This session is devoted to the second mishnah of the fifth chapter of Pirkei Avot (the Ethics of the Fathers): the world was created through ten utterances, and ten generations separate Adam from Noah, and then Noah from Avraham. The question it raises is simple and dizzying: why ten, when a single utterance would have sufficed? Rav Raphaël Benizri answers with what he calls a qualitative arithmetic, in which one plus one does not make two, and in which ten breaks down into three times three plus one. The lecture is in truth about the way G-d governs His universe, about man’s involvement in that governance, and about the qualities required to be made a partner in it.
The Rav starts from the numbers that dominate the mishnah and works back to the underlying principle: unity cannot be grasped, it belongs to the Creator alone, and everything that exists proceeds from a synthesis. He unfolds the number three through the alphabet, the days of creation, the festivals and the patriarchs, and then through the figures of Adam, Noah and Avraham. He then turns to ten as the measure of completed creation, and to the dynamic by which history is transformed from ten generations to ten generations.
The last part moves the question onto the ground of values: good and evil are not the primary category of the spiritual life — holiness and purity are. Two questions from participants carry the session further: one on the repetition of ritual, which seems to contradict the condemnation of conformism; the other on the verses on which the relativity of good and evil might be founded. The answer distinguishes the holiness one receives from the holiness one wills, and presents justice as the minimal expression of morality.
What this lecture teaches
A single utterance would have sufficed: the ten utterances are a reprieve. The mishnah says that the world was created through ten utterances, and the question immediately arises: why, since a single one was enough to bring it into being? The answer is that the aim is to grant a reprieve to the human beings engaged in running this world, to leave them the possibility of making amends. One does not wish to stake the future of the universe on a single utterance, and so one prefers to spread it over ten. The mishnah is therefore about G-d’s governance of the world, about man’s involvement in that governance, and about the qualities required to be made a partner in it.
In Jewish arithmetic, one plus one makes three. This arithmetic rests on quality rather than quantity: things do not repeat themselves, they vary in space and in time. When we add together two elements that are not fundamentally different but are simply placed in another perspective, we create a new entity. The couple is the example: one plus one, and the couple is a third entity. This is the principle of synthesis, and this is how the world works. Unity in itself cannot be grasped: without two there is no one, and the One is reserved for the Creator alone — and even then, in the very profession of faith, the two Names must be joined together: what lies beyond nature, and nature itself.
Three is the foundation of the alphabet and of all that follows. The Hebrew alphabet begins with aleph and bet, and aleph plus bet make gimel. In the same way, there are three partners in the coming of a human being into the world: the father, the mother and the Creator. This trilogy recurs in space and in time: on Pesach, whoever has not said three things has not fulfilled his obligation; the Torah was given in the third month, after three days of setting bounds, to a people descended from three patriarchs; responsibilities are assumed through three daily prayers; humanity unfolds in three tenses, past, present and future; and space itself has three dimensions.
The six days of creation are three plus three. There is a first unity: the light of the first day, marked by the point of light; the space of the second day, bounded by the line, which is a succession of points; and the third day, with the appearance of volume. These are the three elements on which creation is founded. The three following days come to give them content: the sun and the moon, which determine seasons and years; what was created on the fifth day to populate the seas; and finally the animals and man, on the sixth day, called to populate the earth and give it reality.
The human dimension is forged in three figures. Adam is raw being, the basic element, the one who takes his name from the earth. Noah gives feeling its place — his sons are themselves three in number, and one of them carries the sense of aesthetics, which is bound up with ethics. With Avraham comes the birth of the one who is truly worthy of revelation. The same structure recurs at the scale of the people, with Miriam, Aharon and Moshe — the Rav notes in passing that Miriam is named first — and then within the people itself, which is the instrument, the vessel of the entire universe, and which is divided into kohen, levi and yisrael.
The one that is added to nine is not counted like the others. Ten is not ten times one: it is three times three, plus one. This last term does not belong to the series. It is like the counting of the omer: we have fifty days to go through, but we do not count the fiftieth; it rises of its own accord once the forty-nine have been counted. The unity that completes is thus not produced by the addition; it arrives once the addition has been carried through to its end.
That is why ten is the expression of perfect creation. The ten utterances that found creation reappear as ten utterances at the revelation. We find, too, ten trials, which engage man in the right governance of this creation — the text does not list them one after another, but they are there. The number, then, does not count objects: it marks a completed cycle. Wherever it appears, something has been fully accomplished.
History is transformed every ten generations. There are ten generations from Adam to Noah, and ten more from Noah to Avraham. This means that history is not static: there is a dynamic of history, and man is, first of all, associated in G-d’s governance of the world. If we do not see why a righteous man suffers and a wicked man prospers, it is simply because we occupy very little time within a span which, between the creation of Adam and Noah, amounts to something like one thousand and fifty-six years. We cannot, therefore, have any perspective on history, nor understand how these generations prepare the coming of Noah, and then that of Avraham. But the people who live through this history are not useless.
Every being bears a spark, and trials are needed for it to reappear. There is a divine portion in each of us, but we stifle it with character traits and behaviour unworthy of a human being. Because of this, one has to pass through very harsh trials — sometimes a flood, sometimes a very heavy punishment — to see the sum of these particles, these sparks of light, gather together in a single man: Noah, or Avraham. Each remains on his own level: Noah is a righteous man, and as a righteous man he is called to raise his society up to a certain point, which makes the transformation possible.
As long as no leader appears, the world cannot be held to account. For ten generations the world cannot, at first sight, be judged: one has to wait for the tenth. The reason is that as long as there are no norms in society and no one comes forward to embody them, people have neither reference nor example, and they cannot be judged. As soon as the leader appears, criteria appear with him, which demand change and levelling. This is what the mishnah indicates by listing these ten generations: it tells us of G-d’s patience with humanity, which has no one to take as an example until that man arrives.
Noah remains within the law of creation, and that is why Avraham is needed. Noah is a man who walks with G-d’s justice, and therefore bound to the laws of creation and enclosed within them — and that law calls for the law of retaliation. After the flood, one sets out towards a new creation and a new history, but ten more generations must pass before moving in another direction: that of kindness, of love, of going beyond the ways of nature. That is Avraham. And Avraham is Noah seen in another perspective — he is Adam too.
All this comes from the smallest letter. The yud is the smallest letter of the alphabet, and its numerical value is ten. It is a point, and that point is indivisible: it is the starting point of creation. It is from yud to yud that the world advances. But creation itself is dual, and that is why it begins with the letter bet — the letter that presupposes something other than itself.
Transformations are then counted in tens, up to a hundred. The count goes by tens — ten, twenty, thirty, forty — up to a hundred, which is the completed multiple. And it is said of one who reaches a hundred years that it is as if he had died and departed from the world: having reached that age, he has nothing left to innovate. For what is death? The loss of dynamism, of meaning, of the sense of responsibility — the moment when one no longer turns one’s gaze towards the new generations.
Good and evil are not the first category. There is in Judaism the notion that good and evil are highly subjective, and if man was told at the beginning not to fix his attention on the knowledge of good and evil, it is because there is no evil in the absolute. It is not for the distinction between good and evil that we bless: we bless the One who separates the holy from the profane, the pure from the impure. What matters in a spiritual life is to raise matter to the level of the sacred, to consecrate the profane, to cross the boundary between the pure and the impure. Good and evil come in only afterwards, in third position in the classification of values — and the first generations had a sense of neither of these categories.
Holiness, too, is threefold. We say kadosh three times: once for what relates to heaven, once for what relates to matter, and once for the combination that takes place through time — and it is this third holiness that we sing. It is in this capacity that we are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation: we are little kohanim for humanity, inspired by the stature of the High Priest, who guards himself from impurity and watches over holiness. Time contributes to this — the time of the three festivals, when we set aside everything repetitive and conformist, for conformism is the very essence of impurity. It is always a matter of passing to a higher level, and the rhythm of Shabbat, its preparation, the preparation of the festivals, the three daily prayers, are so many ways of keeping our spirituality alert. There is no repetition in space or in time, and still less in the human being. There are only stages — stages that lead man to be in the image of his Creator. That is why the righteous man knows no rest: he is always at work, he cannot let himself simply drift through life, he is responsible — and to be responsible means that there is another facing him, towards whom he has duties to fulfil. So it is that Avraham himself passes through trials, and that he is rewarded not for his past but for a steadfastness proof against every trial; so it is, again, that the people of Israel obtains its liberation only after the ten plagues and the trials of the crossing of the desert.
Ten and three do not call forth the same presence. A divine presence consecrates a gathering of ten people, but a divine presence also consecrates a gathering of three. The difference lies in this: when we are within the ten, the elements may remain separate, and even if one is dealing with men of no worth, the fact of being included in that number suffices — the presence is there, and the process of creation will be carried out through them. In the lower order it is otherwise: there must be a true dialogue, an effective participation of the units with one another, for something to come about and for that presence to be called forth.
The repetition of ritual is not conformism — on one condition. To a participant’s question about the daily offering, that regulated cycle which seems to contradict the condemnation of the repetitive, the Rav distinguishes three orders: study, which inspires; halakhah (Jewish law), which regulates practice and ritual; and aggadah (the non-legal teachings), which propels one’s being towards the heights. The mitzvah, yes, is a repetition. Study is not — and the study that inspires the mitzvah means that the mitzvah is no longer the same, so that at no moment is it identical to that of the day before. To shut oneself up in the practice of a repetitive mitzvah gives rise to religion, and we do not want religion: kedushah (holiness) is what stands beyond the mitzvah. But neither is it a matter of sinking into a world of poetry beyond the world, for the text says to be men first and holy afterwards: one cannot be holy at the expense of the human, nor stop at the human without ever going further.
The holiness one receives and the holiness one wills. To the second question, about the verses on which to base the relativity of good and evil — the verse of the tree in chapter two, and the one in which Yosef tells his brothers that the evil they had intended to do him, G-d turned into good — the Rav answers that this is correct, and adds to it. In the book of Genesis, the notion of the holy and the profane does not appear; it appears in the book of Shemot, because at the level of Bereshit there are only individuals, and it is difficult to attain kedushah as an individual: kedushah is plural. It obeys, moreover, a twofold movement. The kohen is holy by birth, not because he is righteous or good: this holiness was bestowed upon him, whether he wishes it or not, and that is the order of providence. But there is also a movement from below to above, a holiness that we will, which engages free choice — consenting to take on this destiny one did not choose. It is there that the notion of a people appears, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, which expresses this need for self-transcendence. For justice is only the minimal expression of morality; true morality lies beyond it, in walking in the way of the good.
Full transcript of the lecture
So now I am going to take up a mishnah from the fifth chapter of Avot, which we will be reading this coming Shabbat. Judging a little from my notes, I have already had the opportunity to speak to you about the first mishnah, which is why this evening I will focus on the second. This mishnah deals, in a sense, with the way G-d governs His universe, with how man intervenes in that governance, and with the qualities required in order truly to be made a partner in the governance of this universe. Three numbers dominate it — one would almost think this was a class in numerology. First, ten: be’asarah ma’amarot nivra ha-olam, “with ten utterances the world was created.” The question, then, is this: a single utterance was enough to set this world on its feet — why ten? Quite simply in order to grant a reprieve to the human beings engaged in running this world, a chance to make amends; because one does not want to stake the future of the universe on a single utterance, and so it was preferred to spread it over ten utterances. Why ten? Because the number ten tells us that it is the unit of perfect creation. So it is not one, it is ten. And ten is not ten times one: ten is three times three, plus one. You will ask why. Quite simply because in Jewish arithmetic — an arithmetic founded on quality rather than quantity — one plus one equals three, for the simple reason that things do not repeat themselves: they vary in space and in time. Consequently, when we add together two elements that are not fundamentally different, but are simply situated in another perspective and stand facing each other, then by adding them together we create a new entity. The couple is one plus one.
Shechinah beineihem — “the Divine Presence is between them”: the couple is a third entity. That is how the world works: by the principle of synthesis. Unity in itself cannot be grasped. Without two there is no one; the One is reserved for the Creator alone — Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad. And even then, even in this profession of faith, one must join together the Name Hashem and the Name Elokim, that is, what lies beyond nature and nature itself. And that is how the number three is the very foundation of the alphabet. What do we have? How does the Hebrew alphabet begin? Aleph, bet — and aleph plus bet equals gimel. And there are three shutafim, three partners in man: the father, the mother and the Creator.
This trilogy, if you like, is found again in space and in time. Remember that on Pesach, whoever has not said three things — pesach, matzah and maror — has not fulfilled his obligation; that is the whole secret of the festival of Pesach. The Torah was given in the third month, after three days of hagbalah, three days of setting bounds before the revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He. It was given to a people descended from the three patriarchs, the fathers of the world; a people destined to fulfil, to discharge its responsibilities through the prayers of the day — three prayers a day; through three tenses in the evolution of humanity and of the world — past, present and future; and through the three dimensions — length, breadth and height, or depth. So it is this notion of unity, founded on a product of synthesis, an element of synthesis, that underlies the three, and that is repeated three times three. Why? Quite simply because there is a first unity of creation: the light of the first day, marked by the point of light; the space of the second day, bounded by the line, which is a succession of points; and finally the third day, the appearance of volume, of the earth. These are the three elements on which the creation of the first three days is founded, and to which the three other days of creation come to give content. For light, there are the sun and the moon, which are to determine the seasons and the years. For the seas, there is of course all that was created on the fifth day, which will populate them. And finally the earth and its vegetation; and on the sixth day it is the animals and man who were created, called to populate the earth and to give it reality. So this notion of three will recur in the nefesh, materiality; then in the ruach, in what we might call regesh, feeling, what also belongs to the senses; and finally, the third element, the neshamah — breathing in and breathing out, life in the full sense. And in this regard, the human composition, the human dimension at its foundation, was forged out of Adam, Noah and Avraham.
Adam is still adamah, the earth: raw being, the basic element. Noah will give him sense — regesh, feeling. Let us not forget that Noah’s children are three in number, and they are three types: Shem, the name, renown; Cham, heat, which is what gives energy; and [Yefet], the sense of aesthetics, which is bound up with ethics. And finally, all of this will find its continuation — or rather, the evolution will pass — through Avraham, and Avraham is a birth. Avraham is truly the one who is worthy of revelation. And this recurs in the redemption of the people: Miriam, Aharon, Moshe. The woman comes first — I point this out in passing. At the foot of Mount Sinai too, the women are mentioned in first place: ko tomar le-veit Yaakov — “thus shall you say to the house of Yaakov” — the house of Yaakov, that is the women; and only then ve-taggid li-vnei Yisrael, “and tell the children of Israel.” And the children of Israel are the kli, the instrument, the vessel of the entire universe; and this vessel has the particularity of being made of kohen — the kaf — of levi — the lamed — and of yisrael — the yud. All this is to say that the functioning of the entire universe is founded first of all on this trilogy, which we find everywhere: in time, in space and in the human. That is the gimel. And gimel comes from gamal: to bestow, a gift. We said that there are three elements of life: nefesh, ruach and neshamah. In every stage of evolution a new entity is given; but there are two primary entities, the material and the spiritual, and they must be united. Their union makes three: three for the material element, three for the spiritual element. Each time we have mentioned the three, it has created a third dimension. There are the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage festivals: these are the stages of life — liberation; the balance that the Torah gives to this creation; and finally the manifestation, or rather man’s recognition of this duality once it has become one. So it is with the people: the people is to be an am segulah, a treasured people — and segulah evokes sagol, the colour violet, and violet is a mixture of red and blue.
And red is the nefesh, it is the earth, the material; blue, as we have always said, is the accumulation of heavenly transparency. Both, then, are to take part in this segulah of the Jewish people: vihyitem li segulah mi-kol ha-amim, “you shall be a treasure unto Me among all the peoples.” It is this colour that asserts itself, if you like, in the march of the people. We have seen that it is three times three; the one manifests itself on its own. The Sages teach us that when ten sit and engage in the study of Torah, Shechinah sheruyah beineihem, “the Divine Presence dwells among them.” The Shechinah comes to join them; but the minyan is always nine plus one. [The nine] are the entity, the foundation, the base; and this one that is added is, if you like, the bonus. In the same way, in the counting of the omer we have fifty days to count, but we do not count the fiftieth day: it arises of its own accord once we have reached the forty-nine days, once we have counted off the forty-nine days. That is why
ten is truly the expression of perfect creation. Just as we find asarah ma’amarot, ten utterances, at the foundation of creation, we will find ten utterances at the foundation of revelation. We will also find the ten trials that engage man in the right governance of this creation — the text will tell us so further on. But more than this, the text says that the transformations of history always come about from ten generations to ten generations: asarah dorot me-Adam ve-ad Noach, ten generations from Adam to Noah. There are ten generations that bring forth Noah, and ten more generations that bring forth Avraham. That is to say, history is not static: there is a dynamic of history, and G-d is involved, first and foremost, in the governance of this universe, in the governance of the history of humanity.
We do not see why it is that rasha ve-tov lo, tzaddik ve-ra lo — the wicked man prospers and the righteous man suffers — quite simply because in these ten generations, for example, which separate the creation of Adam from [Noah], some 1,056 years, what little time do we occupy within that span? So we cannot have a perspective on history; we do not know how these ten generations prepare the coming into the world of Noah, the coming into the world of Avraham, the coming into the world of Yitzchak, and so on. There is a whole itinerary of history taking place, and the people who live through these histories are not, let us say, useless — no. In each one there is a divine spark; only it has been stifled by middot, character traits, and by behaviour unworthy of the human being. And because of this, one must pass through very harsh trials — sometimes a mabul, a flood, and sometimes a very harsh punishment — to see the sum of these particles, of these sparks of light, appear in a single man: Noah, or Avraham. Of course, each man is on his own level. Noah is a tzaddik, a righteous man; Avraham is a chassid, a man of loving-kindness. And Noah, being a tzaddik, is called to raise his society up to a certain level, which facilitates this transformation. That is to say, for ten generations the world cannot, at first sight, be judged, and one must wait for the tenth.
Why? Because as long as there are no norms in society, and no people, no leaders, come forward, then people are not — I would say — answerable to justice. They cannot be judged: they have no reference, they have no leader. But as soon as the leader appears, there is a call for norms, for criteria, which demand change, levelling. And then, at that moment, the text tells us: asarah dorot me-Adam ve-ad Noach, lehodi’a kamah erech apayim lefanav — “ten generations from Adam to Noah, to make known how great is His patience.” Ten generations, to inform us how great G-d’s magnanimity is towards humanity: she-kol ha-dorot hayu makh’isin u-va’in ad she-hevi aleihem et mei ha-mabul — “for all those generations kept provoking Him, until He brought upon them the waters of the flood” — because they had no one from whom to take an example until the coming of Noah. And when Noah does appear,
the flood comes, and one sets out towards a new creation, a new history. But since Noah is a man who walks with G-d’s justice, who has thus remained bound to the laws of creation, enclosed within this law of creation — and this law of creation calls for the law of retaliation — ten more generations must pass before one moves in another direction: that of rachamim, compassion, that of love, that of goodness, that of going beyond the ways of nature. And that is Avraham. And Avraham is Noah in another perspective — and he is Adam too. All of this comes from the smallest letter, the [point] of the universe, the smallest letter of the alphabet: the yud, whose numerical value is ten.
And how does the letter of unity, [the aleph], begin? With a yud, which, across the line of reflection, finds itself facing an inverted yud below. Hence the numerical value of the yud written out in full, yud-vav-dalet; of yud and yud with the vav — a numerical value […]. But the [aleph] is already inscribed in the first yud, and it is from yud to yud that the world advances. It is the foundation of the alphabet; it is the point — the point in the bet of Bereshit. The bet of Bereshit is the starting point of creation, and that point is the yud. And this point is indivisible. But when we speak of creation, which is dual, it is the bet of Bereshit. That is why in all the books you will never see the letter aleph on the first page, but the letter bet: because the bet is what presupposes something before it — the aleph — first.
So now we can [understand] the reason why the Holy One, blessed be He, when He considers behaviour, transformations, will do so by ten, in blocks of ten: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, up to a hundred. From ten on, these are the components of a hundred, which is of course their multiple. Ben me’ah ke’ilu met ve-avar u-vatel min ha-olam — “one who is a hundred years old is as though he had died, passed away and ceased from the world.” One who reaches that age has nothing left to innovate. Yes — for what is death? It is the loss of dynamism, of meaning, of the sense of responsibility; one is no longer turning one’s gaze towards the new generations. There is an important notion in Judaism, namely that good and evil are highly subjective.
If G-d told man at the beginning not to fix his attention on the knowledge of good and evil, it is because there is no evil in the absolute. What matters in life is not to distinguish between good and evil. We do not bless the Holy One, blessed be He, because He established the separation between good and evil; we bless Him as ha-mavdil bein kodesh le-chol — the One who separates between the holy and the profane, between purity and impurity. That is to say, in a spiritual life what counts more is to raise matter to the level of the sacred, to consecrate the profane, to cross the boundary between the pure and the impure. And then, at that moment, the notion of good and evil comes in.
It comes third in the classification of values. Now these first generations had no sense either of holiness — for holiness too is threefold: kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, we recite it three times. Once it refers to heaven, once it refers to matter, and once it refers to that combination which comes about through time — the third, which we sing, the third synthesis. And it is in this capacity that we are to be a kingdom [of priests], and the one who watches over holiness. We are little kohanim for humanity, but we are inspired by the stature of the kohen gadol, the High Priest.
We are inspired by time — that of Pesach, of Shavuot and of Sukkot — when we set aside everything that is repetitive, from shigrah, routine, from everything that is conformism. Conformism is the very essence of impurity. [The aim is] to seek to bring each point to a higher level. And we are bound to the rhythm of Shabbat, of the preparation of Shabbat, of the preparation of the festivals, of the three prayers of the day, and so on: it is a way of keeping our spirituality alert. There is no repetition, neither in space nor in time, and still less in the human being. But there are stages — stages that lead man to be in the image of his Creator. That is the teaching of this mishnah, which is illustrated by the one that follows. […] A righteous man knows no rest; he is always at work. He cannot lose himself, let himself simply drift through life — that is not possible. He is achra’i. You know, in the word achra’i, “responsible,” there is the word acher, “the other”: responsibility means having the other before you, wanting to bring about progress, so as to be able to fulfil one’s duties towards him.
It is natural: he too will pass through trials — ten trials, as was the case before him for Avraham Avinu. He was not rewarded for his past, but rather for having shown yatzivut, a steadiness, a fidelity proof against every trial. And that is also the reason why the people itself obtained its liberation only after the ten plagues of Egypt, the ten [wonders] at the Sea of Reeds, and the ten trials it had to face in the crossing of the desert. And life goes on like this — life goes on like this, but on one condition. For when we leave the number ten, we find ourselves in the number seven; and in the number seven, as I said, [we have twice] three for creation, and the seventh is the consecration. It is always this trilogy that returns. And our Sages said: what, then, is the difference? After all, there is a divine presence that consecrates a gathering of ten people, and there is a divine presence that also consecrates the presence of three people. The difference is that when we are within the ten, the elements may be separate; but the fact that we are included in the ten — even if we are dealing with resha’im, wicked men, with unbelievers — means that this presence is always there, this process of creation will always be carried out through them, and the divine presence is there. Whereas when we are in the lower order, then at that moment there must truly be a dialogue, a participation of the two units, in order to achieve something, in order to call forth [that presence]. There — I will stop here. If you have any questions, with pleasure.
— Yes, Rav, if you will allow me, I have a small question first. You said that the source of impurity is conformism and repetition. But when Ben Zoma says that the korban tamid, the daily offering, is what represents the very essence of Judaism, and when we take up the priestly service, which is eternal, which is an eternal cycle, and which is precisely extremely regulated — how do you reconcile the two, in fact? — Yes, listen: there are three notions in the spiritual order. That of talmud, of study, which inspires; that of halakhah, which regulates our practice, our ritual; and that of aggadah — of the imaginary, though I would not say the imaginary, but rather the projection of one’s being into a world that carries us towards the heights.
The mitzvah, it is true, is a repetition — it is a repetition. Study is not; talmud is not. The study that inspires the mitzvah means that the mitzvah is no longer the same; and the fact that at no moment is the mitzvah identical to that of the day before projects us into another conception of spirituality. To shut oneself up in the practice of a repetitive mitzvah gives rise to religion. We are not religious; we do not want religion. We are the poets of life with G-d. We are beings carried by spirituality to be adam — to be man, in the image of our Creator. One must not [sink into] the repetitive. Ve-anshei kodesh tihyun li — “you shall be holy men unto Me.”
“Holy men”: you shall be men — and beyond that, kodesh, holy. Kedushah cannot be [laid down in rules]; the mitzvah can — this is how it must be done, and not otherwise. Not kedushah: kedushah is what lies beyond the mitzvah. The whole ritual of the Temple lay in the realm of kodesh and of taharah, holiness and purity. It did not lie in good and evil; it lay in impurity, in the purity that one wrested from impurity, and in the holiness that one wrested from the profane. Of course, it is not a matter, either, of sinking into a world of poetry beyond this world. Ve-anshei kodesh tihyun li: be men first, and holy afterwards. But you cannot be holy at the expense of the ish, of the anashim — of the human being.
And you cannot confine yourselves to remaining merely ish and do without kedushah. There — another question? — Yes. I would like, precisely, to continue from what you have just said: that in Jewish thought the categories of good — the moral categories of good and evil — are very relative, that they are truly surpassed by the holy and the profane, by the pure and the impure. But I am still looking, within the Torah itself, for the verses on which one could base this. And I am thinking rather of the beginning, in Genesis: in chapter two we have the prohibition against eating from the tree of good and evil; but at the end, in chapter fifty, we read what Yosef says to his brothers: “The evil you meant to do me, G-d turned into good.” And I wonder whether this is not a key verse on which to found what you are saying — these relative dimensions of good and evil — even though the mitzvot themselves are very clear. That is all. — So, the answer: you are right, but I will add to it. In the book of Genesis, this notion of the holy and the profane does not appear. It appears in the book of Shemot, when there is a people. At the level of Bereshit there are only individuals, and as an individual it is difficult to attain the notion of kedushah. The notion of kedushah is plural.
The only one who can claim kedushah for Himself is the Holy One, blessed be He. And there it is said: kedushati le-ma’alah mi-kedushatchem — “My holiness is higher than yours.” Why? Because I can be holy at once on earth, holy beyond the world, and holy in time, and you cannot be beyond these three notions. Your holiness, for all that, limits you. It becomes effective only when it projects itself […]. And holiness also obeys a twofold movement. [The first is that of hashgachah, providence.] The Jewish people is holy because that is how providence decided it. The kohen is holy — not because he is righteous, not because he is good: he is holy by birth. It was given to him; he was granted this holiness.
Whether he wants it or not, that is the law of providence, that is hashgachah. But take note: there is a movement from below to above. There is a [second] holiness — the one that leads us, indeed, to respond through bechirah, through free choice. Free choice is when I consent to take on this hashgachah, to take on this destiny that was imposed on me — I did not choose it. And that is when the notion of am, of the people, appears: mamlechet kohanim ve-goy kadosh, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The notion of a people expresses, I would say, this need for holiness, for self-transcendence — not even justice. Justice is the minimal expression of morality. But what is true morality? It lies beyond justice. It is […] — lema’an telech be-derech tovim, “so that you may walk in the way of the good.”
That is the true path of […]. There — I leave you there. — Thank you very much, Rav Benizri, thank you very much. — Thank you very much. Goodbye.
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