During a month in which we digest a season of court challenges and rulings affecting everything from individual rights to the powers of our country’s leaders, it is instructive to recall the story in this week’s Torah portion about an early challenge to the rules, by an unlikely group of vulnerable community members.
In the portion, future allocations of land in Israel are discussed, along with their rules of inheritance. Ownership is to pass through the male line, a system that works if there is a male to inherit. However, one famous passage highlights an instance of a family in which there is no son, leaving the daughters the only ones who can carry on the family’s ownership of land. These daughters of Zelophechad and their family cannot be the only ones among the Israelites without a male heir. Rather, they represent the many people whose life circumstances are overlooked by society, and whose needs cannot be addressed until they are given a hearing, allowed to present their case and advocate for their rights before an empowered audience. In a brief, surprising story, the daughters of Zelophechad become the plaintiffs in an early challenge to Jewish law. They plead with Moses: “Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan, just because he had no son.” Moses steps away and brings the issue to God for private deliberation, and together they make a change to the law, allowing women in this circumstance to inherit their father’s land.
This year’s Supreme Court docket has been unusually significant. Its rulings have been mixed, and they have shown both the importance and the limits of the judicial system to act as a check on presidential power. In the midst of deciding cases whose merits themselves held so much in the balance, the justices had to weigh the court’s future ability to act as an independent, fair and credible place for citizens to bring their grievances, so that the struggles of the disenfranchised can be heard and their rights can be defended. Our Torah portion reminds us of the importance of that function.
Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jeff Saxe
