There is a category of animal called a sheretz, which is broadly defined as animals that live close to the earth. The category of sheretz includes rodents, frogs, lizards, turtles, ants, and flies/gnats.
The Torah goes to great pains to tell us that eating a sheretz is distinctly anti-holy, and strictly forbidden. Indeed, the way the text describes it, being anti-sheretz is practically a mission statement for the Jewish people!
For I am the Lord your God: you shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall you defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing (sheretz) that creeps on the earth. For I am the Lord that brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:44-45)
Look at all the pieces here. We are to be holy to emulate G-d – and that means avoiding creeping animals, sheretz.
But why? After all, G-d made sheretz animals in the 5th day of creation. After the Flood, He even commands Noach to propagate and swarm, sheretz over the land!
How can G-d tell us not to identify with a sheretz, when Noah is commanded to act like one?! Isn’t this a contradictory message? And what is it about a sheretz that is so problematic in the first place?
Here is a possible answer: in the text, the sheretz is an animal that is either fixed to the earth, with neck or heads bowed to look down, and/or (in the case of flying animals) animals that swarm. So the symbolic meaning should be plain enough: sheretz animals are not about aiming upward, elevating, or growing.
Holiness requires us to connect with the earth – but then to elevate upward. We must not engage with a sheretz because they are the symbolic opposites of a relationship with G-d.
There are more layers of meaning. The Torah describes a sheretz as an animal that lives and acts within a swarm (think of gnats). These animals are guided by instinct, not thought. They are identified as members of a group, not as individuals. These are the kinds of behaviors that are found in group-first societies – and first identified in the Torah with the Tower of Babel, where a quasi-communist society, akin to an ant colony, prioritized the group and the mission above any individual person.
By telling us that a sheretz is the antithesis of holiness, the Torah is telling us not only that we must seek to look and travel upward, but also that we must be responsible for our decisions as individuals, which means we must be mindful and conscious, refusing to be guided by animalistic or swarm instincts.
Indeed, although Noach is commanded to act like a sheretz, and mankind does so, G-d was surely not pleased with the choices mankind made after we swarmed over the earth. The dominant societies that emerged from population centers were Babel and Egypt: both places where individualism was reduced in favor of the group, where elevation, growth and change were all suppressed in favor of conforming, both with others and with nature.
In other words: we are not supposed to be like the sheretz in any way. Indeed, the people, at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, are described as sheretz (Ex. 1:7) – and the result was so dramatic that there was nobody raised in that environment who could lead the people!
There was such a diminution of mindful individualism that Moses, the leader who worked with G-d to extract us from Egypt, had to be someone who was more of an outsider than an insider! The Children of Israel, while they lived in Egypt, were not holy, which is why we are reminded of the contrast:
For I am the Lord your God: you shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall you defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing (sheretz) that creeps (sheretz) on the earth. For I am the Lord that brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:44-45)
We learn from what the Torah tells us holiness is not: Egyptian conformity to nature, following the masses, and instinctive or animalistic behavior. To be holy we must stand opposite all of those things, which is why we can have nothing to do with sheretz animals.
[contact me at iwe@religiousliberalism.org]