The Holy of Holies: A Meeting of Worlds
Tzav on Intentionality
One may not act irreverently or conduct himself flippantly opposite the eastern gate of the Temple Mount, which is aligned opposite the Holy of Holies. In deference to the Temple, one may not enter the Temple Mount with his staff, his shoes, his money belt [punda], or even the dust on his feet. One may not make the Temple a shortcut to pass through it, and through an a fortiori inference, all the more so one may not spit on the Temple Mount. At the conclusion of all blessings recited in the Temple, those reciting the blessing would say: Blessed are You Lord, God of Israel, until everlasting [haolam], the world. But when the Sadducees strayed and declared that there is but one world and there is no World-to-Come, the Sages instituted that at the conclusion of the blessing one recites: From everlasting [haolam] to everlasting [haolam]. (Mishna Brachot 9:5)
It shall not be baked with leaven; I have given it as their portion from My offerings by fire; it is most holy (kodesh kodashim), like the sin offering and the guilt offering. (Leviticus 6:10)
The gift offering (mincha), the sin offering (chatat), and the guilt offering (asham) are all called “most holy,” or literally, “holy of holies” (kodesh kodashim). We are familiar with this phrase as a spatial referent: the holy of holies is the inner sanctum of the Temple sanctuary. What could it mean to call sacrifices holy of holies? Rashi gives a practical answer. Sacrifices so-called require an extreme level of intentionality. A priest who eats any part of these without proper attunement has annulled the sacrifice, which is itself a sin. The sacrifice is holy when brought by a pilgrim with proper intent, but it also requires the intent of the priest to remain so. The Torah’s injunction for the priest to take care when presiding over the sacrifices demonstrates tiers or gates of intention—to be a success we need the properly directed heart of both pilgrim and priest. By themselves their sacrifice is holy. Together, they create a holy of holies.
A radical idea emerges from the realization that the sacrifices are a team effort, requiring joint intentionality. Could it be that the physical site called the holy of holies is so-called because it requires the joint intentionality of priest and God? Could it be that in the physical holy of holies, the priest becomes a pilgrim while God plays the role of the priest’s priest, or even, the high priest’s high priest? Here I recall John Ashbery’s quip that Elizabeth Bishop is a “poet’s poet’s poet.”
In Parashat Tzav we learn that priest may eat the remains of any gift offering, typically a grain or flour offering, but may not eat it leavened. Here we find an echo of the matzah, or bread of affliction, which the Israelites did not have time to let rise as they fled Egypt. The parallel is instructive: the bread of affliction and bread of haste needn’t be regarded as the food of poverty—it can also be regarded as the food of priesthood, sanctity, and sacrifice. On the flip side, we can appreciate the Torah’s injunction to the priests to remain humble. As you consume the sacred food don’t get too comfortable; place yourself in the mental state of a servant. You are no longer a servant of Pharaoh, but you are a servant of God. The parallel turns slave food eaten from necessity into a gift offering; it also strips the priestly elite of their airs. The matzah consumed on Pesach contains both resonances of degradation and exaltation—the bread consumed by force of survival becomes the bread consumed by force of mitzvah. Matza thus becomes both a marker of lack and luxury.
The Mishna teaches us that we should not treat holy places casually. The Mishna’s chiddush (insight) is not that we should avoid entering the holy zone with a money belt, or with dust on our feet (i.e., bringing the street in with us); nor is it that we should not use the Temple as a short-cut (this is obviously a form of use and an instrumentalizing the non-instrumentalizable). Rather, it’s that we should recite blessings in the Temple. The Torah itself is rather light on details about what priests should say during sacrifices. Here, the Mishna comes to explicate and script what in the Torah is merely implied. There is a lot of visual detail in Leviticus, but not a lot of verbal detail. One might imagine the priests engaging in wordless sacrifice. The core message of Brachot is that we can use our words to enact and express our intentionality. Words are instruments of holiness. They both maintain the holy of holies and enhance it by bringing it and ourselves into greater focus.
The Mishna highlights the words corresponding to a sensibility of the holy, namely the affirmation of ha-olam, a word meaning both world and everlasting. Against the threat of misinterpretation, the sages emphasize “from the world to the world” or “from the everlasting to the everlasting” (min ha’olam ad ha’olam). The verbal change represents a hedge against materialism or or immanentism—the view that the tangible world is all that there is. But I believe it also fits with the doubled language of “holy of holies,” namely, that holiness is a co-creation or meeting of worlds. We can think about the holy of holies as the meeting of pilgrim and priest or of humanity and God, or of the material world and the spiritual world. The holy of holies is not the spiritual of the spiritual, as it is commonly understood, but spiritual of the material, the divine of the human, the transcendence of the intersubjective. The holy is the other as Rudolph Otto says, but the holy of holies is the meeting of self and other.
The holy of holies as a category reveals a world that has three stages: everyday life, separation from it and reflection on it; reintegration with it. The Israelites are enjoined in Kedoshim to become holy (set apart); this is the core mission of the Jewish people; only by reintegrating and connecting with the world can we become most holy (“kodesh kodashim”). This is the corrective to the Sadducee interpretation of “become holy” which insists on “from the world,” but not “From the world to the world.” The Mishna continues: we are allowed and even required to greet one another in God’s name, even as Biblical law apparently forbids taking God’s name in vain. As we can now see there is no contradiction. To refrain from speaking God’s name in greeting one’s fellow is “holy.” To invoke God’s name in greeting one’s fellow is “the holy of holies.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins