Make Yourselves Holy

Usually Hashem speaks to Moshe on his own. Here He speaks to Moshe and to Aharon, and tells them both to pass the words on. That is a sign that what is coming next is not only for the kohanim who work in the Mishkan. It is for every family, at every meal.

Why is Aharon included here? Rashi reads the chain out of the verse: Hashem told Moshe to tell Aharon, and the last word, alehem, means Aharon was to tell Elazar and Itamar. Four men, not two. Why those four? Rashi answers that on the very next verse, on the plural word speak: they were made messengers alike because they were alike in silence, and took the decree over Nadav and Avihu without protest. He is pointing back one chapter, to the fire that killed Aharon’s two sons and to the two words that follow it, vayidom Aharon. Whatever you make of that as consolation, it places this chapter very precisely: it arrives at a family that has just buried two people, and its subject is what they will eat for dinner.

The opening is doubled - לֵאמֹר אֲלֵהֶם - and is followed in the next verse by the plural imperative דַּבְּרוּ. Rashi divides the labour between the two verses. Here he reads אֲלֵהֶם as one more link in the chain: Hashem told Moshe to tell Aharon, and Aharon to tell Elazar and Itamar, since דַּבְּרוּ אֶל בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל in verse 2 already covers the people, so אֲלֵהֶם must mean the sons. Only on verse 2, on the plural verb, does he explain why all four: הִשְׁוָה לִהְיוֹת שְׁלוּחִים בְּדִבּוּר זֶה, לְפִי שֶׁהֻשְׁווּ בַּדְּמִימָה - made messengers alike because alike in silence, accepting the decree over Nadav and Avihu מֵאַהֲבָה. The placement carries as much weight as the address. Chapter 9 is the inauguration of the Mishkan, chapter 10 the strange fire and the deaths, and chapter 11 turns without transition to what may be put in the mouth. Vayikra does not treat the altar and the table as two separate subjects, and the plural verb makes the priestly household responsible for teaching a law that has nothing to do with the sanctuary.

The word here for animal is chaya, which comes from chayim, life. Hashem tells Moshe to teach the people, and Rashi says he taught it by picking each creature up and holding it out in front of them: this one you may eat, this one you may not. Not a list read from a page. A demonstration you could watch.

Rashi, drawing on the Gemara in Chullin, treats the word zot - this - as a stage direction: Moshe took hold of each creature and showed it. That is an odd thing to say about a book, and it tells you what the rabbis thought this law actually required. Not a memorised list, but the ability to stand in front of an animal you have never seen and know what you are looking at. The signs in the next verse are what make that possible.

Rashi comments four times on this verse. On the plural דַּבְּרוּ he explains the widened address: אֶת כֻּלָּם הִשְׁוָה לִהְיוֹת שְׁלוּחִים בְּדִבּוּר זֶה, לְפִי שֶׁהֻשְׁווּ בַּדְּמִימָה - all four alike, because all four were alike in silence over Nadav and Avihu. On זֹאת he cites Chullin 42a: Moshe took hold of the creature and showed it to Israel, saying this you may eat and this you may not. On הַחַיָּה he reads לְשׁוֹן חַיִּים - because Israel cleave to the Omnipresent they are fit to remain in life, and He therefore separated them from impurity and laid commandments upon them, וְלָאֻמּוֹת לֹא אָסַר כְּלוּם, with the parable of the physician who forbids nothing at all to the patient he cannot cure and gives careful instructions to the one who might recover. And from the Sifra and the Gemara in Chullin he notes that בהמה is subsumed within חיה, so the verse’s opening term is the broader one and the domestic animal named at its end sits inside it. The framing matters: the chapter’s first statement is a permission, זֹאת הַחַיָּה אֲשֶׁר תֹּאכְלוּ, and not a single thing has yet been forbidden.

Two signs. First the foot: the hoof has to be split all the way through into two parts, not one solid block like a horse’s. Second the mouth: the animal has to bring its food back up and chew it again, which is what chewing the cud means, and you can stand and watch a cow doing it. Both signs together, and the animal may be eaten.

Why give signs at all rather than simply a list? Because a sign can be checked. Standing in a field with an animal nobody has named for you, you can look at its foot and watch its jaw and decide for yourself. Rashbam explains the mechanics exactly - a divided hoof means one nail split in two, not separate claws like a hare’s - and then offers a reason: these creatures are repellent, they damage the body and overheat it, and, he adds, expert physicians say so. That reason has not aged well. It is worth sitting with the fact that a great commentator staked the law on the medicine of his day, the medicine turned out to be wrong, and the law is still here.

Rashbam glosses the terms with unusual precision: מַפְרֶסֶת פַּרְסָה is a single nail like a shoe rather than separate claws as on the hare and the hyrax, and וְשֹׁסַעַת שֶׁסַע means divided into two rather than one whole hoof as on a horse or donkey. He then gives a pshat rationale, offered explicitly as וּלְפִי פְּשׁוּטוֹ שֶׁל מִקְרָא וּתְשׁוּבַת הַמִּינִים, an answer to the sectarians: these creatures are מאוסים ומקלקלים ומחממים את הגוף, and he cites both expert physicians and the Talmud’s remark that gentiles who eat vermin are physically harmed by them. Ramban, at 11:13, argues in the opposite direction - the forbidden birds are the predators, whose blood is heated by their cruelty and thick and dark, and which נותן אכזריות בלב, put cruelty in the heart. One reads the dietary laws as dietetics, the other as character formation, and the difference is not academic: it decides whether the law is an instrument you could in principle replace with better medicine, or a training you could not. Chullin 59a turns the pair of signs into a field rule. Rav Chisda: if you find an animal whose mouth is mutilated, check the hooves, and if they are split it is permitted - provided you can recognise a pig; and if the hooves are gone, check the mouth for the absence of upper teeth - provided you can recognise a young camel. Note also the root ע-ל-ה in מַעֲלַת גֵּרָה. It returns in verse 45 as הַמַּעֲלֶה, so that the chapter ends by raising Israel out of Egypt with the same verb it used for a cow raising up its food.

A camel chews its food twice, so it has one of the two signs. But its foot is a soft pad, not a hoof split into two, so it does not have the other. One sign is not enough. The Torah names the camel on purpose, because it is exactly the animal a person might get wrong.

The chapter could have listed what is permitted and stopped there. Instead it spends verses on the near misses - camel, hyrax, hare, pig - creatures carrying one sign and missing the other. Rules get tested at the edges, never in the middle, and the Torah walks straight to the edge. Then look at the last three words: טָמֵא הוּא לָכֶם, impure for you. Not impure in itself, not disgusting, not diseased. Impure to you. It is a status the Torah assigns, not a fact you could have discovered by smelling the animal.

אַךְ is the exception particle, and it opens the counter-list: three creatures that bring up the cud without the divided hoof - camel, hyrax, hare - and then, at verse 7, the pig, divided-hoofed and not chewing. Rashi has nothing at all to say on this verse; the language is transparent, and the interest is structural. What repays attention is לָכֶם. The animal is not pronounced repugnant, it is pronounced forbidden to you. R. Elazar ben Azaryah, quoted by Rashi at Vayikra 20:26, presses precisely this point: a person should not say נַפְשִׁי קָצָה בִּבְשַׂר חֲזִיר, my soul loathes the flesh of a pig, or I have no wish to wear kilayim, but rather I do wish to, and what can I do, seeing that my Father in Heaven has decreed upon me. On that reading the camel is not disgusting and never was. It is simply not yours - which is a far harder thing to keep than distaste, and a far more honest one.

Now comes the reason. Hashem says: I am kadosh, so make yourselves kadosh. Kadosh does not mean frightening, and it does not mean far away. It means kept apart for one thing only - like a cup used for Kiddush every week and never for orange juice. The rules about food are one of the ways a person is kept apart for something.

This is the reason, and notice what it is not. Not health, not hygiene, not that the animals are unpleasant. It is: I am holy, therefore make yourselves holy. And the verb וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם is reflexive - you do it to yourself, nobody does it to you. Rashi splits the verse in two: make yourselves holy down here, and then you will be holy, because I will sanctify you above. Which puts the order the opposite way round from how most people imagine holiness working. It does not descend on you and then get expressed. You go first, with something small, and it is met.

Rashi divides the clause: וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם - קַדְּשׁוּ עַצְמְכֶם לְמַטָּה; וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים - לְפִי שֶׁאֲנִי אֲקַדֵּשׁ אֶתְכֶם לְמַעְלָה וּבָעוֹלָם הַבָּא. The first half is a demand, the second a consequence, and the sequence runs upward from the human side. On וְלֹא תְטַמְּאוּ he explains the apparent redundancy halachically: the repetition multiplies the prohibitions, so that one act incurs several sets of lashes, and he cites Makkot 16b - one who eats a putita takes four, an ant five, a hornet six. Set beside that is a very different use of the same verse. Berachot 53b has Rav Yehuda in the name of Rav map its four clauses onto a meal: וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם is the washing before eating, וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים the washing after, כִּי קָדוֹשׁ the oil, and אֲנִי ה׳ אֱלֹהֵיכֶם the blessing. The verse that supplies the chapter’s whole rationale is thereby laid over the ordinary sequence of sitting down to eat, which is roughly the argument the chapter has been making all along.

The chapter ends by reminding them where they came from: I am the One who brought you up out of Egypt. Not only took you out - brought you up, lifted you. And then the same words as before, said again: be holy, because I am holy. Some sentences matter enough to be said twice in a row.

Everywhere else the Torah says הוֹצֵאתִי, I brought you out of Egypt. Here it says הַמַּעֲלֶה, the One who brings you up. Rashi notices the switch and quotes the school of Rabbi Yishmael: had I brought Israel up from Egypt for no other reason than that they should not defile themselves as the other nations do, that alone would have been enough, and it counts as an elevation. You may or may not find that a satisfying valuation of the Exodus. But the claim is unmistakable: the point of being taken out was not comfort, and not even land. It was to live differently, in the small moments of an ordinary day.

Rashi offers two readings of הַמַּעֲלֶה. First, conditionally: עַל מְנָת שֶׁתְּקַבְּלוּ מִצְוֹתַי הֶעֱלֵיתִי אֶתְכֶם - the redemption came on terms. Second, lexically: everywhere else the formula is הוֹצֵאתִי, and the shift to a verb of raising prompts the teaching of the school of R. Yishmael - אִלְּמָלֵי לֹא הֶעֱלֵיתִי אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרַיִם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁבִיל שֶׁאֵין מִטַּמְּאִין בִּשְׁרָצִים כִּשְׁאָר אֻמּוֹת דַּיָּם, וּמַעַלְיוּתָא הִיא גַּבַּיְהוּ, and that is what מַעֲלָה means here. The verse then closes the chapter by repeating וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי verbatim from verse 44, so the rationale is stated twice: once anchored in the holiness of God, once in the Exodus. Ibn Ezra, two verses earlier, supplies the mechanism the text leaves implicit - כי ידוע כי הגוף הנאכל ישוב בשר בגוף האוכל, what is eaten becomes flesh in the body of the eater. On his reading kashrut is not a badge worn on the outside of a life. It is the one commandment whose object literally becomes you.