(Delivered February 28, 2026)

“Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me!”

I turn around. It’s a warm spring day, and the Trader Joe’s parking lot is bustling. What does this stranger want from me?

“Do you always wear … [gesturing at my kippah]?” Aged perhaps in his mid to late 60s, friendly but not smiling, he speaks with an Israeli accent. 

“I do. I mean, not while I’m sleeping, but yeah. I wear it regularly.”

“Can you tell me why?”

[…]

Although I didn’t grow up wearing a kippah or even knowing any women who did, early in rabbinical school I started experimenting with כִּסוּי רֹאשׁ—covering the head. At first, I wore a kippah only in synagogue, to remind myself of this teaching from the Talmud: שְׁכִינָה לְמַעְלָה מֵרֹאשִׁי—the Divine Presence is above my head. As I got deeper and deeper into my studies, I came to see that the same holiness that felt so near to me in shul was present in other places as well. When I was learning with my havruta or preparing a dvar Torah, that, too, was holy work. Like an ink spot that soaks into the paper beneath it, the sense of holiness gradually seeped into more and more aspects of my daily life.

As I came to find out, the man in the Trader Joe’s parking lot had grown up in an Orthodox family in Israel but had fallen away from that intensive mode of observance. His head was bare, and for him, seeing a woman in a kippah was a shock, if not a provocation. As our conversation unfurled, he told me how when his mother visited from Israel, he took her to the Conservative synagogue he occasionally attended, wanting her to see what his life was like now. After seeing men and women seated together, and everybody wearing kippah and tallit, she didn’t talk to him for a week. 

But his misgivings about my choice went deeper than the unfamiliar: For him, what I was doing was potentially dangerous. He imagined me being harassed by antisemites or, for that matter, by ultra-Orthodox Jews.

We spoke for some time, interrogating what it means to be “Jewish enough,” and who actually owns our sacred symbols. Which Jews belong in kippot? Who gets to be a rabbi? 

Who’s in and who’s out?

The memory of this incident returned to me as I reflected on this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, with its painstaking description of the elaborate ritual clothing that the Israelites create for Aaron and his sons. Each detail of the priestly garments—from material to color to pattern—is carefully articulated. How much detail is embedded in these passages: the hem of the robe decorated with golden bells and embroidered pomegranates, the tunic engraved with the names of the tribes, the apron decorated with gold and twelve types of gemstone!

These divinely commanded garments were powerful symbols of the singularity of the role of כֹּהֵן גַדֹל—High Priest—and of the priesthood in general. Only Aaron, his sons, and their eventual descendants wore these clothes, and only when serving in their ritual capacity. The מְעִיל (tunic) and the  אֵפוֹד (apron) the מִצְנֶפֶת (headpiece) and the אַבְנֵט (sash) served to delineate a particular mode of being, a sense of access to the divine that was exclusive. And yet, when Aaron was fully uniformed to enter the Holy of Holies, he carried his entire people with him. The חֹשֶׁן מִשְׁפָּט, untranslatable but often called the breastplate of judgment, was adorned with twelve stones representing Jacob’s twelve sons, or more broadly, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. 

Thinking about this apparent paradox this week has shaken me to my core. The reason for my upset is that legislation was put forth in Israel this week to grant full control over the Kotel—also known as the Wailing Wall—to the Rabbanut, the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate. If successful, this move would criminalize religious services at the Kotel that are not ultra-Orthodox. This would effectively dismantle the Egalitarian Kotel. Conservative and Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal expressions of Judaism would no longer be welcome, indeed would no longer be permitted. Should this legislation pass, millions of Diaspora and Israeli Jews would lose meaningful access to worship at Judaism’s holiest site. 

If you’ve ever paid a visit and tucked a note of prayer between those sacred bricks or rested your forehead against the cool stone to sense the presence of your ancestors, you know what a loss this would be. 

Just a few weeks before I started my position here, I visited Israel, for the first time in decades. Without question, the most meaningful moment for me was finally being in the presence of the Kotel. As I approached, I felt the weight of the history of that holy space, the longings of generations and generations of Jews.  

Who owns that pile of golden stones, the last surviving wall of our people’s ancient place? Who gets to say who prays there?

It’s heartbreaking to think that the flowering of Jewish tradition, a flowering which has given us so much richness and meaning, may soon be cut off, not from outside our community but from within it. The maftir aliyah we read for Shabbat Zachor—the Shabbat of Remembrance—reminds us never to forget the damage caused by Amalek’s sneak attack on the Israelites as they were leaving Egypt. And yet here, the Amalek is no Amalek but our own kin; the sneak attack is one of spiritual violence, designed to humiliate, control, and exclude.

Thinking back on that long-ago conversation in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, I wonder what that Israeli, formerly Orthodox man—someone curious and open-minded enough to engage a stranger from a totally different world in respectful conversation—would say about this. I would hope he, and many others, would join me in speaking out about this potentially devastating decision, a decision that stands to move Israel further in the direction of religious extremism. I would hope that he has signed the petitions and contacted government officials, perhaps recalling what he learned that spring day.

The traditional priestly garments we read about at length in today’s parsha are made of varied threads of many colors, of a mix of fibers; the חֹשֶׁן מִשְׁפָּט itself is bedecked with precious stones representing all twelve of the tribes, without differentiation or favoritism. What lay over Aaron’s very heart in the presence of the divine should teach us: that each of us is a part of that holy fabric and must enjoy freedom of religious expression everywhere, including at our most sacred place.