The command seems almost impossibly broad. What exactly is being asked? The Torah has just spent chapters specifying forbidden relations, dietary laws, agricultural rules — concrete, actionable instructions. Now, suddenly, a single sweeping imperative: be holy. What does that even mean?
Rashi’s answer is precise. “Be holy” is not introducing what follows but summarizing what came before — specifically, the laws of forbidden sexual relations. Holiness, for Rashi, means separation: keep away from the prohibited relations just enumerated, guard yourself against sinful thoughts, and you will have achieved what the verse demands. The command is broader than any single law, but it is still fundamentally about restriction. Holiness is what you don’t do.
Nachmanides reads the verse entirely differently. For Nachmanides, Rashi’s reading misses the Torah’s deepest concern. The laws of forbidden relations are already commanded explicitly. “Be holy” addresses a problem the specific laws cannot reach: the person who observes every letter of the Torah and remains coarse, self-indulgent, and spiritually stunted. Picture him: he knows exactly which foods are permitted and which are forbidden, keeps the Sabbath without cutting corners, gives to charity. Ask anyone who knows him and they will tell you he does everything right. And yet he eats — a lot, and with obvious relish, never quite leaving the table satisfied. He drinks. He pursues every legal pleasure to its outermost limit, because none of it is technically forbidden. He is, in Nachmanides’ devastating phrase, a naval b’reshut haTorah — a degenerate within the permissible realm of the Torah.
The Torah cannot legislate against every excess. It cannot tell you exactly how much to eat, how much to drink, how much to pursue the pleasures it permits. What it can do — what it does here — is issue a meta-command: be the kind of person for whom the rules are not the ceiling but the floor. And the payoff, Nachmanides adds, is in the second half of the verse: by cultivating this holiness, we merit to cleave to God Himself.
This is a remarkable admission. The Torah is acknowledging that technical compliance is not the goal. You can follow every rule and miss the point entirely.
But there is a third reading, one that shifts the entire frame. Rabbi Shimon Shkop, one of the towering Talmudic figures of pre-war Eastern Europe, argued that both Rashi and Nachmanides, for all their differences, are focused on restraint — one from the forbidden, the other within the permitted. For Rabbi Shkop, the key to the verse lies not in the command itself but in its justification: for I am holy. Nachmanides understood this as the destination — holiness brings us to cleave to God. Rabbi Shkop asked what God’s own holiness actually consists of, and built his answer from there.
His answer is striking. God’s holiness consists entirely in the fact that everything He does is for the good of others. Every act of creation, every moment that He sustains the universe in existence, is an act of pure giving. There is no divine self-interest. Holiness, properly understood, is not primarily about what you withhold from yourself. It is about what you give to others. A life oriented entirely around personal gratification — even within the letter of the law — is the opposite of holy not because of the excess, but because of the self-absorption. Any benefit we derive that serves no one beyond ourselves is, in Rabbi Shkop’s formulation, in opposition to holiness.
This gives Nachmanides’ warning its sharpest possible edge. The problem with being a degenerate within the permissible realm of the Torah is not merely that he lacks self-control. It is that he has made himself the center of his own world — and a person like that cannot be holy, because God’s holiness points entirely outward.
The Sages in Vayikra Rabbah capture the full weight of this with a single sentence. God says to Israel: “Can you truly be like Me? My sanctity is above yours.” We are called toward holiness while being told at the outset that we can never fully reach it. This is not a discouragement. It is a direction. The goal is not arrival but orientation — toward God, toward others, away from the gravitational pull of the self.
Rashi hears in “be holy” a warning to stay away from what is forbidden. Nachmanides hears a demand to cultivate restraint even where no warning is necessary. Rabbi Shkop hears something more radical still: a call to reorient the entire direction of a life. The question is not what you are permitted to do, or even how much of it you allow yourself. The question is whether your life is pointed toward others or toward yourself.
