by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman
author and speaker on Jewish ritual, prayer, and spirituality, is a professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

The sacred is under attack these days as an evil incompatible with egalitarianism. I am surely as egalitarian as they come. But I miss the sense of some things, places, times, and aspirations that are at least symbolically “priestly” and apt, therefore, to reassure me that there is such a thing as the divine.

The possibility of the sacred lingers on surreptitiously, through hints of not-just-the-everyday. Last month, for instance, when Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II turned 80, throngs filled the streets to hear her speak — not because she had anything earth-shattering to say, but because a genuine queen was saying it. Queen Elizabeth’s address evoked a sense of spiritual elevation, the thought that just maybe, there exists a realm of something beyond the mundane.

Here’s another example, closer to home. During a visit I made to Washington with my daughter, then just a child, we were given an insiders’ tour of Congress, with the help of the majority party whip, whom a friend of mine knew. The tour culminated in an off-hours close-up view of the speaker’s rostrum from the floor of the House itself. “Hey, come on up here and sit in the speaker’s chair,” our guide offered. My daughter refused. The place seemed too sacred to be violated by a mere tourist.

American sensitivities bridle at differentiations in class — and I share those sensitivities. But I bridle also at the notion of leveling all experience, as if there were nothing higher or better than anything else, nothing calling us to our greater selves. Sure, I know that Congress isn’t really holy, but maybe our legislators would do a better job of avoiding the seamy side of public life if they saw just a touch of the holy in their election to high office. Their behavior ought to affirm a sacred duty, not just political expediency.

That is the message of the entire Torah. It arises here in Bamidbar, as the priests and Levites are accorded special treatment. The Kohatites, one of the Levite clans, are charged with carrying cultic objects, including the ark itself, through the desert — a task that evokes the theme of the sacred writ large.

There is normally a screening shield that protects the ark from public view — only priests may enter the house where God dwells. As Rambam observes, the point of the shield is to protect all but the priests from seeing the ark directly and coming into direct contact with its related sacred objects. That is why, when the Kohatites carry the ark, they do so on staves that prevent them from physically touching it. And it is also the reason they do not carry sacred pertinences, like sacrificial vessels, until Aaron and his sons cover them up. They may be injured otherwise, because the holy is one giant step higher than what we normally confront.

We are not dealing literally with danger, however, as if human beings were cats and dogs and field mice who warily avoid situations that properly frighten. At stake is the indemonstrable but real existence of the sacred, which only human beings are equipped to appreciate. We overreach ourselves if we are not duly awed by the frontier of the Godly.

Believing in spiritual elevation, I watch with dismay the erosion of symbolic suggestions of its reality. There is talk about Queen Elizabeth’s being the last British monarch. Congress has fallen into such low esteem that I doubt any visitor would even want to mount the speaker’s chair any more. In an effort to erase class distinctions, everyone is on a first-name basis with everyone else. Heck, we are all just ordinary plain folk, aren’t we?

The point of some people (Queen Elizabeth) and some places (the speaker’s rostrum) commanding sacred respect is not the people or places themselves, but what they stand for: the possibility that God is somehow specially invested in what they do, the governance of human destiny first and foremost. By extension, we too, not just those who govern, can raise ourselves to a level of human dignity commensurate with our creator. “You shall be holy,” the Torah commands, “as I your God am holy.” It does not say, “I, your God, am just an everyday guy, so don’t strive for anything transcendent.”

The appropriate leveling of the democratic playing field does not banish all aspirations of greatness to life’s sidelines. I like this sedra’s idea of people, places, times, and things that are sacred enough to call us to a higher level of responsible living. Not for nothing does it come as the introduction to Bamidbar, In the Wilderness. The wilderness we should fear is the twisting of democracy to imagine we can aspire to nothing beyond the everyday.

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