I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Louisiana v. Callais. I’ll get to my sense of why I think this is a deeply concerning turn of events, but I want to begin with the concept of holiness and what Torah expects of us in building up an aspirational society. Because defeats become setbacks when we remember our stories are still being written.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests that the book of Leviticus, “invites us to consider what it would mean for us to live a consecrated, dedicated life.” In Hebrew, the book in which we currently find ourselves is named Vayikra, meaning “and God called.” Rashi says this is לְשׁוֹן חִבָּה, God’s love language. For Sacks, this evokes the key Western concept of vocation or “calling.” “Not everyone who finds meaning in life does so in moral terms,” he writes. “But they almost always do so in terms of some project involving challenge, dedication, commitment, and effort that takes them beyond themselves.”
Today, as we celebrate Beth Am’s annual Volunteer Shabbat, we honor so many of you who have demonstrated this kind of altruism. Thank you! And today, I want to further explore this question of dedication, of holy commitment. Our parasha includes a strict admonition against eating hekdesh, that which is set aside for God.
וְכׇל־זָ֖ר לֹא־יֹ֣אכַל קֹ֑דֶשׁ
“No lay person shall eat of the sacred donations” (Lev. 22:10).
These terumah offerings were voluntary gifts provided to the priests. What’s the origin of the word terumah? It derives from the shoresh רום which means to elevate or exalt, which is the source of the archaic translation “heave offering.” In other words, once something has been elevated for sacred use, it cannot be claimed or consumed in the regular way. Terumah is for the kohein alone, or more specifically his household.
The haftarah, too, refers to hekdesh, commitment to the irreducible holy. In Ezekiel’s description of Temple worship he says, “The meal offerings, sin offerings, and guilt offerings shall be consumed by them....”
וְכׇל־חֵ֥רֶם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לָהֶ֥ם יִהְיֶֽה׃
“Everything proscribed in Israel shall be theirs” (Ez. 44:29). As Bible scholar Michael Fishbane points out, the language evokes next week’s double parasha, the concluding section to Sefer Vayikra. The Torah also uses the word חֵ֡רֶם which we often think of as a ban or excommunication. But here it means devoted—that is permitted to the priests but “banned” for everyone else.
אַךְ־כׇּל־חֵ֡רֶם אֲשֶׁ֣ר יַחֲרִם֩ אִ֨ישׁ לַֽה…
“But of all that anyone owns, be it man or beast or land of his holding, nothing that he has proscribed for the LORD may be sold or redeemed…”
כׇּל־חֵ֕רֶם קֹֽדֶשׁ־קׇדָשִׁ֥ים ה֖וּא לַה׃
“Every proscribed thing is totally consecrated to God” (Lev. 27:28).
This is the say that once we set aside anything to God—an animal, home, land—it must remain so. No take backs. The consecrated life is about elevated living. In Judaism (unlike gravity) what goes up, must stay up.
And the concept, it seems, applies to people as well. When Manoach’s wife dedicates her son Shimshon/Samson as a nazir, he remains a nazir. When Chana dedicates her son Shmuel for service, he must serve. This is why we have the mitzvah of pidyon haben, the redemption of the first born. Because just by virtue of one having been born first, we are obligated to the Temple. An elaborate ceremony is supposed to be performed, even to this day when beit hamikdash no longer stands, to redeem such a child from this service.
But this concept of the irreducible holy also applies beyond its strict application to priests and the Temple. Blessings, too, seem to be irrevocable. When Yaakov tricks his blind father Yitzhak, pretending to be Esav, what is Yitzhak’s response? Not to revoke the blessing as fruit from a poison tree.
וָאֲבָרְכֵ֑הוּ גַּם־בָּר֖וּךְ יִהְיֶֽה׃
“I blessed him,” Isaac proclaims, “so blessed will he be!” (Gen 27:34).
And famously, on Chanukah, how do we light the candles? We follow Beit Hillel who say we add one flame each night instead of subtracting because we should be “ma’alin bakodesh, v’lo moridin, we should only go up in holiness, not down.”
All this is hopefully inspiring, but know the world often does not work this way! The question for us then is less about the priesthood which is mostly vestigial in a post-exilic Jewish world. Our parasha’s challenge to us is how might we commit, vocationally, as a calling, to greater holiness in our lives? And how might that commitment uplift possibilities for future generations?
One example can be found in a middle-school student at Lincoln Square synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Having impressed her Hebrew school instructors and rabbi, 12-year-old Elena Kagan couldn’t understand why girls were not permitted to celebrate their coming of age with bat mitzvah. In those days it was uncommon for girls in Conservative shuls to read from the Torah—and unheard of in Orthodox ones like Lincoln Square. Young Elena was not permitted to. But on Friday night May 18, 1973, after fighting tooth and nail for the privilege, she did become the first girl at her shul to celebrate a bat mitzvah. “She certainly raised my consciousness,” said Rabbi Shlomo Riskin who years ago made Aliyah and has continued to evolve in his own thinking. Nowadays it’s de rigueur for Orthodox girls to have some sort of bat mitzvah celebration, and not uncommon for them to read Torah, including at Lincoln Square. Meanwhile, Elena Kagan would go on to become the first female dean of Harvard Law School and the first woman to serve as solicitor general.
So, it seems fitting that as the Supreme Court all but dismantled the last key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week, Justice Kagen took the rare step of delivering her powerful dissent aloud from the bench. This law “…was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” she said. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court.” She might as well have been chanting a maftir or a haftarah from our prophets. Her Jeremiad is rooted not in nostalgia, but real concern for the degradation of rights and representation for Black Americans.
There is much to be said, and no time to say it now, about the history of the VRA and the importance of Black and Jewish alliances during the Civil Rights Era. These histories have been written. Where I’d like us to land today is in considering how hard it is to maintain upward momentum in our Jewish pursuit of justice. As Jews, it should concern us when hekdesh, achievements of a higher order—robust and diverse democratic participation, for example—are torn down in the name of progress. The question for us is not whether polling access for minorities is much better than it was in 1965. It is. The question is why.
And one big reason why is because of the protections afforded by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As another pioneering Jewish Supreme Court justice wrote in 2015 when SCOTUS dismantled the preclearance provision of the same landmark legislation, “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” A recent study published in the Journal of Politics shows throwing away the umbrella has had a marked effect on the racial gap in voter turnout since Shelby County v. Holder, translating to literally “hundreds of thousands of uncast ballots by voters of color.” Unfortunately, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg feared, it’s been a pretty soggy decade since the last time SCOTUS took up the Voting Rights Act.
What’s to be done when some seem to be working so hard to reduce the irreducible holy? First, we study our history. What is one of the first things you learn when learning to drive a car? Check your mirrors. New drivers are hyper-focused on the road ahead. Experienced drivers know we also have to look behind us: Your rear view, side mirrors, blind spots.
Consider our own Jewish history of disenfranchisement and suffering. There has been much focus in recent years on increasing Holocaust education. But as Holocaust Historian Daniel Greene argues in the new issue of Sources (“Holocaust Education for Today,” Spring 2026), in the battle to combat the very real and precipitous rise in Jew-hatred, cause and effect is less clear. Of course we should study the Shoah, and it should be studied more frequently not less, particularly with the rise of Holocaust denial, misinformation and disinformation campaigns. And some people are, undoubtedly, more sympathetic to Jews because of their knowledge of that history. But it would be inaccurate to claim that Holocaust education has decreased the overall rate of antisemitism. The evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.
Ultimately, we study history because it happened, argues Greene. The goal of learning about the past is not to “instrumentalize” it, it’s to understand it, to grapple with it. Likewise, understanding why African Americans were disenfranchised during Jim Crow is one critical step in the process of fighting for more inclusive elections.
Legislation, a new umbrella, may be part of the answer. A bill exists that, if passed, could help a lot. But trying to pass new laws without doing the relational work is unlikely to yield lasting results. Without a set of agreed-upon norms and values, what we do with our past is “up in the air,” so to speak. Holy is as holy does. We continue to have b’not mitzvah because our communities (including many Orthodox shuls) have agreed this is important. We have to win arguments, not just legal battles. We have to build empathy not only shout our displeasure online. We must build coalitions of people who remember their neighbors, not just their party affiliations, when they step into the voting booth.
And we must be open to the possibility of repair. On Mother’s Day, my family is going to see Holes at Center Stage. How many of you have read the book? Seen the movie? Seen the play? Holes is, at its heart, a Jewish story about healing. It’s the tale of two friends who redeem a century of injustice through kindness, fellowship, and by fighting for their futures. It’s about restorative justice. It’s about keeping our eyes set on road ahead, while checking the rearview mirror.
If we think about it, we’ve always known that the irreducible holy is iterative. Our tradition may say we must only go up, but there are forces pulling us down; they are strong and they are determined. To live a “consecrated, dedicated life,” to achieve an aspirational society, requires stamina, patience, and a belief in a higher purpose for this complicated world.
We Americans have dug ourselves into a hole of late. And there is real danger in feeling trapped by that hole. But we’re not. I don’t want to minimize the suffering, the fear, and anger. They are real and understandable. But if we think about it, we’ve always known that the irreducible holy is iterative. Our tradition may say we must only go up, but there are forces pulling us down; they are strong and they are determined. To live a “consecrated, dedicated life,” to achieve an aspirational society, requires stamina, patience, and a belief in a higher purpose for this complicated world. Gravity is gravity. It’s as old as time and space. But long before 1965, we humans figured out how to fly anyway. And recently, Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a moon mission, piloted humanity higher, further than we’ve ever flown.
So what’s next?
