Holiness

In nature, the animals create paths.  A rabbit finds a new way through the brush to a place of water or shelter, and then follows its own track the next day.  With time, other animals follow the scents and signs left by the rabbit, and the track becomes a path.  When humans arrive, they add the stamp of their own feet to the path, which continues to broaden and harden, eventually becoming a road.  In this way, the inscrutable darts and turns of the first rabbit become part of the geography of the world.

            The sparks of relationship passing between souls also follow pathways.  Two children return day after day to a game in which they discovered the joy and deep satisfaction of playing together.  A family gathered together over a meal returns to its past, retelling its favorite jokes and stories.  A culture is nothing more than the complete set of pathways which bring a group of people back into relationship with each other, day after day and year after year.  "Holiness" is the residue lining a pathway, left there by sparks of relationship traveling between souls.

            Any path or set of paths bears within it the signal: "this way, not that way;" "this, not that."  The Jewish signs of holiness, marking a set of pathways, consistently declare: "this, not that."  Work on these days, not on that day.  Make love to this woman or man, not those.  Worship in this place, not in those.  Eat this food, not that.  Holiness, in Judaism, is a system of restraint, of limitation, of "this, not that."

            Like all pathways, the paths of holiness began as nothing more than a broken blade of grass, or a bit of rabbit scat.  And yet time and the footsteps of countless souls along these paths have made them everlasting, have pressed them into the geography of our universe.