Cohn, Jacob. The Royal Table - VWC: Faculty/Staff Web

44 THE ROYAL TABLE
they shall not take unto themselves for a wife" (Lev. XXI,
7). The body) must be kept beautiful; it is sinful and
unholy to disfigure it wilfully. "You are children to the
Lord your God: you shall not gash your flesh, or tear out
the hair between your eyes in mourning for the dead; for
you are a holy people to the Lord your God" (Deut. IV,
1-2). The camp must be kept clean, and all excrement
deposited outside the camp and covered up,
for "the Lord
your God goes with your camp . . . therefore let your camp
be holy, and nothing loathsome be seen among you lest
He turn away from you" (Deut. XXIII, 14-15). From
all these passages it appears clearly that the Torah was
anxious to make Israel an aesthetic people who would shun
the loathsome and seek the beautiful. An attitude cannot
be taught in the same fashion that the knowledge
of facts
is transmitted. We learn to do by doing, or not to do by
not doing, is a well-known dictum of the psychologists, which
the Torah too knew well. By an enforced incessant separation
from that which is ugly the Torah bred a contempt for
ugliness.
In the language of the anthropologists, the Law
declared loathsome objects taboo, and thus the notion of
holiness gained from avoiding those objects became firmly
fixed in the minds of the followers of the Torah.
But the Torah had higher aims than simply refining the
artistic temperament of Israel. The Torah wished, by a
process of association, to attach a feeling of repulsion towards
immoral acts as though they were physically loath-
some acts; that is, the Torah wished to make people react
aesthetically towards moral values. It therefore broadened
the field of holiness to include the entire field of morality.
The love of the beautiful and impatience with the ugly is
an almost universal reaction. By associating the good
with the beautiful, the desirability of the former is mail-