IB World Religions 6.1.3. Kedushah, Teshuvah and the Shekhinah Notes

6.1.3. Kedushah, Teshuvah and the Shekhinah

Kadosh and separation

1. Kadosh (holy) comes from a root meaning to be set apart, so holiness in Hebrew is first a matter of being marked off for a particular use rather than of being morally pure. What is kadosh is withdrawn from ordinary handling.
2. Jews apply the word to God before anything else. The seraphim in Isaiah 6 call out kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, and that threefold cry became the Kedushah, a passage the congregation says standing during the Amidah.
3. Kedushah is the noun, holiness, and Jews speak of degrees of it rather than a single state. A synagogue, a scroll, a day and a person each carry it in different measure.
4. Leviticus 19 turns it into an instruction: you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. Holiness is therefore presented as something asked of people and not only as a description of God.
5. The rabbis read that verse as a call to imitate God. Imitating God in Jewish terms means clothing the naked, visiting the sick and burying the dead, since those are acts the Tenakh attributes to God.
6. Holiness in Judaism is not reached by withdrawal. The instruction in Leviticus is addressed to the whole congregation of Israel and is filled out with laws about wages, courts and harvests.

Holiness in time and place

1. Judaism sanctifies time as heavily as space. Shabbat is the first thing the Torah calls holy, before any place or object, and the twentieth century thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel described Judaism as building a palace in time.
2. Marking the boundary is itself a ritual act. Kiddush, from the same root, is the blessing over wine that declares Shabbat holy, and havdalah at its close separates the holy from the ordinary.
3. Place was graded in the Temple. Outer courts, sanctuary and the Holy of Holies stood in ascending order of kedushah, and only the High Priest entered the last, on Yom Kippur alone.
4. After 70 CE the synagogue took over some of that vocabulary without claiming the same standing. The ark holding the scrolls is treated as the holiest point of the room, and a worn scroll is buried rather than thrown away.
5. The root reaches into personal life. Jewish betrothal is kiddushin, sanctification, because the couple are set apart for one another, and the Kaddish said by mourners sanctifies God's name without mentioning death at all.
6. What these share is the drawing of a line. Kedushah in practice means treating one thing differently from another, and much of Jewish observance is the work of maintaining such lines.

A holy people

1. Israel is called a goy kadosh, a holy nation, at Sinai. Kedushah is therefore a description of the covenant people as a whole rather than of specialists within it.
2. Leviticus 19, the chapter that commands holiness, is largely ethical. It orders leaving the corners of the field for the poor, paying a labourer the same day, not putting a stumbling block before the blind, and loving your neighbour as yourself.
3. Ritual and ethical material sit side by side there without a change of register. The chapter moves between forbidden mixtures and honest weights, which the rabbis read as a refusal to rank the two.
4. Public conduct carries the same weight. Kiddush haShem, sanctifying the Name, means acting so that God is honoured through a Jew's behaviour, and chillul haShem, profaning it, means the reverse, above all when a Jew deals dishonestly with a non-Jew.
5. In its extreme form kiddush haShem means martyrdom. Jews who died rather than abandon Judaism, in the Rhineland in 1096 or in Spain in 1492, are described as having sanctified the Name.
6. The movements differ over what being set apart now requires. Orthodoxy holds the distinguishing practices of kashrut and Shabbat to be its substance, while Reform and Liberal Judaism have stressed ethical distinctiveness alongside full participation in wider society.

Teshuvah as return

1. Teshuvah is usually translated repentance, but the word means return. The image behind it is a person who has walked off a path turning back onto it, not a person pleading for a reprieve.
2. That image assumes the relationship survives the wrong. The prophets call Israel to return because the covenant is still standing, and the liturgy asks God to bring us back rather than to take us back.
3. Judaism holds no doctrine of inherited guilt. A person is born with a yetzer hatov and a yetzer hara, an inclination to good and an inclination to evil, and teshuvah is the ordinary work of steering between them.
4. Maimonides set out the stages in his Hilkhot Teshuvah. A person must recognise the wrong, feel regret, say it aloud in vidui (confession), and resolve not to repeat it.
5. He adds a test for completion. Teshuvah is finished when the same person, in the same situation, with the same opportunity, acts differently.
6. Confession is made to God rather than to a priest. In the synagogue it is said in the plural, so that a congregation confesses together and no individual is singled out.
7. One limit is stated firmly. The Mishnah holds that Yom Kippur atones for wrongs between a person and God, while wrongs done to another person are not forgiven until that person has been appeased.

The Shekhinah

1. Shekhinah comes from shakhan, to dwell, and names God's presence as it settles among people. The word is rabbinic rather than biblical, coined to speak of God's nearness without compromising God's oneness.
2. Its scriptural anchor is the mishkan, the wilderness tabernacle built from the same root. God tells Moses to have the people make a sanctuary so that I may dwell among them, and Jewish readers note that the text says among them rather than in it.
3. The rabbis located the presence in ordinary gatherings. The Talmud says the Shekhinah rests where ten pray, where three sit in judgement and where two study Torah together.
4. It is also said to share suffering. Rabbinic tradition holds that when Israel went into exile the Shekhinah went into exile too, so the presence is described as displaced rather than as left behind.
5. The noun is grammatically feminine, and later Jewish mysticism made much of that. In Kabbalah the Shekhinah is the tenth sefirah, the aspect of God nearest the world, and the mystics speak of her exile and her reunion.
6. That imagery entered ordinary worship. The Friday evening hymn Lecha Dodi, written in sixteenth century Safed, greets Shabbat as a bride, and congregations across the movements turn to face the door as they sing its final verse.

Holiness, presence and return

1. The three concepts describe one movement. Kedushah is the making of a space, the Shekhinah is what Jews hold fills it, and teshuvah is what reopens the space when conduct has closed it.
2. The rabbis state the link plainly. Wrongdoing is said to drive the Shekhinah away, and the prophets present exile from the land as the presence withdrawing rather than as politics alone.
3. Teshuvah is therefore described in spatial terms as well. Returning to God means returning to where the presence can rest, which is why the High Holy Day liturgy asks for a clean heart and a renewed spirit.
4. The scheme keeps ethics and worship joined. A wrong done to a neighbour is treated as an obstruction to the presence, so making amends and praying are not separable acts.
5. Emphases differ across the movements. Hasidic teaching stresses the Shekhinah's presence in every part of the world, Reform and Liberal Judaism have stressed teshuvah as moral self-examination, and Reconstructionist thought speaks of holiness as what a community consecrates rather than as a substance God supplies.
6. What the movements share is the direction of travel. Holiness in Judaism is built into ordinary time by conduct, and teshuvah is what keeps the building repairable.