GEN561 The concept of kedushah [i.e., “holiness” – AJL]… would appear to be the most general and all-embracing term by which Judaism designates the highest religious quality that can be attained either in space, in time, or in man himself and that brings one closer to God, or into communion with Him. But, since in Judaism, the essential core of religion is morality, it follows that holiness for man is “basically an ethical value” D.S. Shapiro, “The Meaning of Holiness in Judaism.” Tradition 7, No. 1 (Winter 1964-5); 62, the “perfection of morality” and the “ethical ideal of Judaism.”  M. Lazarus, The Ethics of Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1901), pt. II, pp 25, 176.  The concept of holiness is also found in connection with the dietary laws and the rules governing sexual behavior. Leviticus 11:44-45, 20:8, 26. See Rashi on Leviticus 19:2.  These too, however, must be seen as ultimately contributing to the development of the personal morality of the individual, i.e., his inner character traits and moral dispositions. For clearly, we are dealing here with the two strongest urges or appetites in man, which are biologically grounded and thus have “natural” and useful channels of expression. Yet there is something in man that can convert these passions and sources of great creative energy into an “evil urge.” It is the “imaging of the designs of his heart” [this verse] – which Buber understands as “play with possibility, play as self-temptation … images of the possible from which ever and again, violence springs” Good and Evil (New York: Scribner’s 1953), p. 91 – that is called evil and can transform a neutral passion into lust and gluttony. While Judaism accepts the pleasures of food and sex as legitimate and as a positive good, it seeks, by the imposition of guidelines – by laying down rules for the “how,” “when,” and “with whom” of these activities – to encourage the individual to exercise a degree of control.  Armed with deep insight into the psychology of desire and the dynamics of hedonism, Judaism strove to have man avoid the extreme of repression and obsession and instead cultivate an approach that would preserve for the individual the simple and satisfying joys of food and sex. One of the effects of the many rules regulating eating and drinking in Judaism has been thus described: As often as one is about to satisfy the impulse of eating and drinking, the Torah brings one, from early youth, to that pause which converts impulse to will. The pause may be exceedingly brief but the very withholding of the immediate fulfillment of the demands of the impulse, the very questioning and the very performance of actions other than through the medium of impulse, but after the examination and deliberation, are indeed what separate fundamentally and basically the man whose impulse has the better of him from him who can master it. Aaron Barth, Quoted by B. S. Jacobson, Mediations on the Torah (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1956), p. 285 Judaism, however, recognizes that man is neither an ascetic animal (which leads to neurosis) nor a pleasure-seeking animal (which leads to obsessional indulgence), but a human being, created in the image of God, whose every biological activity is interpenetrated by the human psyche, which demands meaning and significance. Eliezer Berkovits, “A Jewish Sexual Ethic,” in Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976), pp. 48-82. Only self-transcendence can save these activities from ultimately becoming stultifying and empty. SPERO 47-8