Parshat Kedoshim: You Shall Be Holy

Parshat Kedoshim opens with a famous instruction: “Speak to the whole Israelite community” — kol adat b’nei Yisrael — “and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, Hashem your God, am holy.” The word used for community here is edah. Its root, ayin-dalet-hey, is connected to witness. An edah is not just a gathering of people. It is a community that bears witness to something larger than itself. Before we are told what holiness looks like in practice, we are told that holiness is meant to be spoken into the life of a people together.

That matters, because the Torah does not say: you are holy. It says: you shall be holy. Holiness here is not presented as a fixed identity or an accomplished fact. It is a direction, a calling, and an aspiration. To be holy is not to arrive once and for all at some perfected spiritual state. It is to keep turning ourselves toward a life worthy of bearing witness to God’s presence in the world, over and over and over, in each moment.

I think about this through the lens of dance. At my physical peak, I could do all kinds of things because I had cultivated flexibility, discipline, and control. But that capacity did not simply appear one day and then remain forever. It required ongoing practice. If I stopped for a year, or two, or ten, I would not have that same range or strength. Flexibility was never a static condition I possessed once and for all. It was something I had to keep tending. Holiness, too, may be less like a title we earn and more like a capacity we practice.

Perhaps that is what it means to become an edah: not a community that claims perfection, but a community that keeps returning to the work of alignment. We bear witness not because we are finished, but because we are willing to keep reaching. Kedoshim reminds us that holiness is cultivated in the steady, communal labor of trying again — again and again and again — to make our lives reflect something sacred.

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Artwork by Hillel Smith.