Vito asked:

What is holy?

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We often think that holy means greatness, goodness, sacred, a tipping of the divine into the human,
or as a way of understanding the glory of god. And yet the word 'Holy' finds it's root in the Hebrew
equivalent kadesh,which expresses the notion of being separated from, or elevated above and at the
same time a dedication to. Holy is the special (ultimately ethical) relation to what is separated from
me.

But how is it possible to maintain a relation to something that remains separate? Isn't a relation a
notion that implies a meeting a union (if only partial) of two terms? This is correct only so long as we
confine ourselves to a thinking that maintains the reality only of what is immediate, of what is present,
before us, a relation that holds between the is-ness of things. The concept of relation is one which
applies to knowledge, we understand things through relations. Relations are a tool we use to
comprehend. Whereas the Holy forces us to think about what is absent, that can never be present or
fully before us, that escapes knowledge and comprehension. Hence the relation enabled by the holy
is no ordinary relation, it is a relation that must maintain or even create make possible the difference
and separateness of the terms.

The holy would be what Levinas calls a relation without relation, that is, a relation that does not have
the characteristics or defining parameters of a relation. How is this possible? Levinas suggests that it
is possible in ethical terms, which in his sense of the word is the meeting of two people face-to-face,
without that other person being reduced into any prejudices or previous ideas I may have, but is
encounter with that which is irreducible to me any knowledge I may have; in other words with that
which is separate from me and maintains this status through our interaction. For Levinas, ethics is
responding to this person's needs and wants, providing for their physical subsistence. The Holy is
simply the responsibility for the other person, the Holy is ethics.

Brian Tee

An interesting question, which has been debated a fair amount. You might take a look at these:

Eliade, M. (1961). The sacred and the profane.New York, NY, Harper & Row.

Frazer, J. G. (1951). The golden bough: a study in magic and religion.New York, NY, The Macmillan
Company.

James, W. (1968). The varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature.New York, Collier
Books.

They are classics in the field of comparative religion.

Steven Ravett Brown