And God spoke to Moshe: “Speak to the entire congregation of the children of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Vayikra 19:1–2

And God spoke to Moshe: “Speak to the entire congregation of the children of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

There is nothing more difficult than the Divine commandment to be holy.

But what does this commandment actually mean?

It is a call to realize that nothing is commonplace, that no human being is an accident or average, that every person is utterly unique—a disclosure of the Divine. That is, each of us is a contemporary of God, that we borrow God’s time, that we must build a life as if it were a work of art, that life is a mandate, not a game or a form of entertainment, that no one has a right to live, but rather an exalted duty to realize that life is a Divine gift, that life cannot be lived on an island to which one withdraws, and that life is the result of an encounter with the sublime, deepened through our interactions with others.

Holiness is the awareness that we live in the presence of God in all that we do, think, say, and feel—without exception.

It is a warning that we are not holy when we merely ponder these ideas, but only when we live them in our day-to-day existence. It is our attempt to allow the........

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