that “he shall be qadosh” (ibid.). ¹⁷ Both of these explanations fall under Maimonides’s “totality of purposes of the perfect Law,” namely,

the abandonment, depreciation, and restraint of desires in so far as possible, so that these should be satisfied only in so far as this is necessary. You know already that most of the lusts and licentiousness of the multitude consist in an appetite for eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse … All this is brought about by the fact that the ignoramus regards pleasure alone as the end to be sought for its own sake. (Guide III:33:532)

These various commandments are said, then, to aim both at taharah and qedushah and at the minimalization of bodily desires for eating, drinking, and sex, implying that the two aims are identical. Qedushah is now opposed to human bodily and material impulses and urges. However, to anticipate the more radical conception of qedushah that emerges in Maimonides’s second explanation of the Law, this first conception is limited in that its goal is simply to counter the ignoramus’s view that “pleasure alone [is] the end to be sought for its own sake.” Instead the Law aims to re-orient citizens’ desires and values toward correct ends and values. On this first explanation, in other words, qedushah is anti-corporealist. But it is not yet (as it will be in the second account) de-corporealization of the human agent. ¹⁸ If God is the paradigm of the purely immaterial and non-corporeal, there is no mention here of imitation of God and no attempt to achieve or approximate His state of immateriality. Holiness is simply devaluation of and, when possible, withdrawal from a life ruled solely or primarily by the pleasures of the body and its desires and impulses. ¹⁹

In sum, according to Maimonides’s first explanation of the commandments that aims at the welfare of the community, qedushah requires nothing more than performance of the commandments, but the commandments are themselves institutional devices to bring about correct values, character traits, desires, emotions, and beliefs among the citizens. That cluster of attitudes that results from performing the commandments is the content of Maimonides’s first conception of qedushah. ²⁰

There is, however, one sentence buried within the lengthy fourth rule in the Book of Commandments that does not fit this first conception: “The Sifra states: ‘Holy you should be (Lev 19:2), Separated (perushim) you should be,’ that is to say, Be separated from הדברים המגונים (hadevarim hamegunim, the contemptible things) of which I have warned you.”

As we said earlier, one philological explication of the Biblical word qadosh derives it from a root that means “to separate apart” or “to be separated from”—the meaning of the word parush—and many of the commandments specifically linked to qedushah in the Torah—laws governing diet, sexual relations, and idolatry—serve either to separate the Israelites or Jews from other nations or to separate oneself from the ritually impure (tame’) or to separate, or dedicate, oneself exclusively to God by living a certain kind of godly life. However, in this midrashic statement from the Sifra, that from which one separates oneself is not other people or the tame’ but “contemptible things (ha-devarim ha-megunim).” What is Maimonides referring to? To identify his reference, let’s turn now to his second explanation of the commandments.

This second account emerges in the penultimate chapters of the Guide III:51–52 and in III:8, a chapter that addresses the tension between matter and form, or between the human’s body and intellect. After describing the various admonitions in Scripture to control one’s matter and bodily impulses, Maimonides concludes: “The commandments and prohibitions of the Law are only intended to quell all the impulses of matter,” and he goes on to single out among these “impulses of matter, … eating, drinking, copulation, anger, and all the habits consequent upon desire and anger—to be ashamed of them, and to set for them limits in his soul” (Guide III:8:433–34). So, on this explanation, the commandments do not aim at communal welfare but at the suppression or at least minimalization of the individual’s shameful material or bodily needs and desires, and not only actions moved by bodily drives but also speech and thought about matter or the body. Given the dichotomy between matter/body and form/intellect, “quelling” these bodily impulses ipso facto enables individuals to devote themselves wholly to the pursuit of knowledge in order to achieve intellectual perfection.

But exactly how do the commandments achieve this end—and how does it differ from their function in the first explanation? In Guide III:51, Maimonides describes the modes of worship for perfected individuals:

Know that all the practices of the worship such as reading the Torah, prayer, and the performance of the other [Mosaic] commandments [mitzvot] have only the end of training you to occupy yourself with His commandments … rather than with matters pertaining to this world; you should act as if you were occupied with Him…. and not with that which is other than He. (Guide III:51:622)

This purpose to which I have drawn your attention is the purpose of all the actions prescribed by the Law. For it is by all the particulars of the actions and through their repetition that some excellent men obtain such training that they achieve human perfection, so that they fear, and are in dread and in awe of God … and know who it is that is with them and as a result act subsequently as they ought to. He … has explained that the end of the actions prescribed by the whole Law is to bring about the passion of which it is correct that it be brought about … I refer to the fear of Him … and the awe before His command…. As for the opinions that the Torah teaches us … [they] teach us love…. For these two ends, namely, love and fear, are achieved through two things: love through opinions … while fear is achieved by means of all actions prescribed by the Law. (Guide III:52:630)

Here Maimonides re-conceives the actions enjoined by the commandments as “training” (al- irtiyād) to cultivate particular skills and to put the agent into states such as fear and awe of God. ²¹ Unlike the role of the commandments in the first account which was to enable the this-worldly goods that contribute to the material and intellectual welfare of the community, the role of the commandments on this second account is to train the individual to be occupied with God and His commandments “rather than with this world” and “not with that which is other than He.” On the first account, by performing the commandments in order to satisfy one’s moderated bodily needs and desires and to inculcate correct beliefs, one nonetheless shows that she values the this-worldly objects of those needs and desires and the contents of those beliefs as contributions to communal welfare. Maimonides’s second account directs us to perform the commandments exclusively because we are “occupied with” God’s commandments or, as it were, with God Himself, denying all value to any good “pertaining to this world.” As in the via negativa, the content of occupying oneself with God is not occupying oneself with anything not-God and, in particular, with any this-worldly good, even the correct beliefs that contribute to the this-worldly welfare of the communal soul. Exclusive concentration on divine commandments, stripped of any utility they might have other than being God’s command, is what Maimonides also refers to as “fear and awe” of God. Nothing other than God is of value; everything this-worldly is “contemptible,” to use Maimonides’s word explicating the Sifra. Since the paradigm of the this-worldly is matter, or the body, this second conception requires that one separate one’s values and inner states from anything bodily, leading to a radical form of de-corporealization, not just anti-corporealism. This, I propose, is what Maimonides means by perishut, separation to God by being separated from everything this-worldly, and this is his second, stronger conception of qedushah.

In the Mishneh Torah we find the same opposition but between love of God engendered by contemplation of the spheres and separate intellects and fear of God that arises from the human contemplator’s awareness of being embodied in sublunar matter:

When one reflects on these matters, comes to know all [God’s] creations … and sees the Holy One’s wisdom … in everything [He] formed and created, his love of the Omnipresent will increase…. But he will [at the same time] experience awe and fear at his lowliness, insignificance, and paltriness when he compares himself to any of the holy (קדושים, qedoshim), sublime [celestial] bodies, and so much the more, to one of the pure (טהורות, tehorot), incorporeal forms, wholly detached from matter; and he will find himself to be a vessel filled with disgrace and dishonor, empty and vacuous. ²²

As human inquirers increasingly pursue scientific knowledge of God’s “creations,” the natural world including the spheres, as their intellects become actualized and perfected, their love of God increases. But at the same time they cannot but compare themselves—to their own detriment and anxiety or fear—to the “holy” (qedoshim) spheres who lack sublunar matter (though have their own “fifth” matter) and “so much the more so,” to the “pure” (tehorot) intellects who are separate from all matter. The more the humans perfect their form, the more they recognize that they can never cease to be embodied, “vessel[s] filled with disgrace and dishonor, empty and vacuous.” The composite material human is “low,” “empty,” “disgraceful.” ²³ The body and matter are the “contemptible things” to which Maimonides is referring in BC.

Maimonides’s best example of qedushah in this second, negative sense—to be separated from everything other than God—emerges in his conception of imitatio dei which itself is presented as his interpretation of a midrashic interpretation of Lev 19:2: “You shall be holy. They said: He is gracious, so be you also gracious; He is merciful, so be you also merciful.” ²⁴ He works out this idea of imitatio dei using his account of divine actions and attributes of action. I begin with some background.

It is well-known that Maimonides rejects the possibility of true affirmative divine attributions because they impugn the unity and simplicity of God. But before he turns to negations of privative attributions, his preferred alternative, he also proposes divine actions (or divine-action-terms) as admissible divine attributes (or predicates) because multiple distinct actions can proceed from one agent without entailing that there exists multiplicity in the agent or in his essence. Hence, actions do not violate God’s unity and simplicity.

But what does it mean to say that God acts? Unlike creaturely agents, God never acts directly or proximately on effects and, because He is always in act or in a state of activity, it makes no sense to say that He acts at one time and not another or that He performs one act and then another. What Maimonides means emerges in his analysis of Moses’s request of God that He show him His “ways,” what His actions have caused. In reply, God first displays to him “all existing things … their nature and the way they are mutually connected” (I:54:124, emphasis added), i.e., the whole system of regularities that characterize the natural world, what Maimonides elsewhere calls “governance” (Ar. tadbir, Heb. hanhagah). His primary example is taken from the world of biology:

the production of the embryos of living beings, the bringing of various faculties to existence in them and in those who rear them after birth—faculties that preserve them from destruction and annihilation and protect them against harm and are useful to them in all the doings that are necessary to them. (Guide I:54:124–25)

Divine actions, then, are the complex of lawful processes of nature of which God is the ultimate cause who always acts through multiple intermediate “mutually connected” proximate natural causes. Because it is not clear how one might individuate one divine action from another, it may be best, then, to think of God’s actions (or, in the singular, His action) as the entire domain of natural science, all the nomic processes by which God qua first cause or agent governs the natural world. ²⁵

Now, in addition to these “divine actions,” or divine action-terms like “produces embryos”—which can be described employing natural scientific vocabulary—Maimonides also refers to divine “attributes of action.” These he explicitly identifies with the divine “ways” (derakhim) of Exod 33:13 and with the rabbis’ “divine characteristics” (middot), their term for the thirteen moral attributes or predicates of Exod 34:7–8, including “merciful,” “gracious,” “long suffering,” and also “jealous,” “avenging,” and “angry.” This second group of “attributes of action” serves two main functions in the Guide. First, it furnishes an alternative vocabulary to describe the natural events and phenomena that constitute divine actions. For example, suppose a scientist produces an artificial device by which millions of poor, deprived, orphaned new-borns are fed milk. One way to describe the scientist’s action would be to say that he has produced an artificial way to nurse babies. But we could also describe what the scientist did as an act of kindness and compassion for humanity. In the same way, natural biological processes can either be described by biological vocabulary or by employing moral, or anthropopathic, psychological terms like “kind” and “compassionate.” But by characterizing these predicates (e.g., “merciful,” “angry”) in their application to God’s actions or to natural events as “divine attributes of action,” Maimonides is also indirectly making a second point. ²⁶ He is saying that in their divine application, these predicates apply primarily to the action, not to its divine agent—in contrast to their application to actions of humans where it is to the agent to whom the moral psychological predicate primarily applies. Thus, a human action is compassionate when, and only when, we take the action to have been moved by the agent’s inner moral sentiment of compassion, only when the agent acted out of or because she felt compassion. Were we to discover another motive, we would withdraw the description. However, in the divine application, we cannot mean that the action was produced by God because He acted out of or on an emotion or inner state—because God is entirely impassive just as He is incorporeal. He has no emotions or inner psychological or anthropopathic states. Instead, the attribute-term, say, “compassionate,” is predicated of the divine (or natural) action just in case it externally or behaviorally resembles a human action that would be moved by that emotion or inner state, but without implying that God Himself had such an emotion that moved Him to remotely cause that effect. This is the force of calling these attributes “attributes of action.” We project onto God’s creation of the natural process of breast-feeding predicates like “compassion,” the same language we would use to describe an analogous human action performed by an agent because of that emotional or psychological state but without imputing the emotion to the agent God. We simply classify the action—the natural event—among those that externally resemble it:

[God] is called jealous and avenging and keeping anger and wrathful, meaning that actions similar to those that proceed from us from a certain aptitude of the soul—namely, jealousy, holding fast to vengeance, hatred, or anger—proceed from Him … because of the deserts of those who are punished, and not because of any passion whatever…. Similarly all [His] actions are such as resemble the actions proceeding from the Adamites on account of passions and aptitudes of the soul, but they by no means proceed from Him … on account of a notion superadded to His essence. (Guide I:54:126)

In short, the content of the application of a divine attribute of action like “merciful” to a natural process or event (whose first remote cause is God) is that the process or event is one that, were a human to have performed it or a similar action, it would be described as one moved by an inner sentiment of mercy. However, the divine or natural attribution does not imply that God Himself has any such moral quality or emotion of mercy in bringing about (even remotely) the natural process or event.

This brings us to the second function of the attributes of action that builds on this first function: their role in imitatio dei. After explaining the meaning of divine attributes of action like “merciful” based on an analogy to their predication to human actions, Maimonides reverses the comparison: when humans are called upon to perform specific kinds of actions, they should act in a way that imitates how God would perform those actions. His first model of a human imitating God, in Guide I:54, is that of the prophet-ruler:

The governor of a city, if he is a prophet, should acquire similarity to these attributes, so that these actions may proceed from him according to a determined measure and according to the deserts of the people who are affected by them and not merely because of his following a passion. He should not let loose the reins of anger nor let a passion gain mastery over him, for all passions are evil…. Similarly, … he should be merciful and gracious, not out of mere compassion and pity, but in accordance with what is fitting. (Guide I:54:126)

However, Maimonides goes on to explain why the ruler should “acquire similarity to these [divine] attributes” in terms of a second model of imitatio dei whose subject is the perfected human:

The utmost virtue of man is to become like unto Him … as far as he is able; which means that we should make our actions like unto His, as the Sages made clear when interpreting the verse, “You shall be holy” (Lev. 19, 2). They said: “He is gracious, so be you also gracious; He is merciful, so be you also merciful” (Sifre to Deut. 10, 12). The purpose of all this is to show that the attributes ascribed to Him are attributes of His actions and that they do not mean that He possesses qualities. (Guide I:54:128)

In other words, Maimonides grounds the normative political behavior of the prophet-ruler, a communal norm, in “the utmost virtue of man,” i.e., in a model of individual human perfection. ²⁷ This model of individual imitatio dei is, in turn, elaborated in the concluding passage of the Guide III:54. Maimonides describes the “way of life” of someone who has achieved not only intellectual perfection—knowledge of God, His providence, and His governance—but also “assimilation” to His “thirteen attributes” of action, a way of life “having in view loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, through assimilation to His actions” (Guide III:54:638).

Both passages, in I:54 and in III:54, call for “similarity” to, “imitation” of, or “assimilation” to (Ar. tashabbuh; Heb. hitdamut) God’s actions. But they employ, respectively, two conceptions of imitatio dei, a weaker one for the ruler, a stronger one for the perfected individual. For the ruler what it means to imitate God is to govern according to norms the intellect determines to be fitting or deserved in the circumstances. Even when a reactive emotion like mercy or compassion would be appropriate, the ruler should not be moved by the passion. Reason alone should determine his correct (re)action. However, this kind of imitatio dei is really just an imitation of, an approximation to, God because He acts, not only without being moved by moral emotions or sentiments, but without possessing any. In the stronger sense of imitatio dei, an individal imitates God by performing actions that resemble ones moved by moral emotions in appropriate situations but, when performed in imitation of God, are instead performed without having those emotions, in a state in which one has divested oneself of the same mental attitudes. Maimonides’s “logic” of imitatio dei goes like this. Divine (or natural) actions are described using moral sentiment terms like “merciful” (M) when they are identical (or similar enough) to actions that would be performed by human agents who so act because of or out of M (mercy), even though the divine (natural) actions are brought about by God who has no moral sentiments like M (and, hence, never acts out of M). When a human (H) imitates God by performing an act m, 1) H performs m described as M (“merciful”) by acting in the behaviorally identical way that another human agent J would act in that circumstance were he (J) to perform an action m* described as M because he (J) acts out of M, but 2) H performs m, not because he is moved by the emotion M (which would make it a moral act), but specifically, having eradicated the emotion M, because he thereby makes himself like God. In the limit case, the human agent acts, like God, always in the morally appropriate way but without possessing moral sentiments or passions, a fortiori, without being moved by them.

This stronger conception of imitatio dei is Maimonides’s explication of the midrash on Lev 19:2 in Guide I:54. We can now glimpse exactly what kind of life Maimonides sees as the life of qedushah reconceived as the life of the commandments. By performing the commandments in a state in which one is “occupied with Him” and nothing else, one acts in imitation of God’s utterly impassive nature rather than out of sentiments and emotions that manifest concern with what is other than Him. According to Maimonides’s moral psychology, the emotions and sentiments are functions of the body or matter. Their suppression calls not merely for their control but for their eradication, apatheia. ²⁸ Hence, imitatio dei demands nothing less than psychological and emotional de-corporealization of the deepest kind. Performance of the commandments as exercises train their human agents both to eliminate, step by step, their material urges, passions, and emotions and to concentrate instead on the purely immaterial or intelligible. One who achieves such a state lives a life of qedushah.

Maimonides’s account moves, in sum, from the rejection of a mythic, supernaturalistic idea of qedushah, or holiness, as a theurgic, miracle-working power, or as a sublime natural or metaphysical perfection, to its reduction to the life of the Mosaic commandments which, in turn, are re-conceived as training to achieve a non-corporeal, non-material, purely intellectual way of life in imitation of God. Maimonides’s qedushah is, therefore, the negation of the material, or bodily, life, and virtually identified with the “life” of a form, the intellectual or intelligible. There are serious questions one might raise about the coherence and intelligibility of a human life that involves this degree of radical detachment from one’s body including emotions, sentiments, imagination, and appetites. ²⁹ For Nahmanides, however, the real problems begin already when we attempt to define qedushah in terms of the commandments of the Law.

Nahmanides on Qedushah and Abuse of the Law

Nahmanides opens his account of qedushah in his commentary on Lev 19:2 by citing and criticizing RaSHI (R. Shlomo Yitzhaqi, Troyes, 1040–1105) who explicates the scriptural term as separation (perishut) specifically from forbidden sexual relations (‘arayot). ³⁰ Whether Nahmanides himself entirely disagrees with this position is not clear, but, more telling, his main objection, into which he next launches, has no connection to RaSHI’s comment. ³¹ Indeed RaSHI seems to be a smokescreen. Nahmanides’s true target, I propose, is Maimonides:

The separatedness (perishut) is that which is mentioned everywhere in the Talmud in virtue of which those who practice it are called Perushim (Pharisees, lit.: Separatists). The meaning is that the Torah forbids [incestuous] sexual relations (‘arayot) and prohibited foods, and permits sexual intercourse between man and wife and eating meat and [drinking] wine. Hence, (yimtza’ ba‘al ha-ta’avah maqom lihyot shatuf bezimat ishto o nashav harabot, the man of lustful appetites will find the opportunity to be lasciviously absorbed in sexual intercourse with his wife or many wives), and to be “of those who guzzle wine or glut themselves on meat” (Prov 23:20), and he can speak freely הנבלות (ha-nevalot, obscenities), for this prohibition is not mentioned [explicitly] in the Torah. (vehineh yihyeh naval bereshut ha-Torah, thus [this person] will be a scoundrel in the permissible domain of the Law).³²

Recall Maimonides’s definition of qedushah as performance of the 613 Mosaic commandments. The full force of Nahmanides’s objection is directed against this Maimonidean thesis. Imagine someone, Nahmanides argues, who scrupulously fulfills each and every one of the 613 Mosaic commandments. The Torah absolutely and explicitly forbids particular incestuous and adulterous sexual arrangements and specific species and mixtures of foodstuffs. But it permits unlimited conjugal relations with one’s wife (or wives) and unlimited consumption of kosher—glatt kosher—meat and wine. Thus a person of great appetite (ba‘al ha-ta’avah), however excessive his lusts and bodily desires, will have as many opportunities as his heart wishes to indulge himself without end in permissible sexual relations and to gluttonously satisfy himself with as much kosher wine and meat as he can consume. Because there is no explicit commandment in the Torah prohibiting obscene speech, scrupulous observers of each and every Mosaic commandment also have license to speak as much crude and profane speech as they wish. The 613 Mosaic commandments allow for this kind of naval bereshut ha-Torah, “scoundrel within the permissible domain of the Law” (for short: “scoundrel”), a phrase Nahmanides originated. While it defines sharp boundaries that demarcate the absolutely prohibited and obligatory, the Law allows for great abuses within its space of permissibility. This may be unavoidable with any law. But according to Maimonides’s definition of qedushah/holiness as no more and no less than performance of the 613 Mosaic commandments, Nahmanides objects that a scoundrel of this sort is not only within his legal rights; the scoundrel is qadosh or holy! It follows, Nahmanides implies, that Maimonides’s characterization of qedushah as perfectly scrupulous performance of the 613 commandments (and only them) leads to a reductio ad absurdum of what it is to be qadosh. ³³

Maimonides, to be sure, has a response to this Nahmanidean objection. His expansive re-conception of the commandments as training to minimize and, where possible, eliminate bodily desires and even some necessities is meant to inculcate the kinds of character traits, virtues, and dispositions that should preemptively or correctively counter the objectionable behavior and defective personality type of the scoundrel. Even if one does not buy the full Maimonidean package of imitatio dei, with its eradication of emotions and pyschological drives, his first explanation of the commandments also envisions them as instruments to inculcate proper values and beliefs.

Notwithstanding Maimonides’s response, Nahmanides would counter-reply:You want to refocus the idea of qedushah away from the magical, miraculous, and supernatural to an intellectually oriented way of life, exemplified by the Mosaic commandments re-conceived as exercises that redirect the individual away from the pursuit of his bodily desires. But the 613 Mosaic commandments you enumerate are not what we would prima facie take to be exemplars for a life that quells one’s material desires and drives—the qedushah you seek to achieve. In fact, the shape of the training delineated by the 613 Mosaic commandments leaves plenty of room for the scoundrel to satisfy all his desires and lusts. For example, if the aim of the prohibited sexual relations is to minimize and quell sex, why does the Torah prohibit only relations between the family members enumerated in Leviticus 18, such as the wife of your father’s brother or your half-sister by your father? Even if (as Maimonides explains in Guide III:49:606) the explicitly prohibited family members are those with whom one is most frequently in contact at home, why

should relations with these particular relatives—just because they are frequently around each other—incur divine punishment by premature death [karet] while individuals are permitted to marry hundreds and even thousands of wives? And why is it so wrong and prohibited for someone to marry his daughter to his son—as is permitted to Noahides? Or for him to marry two sisters, as did Jacob the Patriarch? ³⁴

If the reason for these scriptural prohibitions is to teach general sexual restraint or abstinence, why are these peculiar, and apparently idiosyncratic, relations and not others singled out as Mosaic prohibitions? ³⁵

But, more importantly, even apart from the critique specifically of Maimonides’s account, a novel, original conception of qedushah emerges from Nahmanides’s Commentary. Rather than being a disembodied intellectual state inculcated by the Mosaic commandments, Nahmanides’s qedushah is the complement to the commandments that blocks the possibility of the scoundrel, the perfectly law-abiding individual who exploits and manipulates the Law to satisfy his bodily desires. The charge to be qadosh is directed at correcting problematic loopholes and gaps created by the commandments that the scoundrel takes advantage of. As it were, holiness fills the (loop)holes strewn through the space marked out by the commandments. Abuse of the Law is the mother of qedushah.

Nahmanides mentions the word “perishut” (or derived terms like “perushim”) no less than eleven times in his commentary on Lev 19:2. But what he means by “perishut” and, in particular, what one separates from, is completely different from the other conceptions we have met. It is not scriptural ritual impurity, with its associations with death, from which one must separate oneself within the Temple precincts. It is not the nations of the world from whom the Israelites separate themselves as a people through their distinctive dietary and sexual prohibitions. What is separated is also not, as it is in rabbinic literature, what is out-of-bounds, untouchable, or restricted. And unlike Maimonides, Nahmanides’s perishut is not separating from matter or the body in order to separate oneself to the intellect. Nahmanides does call for minimizing bodily desires but his point is not de-corporealization but to create a unified personality-type opposed to the law-abiding scoundrel who uses every opportunity to take advantage of what is not absolutely and explicitly forbidden, the space of legal but scoundrelous permissibilities, to sate his bodily appetites. Nahmanides’s holiness seeks to create a personality-type characterized by its whole-ness. We could go on to say that perishut aims at realizing the spirit rather than the letter of the Law—a distinction not explicitly drawn by Nahmanides—but keep in mind that his idea of spirit is not opposed to the letter of the Law. His spirit is a generalization of the letter that fills in and expands its sharply defined boundaries.

To correct the abuses of the naval, Nahmanides spells out two different (but not clearly distinguished) “ways of the Torah” in the remainder of his lengthy commentary on Lev 19:2:

Therefore, after specifying those prohibitions that it prohibits entirely, the Torah צוה בדבר כללי (tzivah bedavar kellali, follows with a general command) that we should be פרושים (perushim, separated from) המותרות (ha-mutarot, permissible things; alt. reading: ha-motarot, pleasures beyond the necessary, luxuries, excesses). [For example:] One should minimize sexual intercourse … except as it is necessary for the commandment [to procreate]. And he should יקדש (yeqadesh, separate) himself from wine by [drinking it] in small amounts, as Scripture calls a Nazirite קדוש (qadosh [Num 6:5])…. Similarly, he should יפריש (yafrish, separate) himself from impurity [in his ordinary daily life] even though this is not prohibited in Scripture; as they say: “For פרושים (Perushim, Pharisees, Separatists), the garments of ordinary folk are מדרס (midras, a kind of ritual impurity that can be transmitted by laying or sitting on the impure item).” [Similarly, they say:] The Nazarite is called qadosh when he guards himself against ritual impurity through [contact with] a corpse, and when he also guards his mouth and tongue from being defiled through excessive eating and lewd speech … and he separates himself in this respect until he reaches a state of פרישות (perishut, separatedness) like R. Hiyya who is said to have never engaged in idle talk his whole life. To these and similar [matters] המצוה הזאת הכללית (ha-mitzvah ha-zot ha-kellalit, this general commandment) applies. After [Scripture] has פרט (perat, detailed) all transgressions that are entirely forbidden, [it extends the command] to include under the general precept even cleanliness of hands and body. For even though [handwashing before and after meals] are rabbinic commandments, the main point of Scripture is to admonish us to be clean and pure and separated from the המון בני אדם (hamon benei adam, multitude of people) who dirty themselves במותרות (ba-mutarot, with the permissible; alt. reading: ba-motarot, with excesses, luxuries) and with כיעורים (khi‘urim, unseemly things). וזה דרך התורה לפרוט ולכלול בכיוצא בזה (Vezeh derekh haTorah lifrot velikhlol bekeyotse’ bazeh, And this is the way of the Torah: To specify a particular and then to generalize to similar cases); for after it commands the particulars of law concerning all business dealings among people [such as] “Do not steal” and “Do not rob” and “Do not wrong one another” …, He says in general: ועשית הישר והטוב (Ve-‘asita ha-yashar ve-ha-tov, And you shall do the right and the good [Deut 6:8]) by which it includes in a positive commandment [the duty of doing] what is right and [agreeing to a] compromise וכל לפנים משורת הדין (vekal lifnim mishurat ha-din, and [all actions] within the line of the law) in order to do that which is pleasing to his fellow person…. And similarly with the Sabbath: [Scripture] forbade classes of work with a negative commandment and acts of exertion with a general positive law, as it is said, “And you shall rest” (Exod 23:12; 34:21). ³⁶

Nahmanides, like Maimonides, takes Lev 19:2 to be “a general commandment.” ³⁷ But what Nahmanides means by “general” is very different from Maimonides. According to his first “way,” which holds for civil relations and the Sabbath as well as matters of qedushah, the Torah “specifies a particular” and then “generalizes”—or analogically infers—one of two classes of conclusions. The first infers general directives from particular commandments or prohibitions. For example, from prohibitions on specific sexual relations Nahmanides infers a general directive to minimize all sexual intercourse, and from the specific prohibition on the Nazarite not to drink wine, he infers a directive addressed to everyone to minimize their consumption of wine. The second class generalizes from scriptural commandments or prohibitions to broad rabbinic prescriptions, prohibitions, or practices, e.g., from scriptural prohibitions on specific sexual relations to rabbinic norms governing conversations between sages and their wives and from the prohibitions on ritual impurity in the Temple precinct to Pharisaic norms to avoid ritual impurity in ordinary daily life and to rabbinic instructions to wash hands before and after meals. Likewise, the scriptural prohibitions on specific kinds of “work” on the Sabbath are extended to rabbinic rules that prohibit anything involving exertion (shevut) to safeguard the Sabbath as a day of rest, and scriptural prohibitions on gossip and cursing the deaf and the injunction to honor the elderly are generalized to rabbinic norms governing prayer-leaders, conversations, and good neighborly relations. In sum, Nahmanides’s first “way” to carry out the general commandment to be qadosh is on the whole legislative and prescriptive.

Analogously, Nahmanides’s first interpretation of perishut in order to counter the scoundrel is to fill in the permissible spaces within the Law with more and more laws and rules—to impose new obligations in neutral territory— thereby leaving less room for abuse. To justify this strategy, Nahmanides appeals to the Talmudic principle of lifnim mishurat ha-din, “acting within the line of the law,” which he creatively interprets as a directive to the rabbis to enact explicit laws wherever Scripture leaves open a possible action, neither obligating nor prohibiting it. This move thoroughly blurs the distinction between scriptural Mosaic commandments and rabbinic halakhot, which is characteristic of Nahmanides’s legal thought and distinguishes him from Maimonides’s insistence on a sharp legal divide between the scriptural and the rabbinic. ³⁸ Nonetheless, it is difficult to see how Nahmanides can succeed in blocking the scoundrel using this first strategy of perishut. No matter how many new laws are legislated, the scoundrel will always manage to find a new gap between laws to exploit. New legislation may eliminate some holes in the space of permissibility but it will also create new holes to enable the resourceful, clever scoundrel to take advantage of the law.

Nahmanides’s second “way” to interpret perishut to correct the abuses of the scoundrel rests on an analogy between Lev 19:2 and Deut 6:18: “And you shall do the right (ha-yashar) and the good (ha-tov) in the eyes of the Lord.” Already in his commentary on Lev 19:2, Nahmanides observes that after specifying particular laws about “business dealings among people,” the Torah presents this “general” commandment to do “what is right and [to] compromise and to act lifnim mishurat hadin to do that which is pleasing to his fellow person.” In his commentary on Deut 6:18, Nahmanides spells out his understanding of that commandment and, by implication, of ours:

Our Rabbis have a beautiful midrash on this [verse]. They said: This refers to פשרה (pesharah, compromise) and acting lifnim mishurat ha-din. They mean that first [Scripture] says that you should keep His statutes and testimonies that He has commanded you, and now [Scripture] says also that you should pay attention to do that which is good and right in His eyes [among those things] which He did not command you, because He loves the good and the right. Now, this is a very great matter, because it is impossible to mention in the Torah all [aspects of the] conduct of a person toward his neighbors and friends and all his business dealings and all the rules of all societies and states. However, after [Scripture] mentions many [laws] such as “You shall not bear tales,” “You shall not take vengeance nor hold a grudge,” “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor,” “You shall not curse the deaf,” “You shall rise before the aged,” and so on, it returns to say generally that you should do the good and the right in every matter, including even pesharah and acting lifnim mishurat ha-din, for example, what they said about (dina’ debar metsra’, a neighbor’s prerogative to have first rights on property adjoining his own) and even what they said [concerning the congregation leader that he should be] a respectful person and that one should speak pleasantly with other people, that he be called in every matter upright.³⁹

Unlike his first “way” to achieve perishut by additional legislation, here Nahmanides proposes that Scripture enjoins us to cultivate a virtue or character-trait that will spontaneously bring us to do the good and the right and, by implication, the qadosh or holy—simply because it is the good, right, or holy thing to do, not because a commandment or law obligates it. He argues that no law can anticipate and explicitly legislate before the fact all future questions of social conduct and inter-personal relations. Therefore, the Torah lays down particular laws with the primary intention that they serve as exemplars of virtues. Their purpose is not to enable us to extrapolate more laws but rather to cultivate a personality-type who does the good, the right, and the holy when they are called for, even in the absence of explicit commandments and prohibitions governing that circumstance. These virtues show us how to act in precisely those spaces where scoundrels would exploit the Law for their own ends.

As in Lev 19:2, Nahmanides appeals to the talmudic principle of lifnim mishurat ha-din (acting within the line of the law) in Deut 6:18. However, he means different things by the principle in the commentaries on the two verses. The phrase originates in the Talmud (occuring roughly nine times in the Babylonian Talmud) and in midrashic halakhic and aggadic texts, although there is considerable controversy over its rabbinic interpretation. ⁴⁰ For our purposes, Maimonides’s interpretation is significant. He uses the principle in halakhic contexts to mean that the agent—usually a sage or someone with a higher social status—waives a legal right, entitlement, or exemption he could claim, in deference to another party (usually of lower status)—for which he is praised for acting lifnim mishurat ha-din. ⁴¹ In his commentary on Deut 6:18, Nahmanides uses the principle with the same Maimonidean meaning, conjoining it with pesharah (compromise) which also consists in surrendering (some of) one’s rights or entitlements in order to reach agreement with another party. ⁴² Thus, both Maimonides and Nahmanides in Deuteronomy take the principle to belong to the sphere of rights, entitlements, and exemptions—privileges one can waive.

But in his commentary on Lev 19:2, Nahmanides gives the principle an entirely different, and apparently original, interpretation, as original as his interpretation of qedushah as a solution to the problem of the naval. In Leviticus, what it means to act lifnim mishurat hadin is for the agent to do more than duty requires. Do not merely obey the scriptural prohibitions on particular sexual relations, on impurity in the Temple precinct, or the Nazarite’s prohibition on wine. Reduce all your sexual activity to a minimum, guard yourself from impurity throughout your ordinary daily life, stay away from wine as much as possible, wash your hands before and after meals, and avoid vulgar “impure” speech. None of these actions are scriptural obligations or prohibitions, but what qedushah demands is perishut, separating oneself from more than what the explicit strict laws obligate. ⁴³ Thus Nahmanides transfers the principle of lifnim mishurat hadin from the realm of rights to the realm of duties.

But Nahmanides’s idea of perishut is not only a matter of doing or abstaining from more than the Law obligates or prohibits in the sense of expanding the extension of duties. He repeatedly also opts for more self-denying, more stringent, more ascetic actions that require separation from or restraint from permissible pleasures. In my translation of Nahmanides’s commentary on Lev 19:2, I presented two possible readings of the term מותרות. Either it should be read mutarot, permissible things, or motarot, non-necessary pleasures, luxuries, or excesses. On linguistic grounds, there is reason to read motarot. However, I am inclined to think that Nahmanides really means mutarot, permissible things, influenced by the great twelfth century Talmudist R. Abraham b. David, the RaBaD of Posquieres who composed a seminal code on purity and impurity, בעלי הנפש (Ba‘alei Ha-Nefesh), whose last chapter is arguably the first sustained medieval discussion of qedushah, especially concerning sexual behavior. ⁴⁴ RaBaD argues that qedushah requires separation (perishah) from the domain of the permissible precisely because the evil inclination works on individuals by way of habituating them to indulge themselves in permissible activities and things, and over time habituates them to transgress even explicit scriptural prohibitions. ⁴⁵ On this reading—that qedushah calls for separation from the permissible—the explicit scriptural commandments lay down a minimal threshold of duties that everyone must fulfil and at the same time exemplify maximal duties that individuals should voluntarily seek to fulfil as goals. Between the minimal threshold and maximal goal, in the space of permissable actions that one can either do or not do, the principle of lifnim mishurat ha-din directs us to do more than scriptural duty requires in pursuit of a higher bar. ⁴⁶

Nahmanides’s models of qedoshim (holy people) are the Nazirite, Perushim (Pharisees) and ascetic rabbinic personalities. These individuals live a life of separatedness that consists in separation from everything in which the hamon benei adam, the multitude of people, indulge. Nahmanides’s qadosh is opposed, then, not just to the scoundrel but also to the masses, ordinary people. Even while it is achievable in principle to all, qedushah is not a bar that just anybody will reach; it is an extra-ordinary life for an elite. Those who do reach it attain a privileged relation to the deity for which Nahmanides appropriates the term דביקות (devequt, literally, “cleaving,” which in medieval philosophical Hebrew translates Arabic ittisal, or union, with the deity(. He concludes his commentary on the verse Lev 19:2 by writing: “And the reason for the scripture because I the Lord your God am qadosh is to say that we shall merit to conjoin with (ledavqah) Him when we are qedoshim.” In virtue of achieving devequt with God, not only individuals but also the people of Israel are called a goy qadosh, a holy nation. ⁴⁷

This notion of devequt plays a role for Nahmanides analogous to the role of imitatio dei for Maimonides. One becomes not just god-like but like God through devequt. However, there are significant differences. For Maimonides, one achieves the state of imitatio dei by detaching oneself from the body, by eradicating its needs, desires, emotions, passions, and sentiments. Such individuals—like the Patriarchs, Moses, and Solomon— “perform actions” but “with their limbs only; … their intellects were constantly in [God’s] presence” (Guide III:51:624). Outwardly they appear to act like the rest of us but inwardly their fully actualized, body-independent (so-called acquired) intellects—i.e., their real selves—are in the presence of God, in a world that transcends all bodies and action.

Nahmanides’s description of the individual in the state of devequt may at first appear like Maimonides’s. Like the description in Guide III:51 of the intellectually perfected individual, Nahmanides’s deveqim “abandon all matters of this world and pay no attention to it as if they were bodiless and all their thoughts and intentions are [directed] to their creator alone, like Elijah when his soul cleaved [hidaveq] to the Glorious Name.” ⁴⁸ But Nahmanides, departing from Maimonides, adds that “they will live forever in their bodies and souls.” Explicating the words u-le-davqah bo (“And to cleave to Him”), he explains that devequt is total, unceasing absorption in God but in one’s body:

And it is possible that “cleaving” includes thinking of God and His love constantly, that your thought not be separated from Him when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up, to the extent that when he converses with people with his mouth and tongue, his heart is not with them but in the presence of God. And it is possible that the souls of men at this level of excellence are “bound in the bundle of life” [i.e., achieve a state of immortality] even in their lifetime, since they are themselves a dwelling place for the Shekhinah, as the author of the Kuzari hinted. ⁴⁹

Unlike Maimonides’s holy persons, Nahmanides’s are not disembodied or de-corporealized perfected intellects. They—body and soul—achieve a state of immortality in their lifetime, in this world.⁵⁰ The daveq does not transcend his body-ness or matter but transfigures it. As Moshe Halbertal writes, the one who achieves devequt “does not free himself of his body but he frees his body from the laws of nature by its means.”⁵¹ Nahmanides never explicitly states that the holy person who “cleaves” to God in devequt becomes one with, or identical to, God but the human in this state takes on divine-like characteristics in which his body does not require material sustenance and in which it is not subject to the accidents of nature, raising the ordinary to the extraordinary. Nahmanides’s candidates for this state are figures like Elijah, Enoch, and the generation of Israelites in the desert who for forty years were miraculously cared for. All these semi-mythical figures, in their respective states of devequt, go beyond natural necessity. Their qedushah is not a metaphysical property they possess, but they stand in a relation that effects metaphysical changes in them. Qedushah does not make them miracle-workers, but it raises them from natural causality to a state in which they are subject only to God’s miraculous governance. Nahmanides’s holiness is not, then, the supernatural, magical conception that Maimonides combatted, but it goes far beyond his this-worldly-oriented world of laws in which he tried to situate it. Here we glimpse another dimension of our own conception of holiness, not simply as an ideal, but as an extra-ordinary religious life.