Sensitivity to Holiness

The great contemporary Rabbi, Adin Steinsaltz of Jerusalem, points out that one of the features that makes humans unique in the universe is that they have a particular “sensitivity to holiness.” What he means is that we can detect the Other, the divine, and that this capacity is both a gift, but also a curse for us.

Since our days in the mythical Garden of Eden, humans have been on a quest to know God, and even to become like God—to have God’s capacities, to know the divine qualities. It began when we were “tempted” by the notion that we too, like God, could know good and evil (which indeed we have come to know). But, as the Rabbi says, “The only thing that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge seems to have brought us is the heartache of being, at once, more aware of God” (through our sensitivity to “otherness” or holiness), but also of realizing that we are not any closer to God.

Our inner “God detector” works. We have that strange inner sense of the divine, but the divine does not seem any closer, necessarily, because of that sensitivity. And thus the heartache of being a human caught between these two awarenesses.

The reconciliation of these opposites comes when we continue our journey to seek the hidden face of God, but also when God “journeys” toward us, bridging the inevitable gap, and out of love, and in a way that is truly related to our own unique growth of awareness, manifests directly to us when we are ready and the time is ripe. This is the game of “hide and seek” that we play throughout life, both delicious in its own way, and maddening in another. But it also the inevitable outcome of having our own in-built “sensitivity to holiness.”