Every Shabbat morning in synagogues across the globe, a predictable, beautiful, and ancient ritual takes place. The Torah scroll is unfurled, the room grows quiet, and the Gabbai calls out the familiar words: “Ya’amod, Kohen.”
From the community, a man steps forward. He is often a pillar of the modern world—perhaps a world-class corporate accountant, a meticulous merchant who spends his week polishing a thousand diamonds to flawless perfection, or even a highly revered Rosh Yeshiva who spends his days teaching the depths of the Talmud to the next generation of scholars. He walks up the Bimah in his finest attire, wearing polished shoes and carrying the deep respect of the congregation. He kisses the mantle of the Torah, recites the blessing, and is granted the community’s highest honor: the first aliyah.
We accord him this privilege because of his lineage. We do it to honor a sacred covenant passed down through the generations. But as we watch him stand there, comfortable and highly respected in our modern sanctuaries, a quiet, staggering irony goes completely unaddressed.
The honor of the first aliyah does not historically belong to a high-society VIP, a corporate executive, or a brilliant academic. Spiritually and halachically, that honor belongs to a humble, barefoot servant. It belongs to a man standing on the cold stone of the Temple courtyard, wearing a blood-stained white linen garment, his hands covered in ash, completely consumed by the raw, physical labor of facilitating intimacy between the Jewish people and the King of Kings.
Nearly fifty-nine years ago, the course of Jewish history shifted in a single afternoon. In June of 1967, the radio crackled with words that sent an electric shock through the soul of our nation: “Har HaBayit be’yadeinu”—The Temple Mount is in our hands. For the first time in nearly two millennia, the physical location of our collective soul, the sovereign keys to the courtyard of Hashem, were returned to the Jewish people. The external excuses of exile, the barriers of foreign empires and physical displacement, vanished overnight.
Yet, nearly six decades later, the courtyard remains empty. The mizbeach (altar) is unbuilt. The bigdei kehunah (priestly garments) remain locked away as tourist curiosities.
Instead, a bizarre theological compromise has settled over our communities. We have decoupled the honor of the priesthood from its actual function. We meticulously maintain the synagogue honors—ruthlessly protecting the sequence of Kohen, Levi, and Yisrael for the sake of peace—while treating the actual job description assigned by Hashem as a forgotten historical footnote. We continue to give the fat of the land and the highest honors of our communities to our modern elite, entirely overlooking the fact that they have been truant from their actual shift in the courtyard for fifty-nine years.
This is not an attack on the character of our Kohanim and Levites; it is an existential wake-up call born of deep love, longing and halacha. This passivity cuts across our entire social and religious spectrum. On one side, we have priestly leadership that is hyper-competent in the secular world—orchestrating corporate mergers, managing multi-billion-dollar portfolios, or navigating the diamond exchanges. On the other side, we have Kohanim running our great Yeshivas. These religious leaders spend twelve hours a day lecturing on the intricate, abstract minutiae of, among other things, Kodashim (the Temple laws), debating the conceptual boundaries of the korban (offering) with brilliant intensity, yet they treat the actual, practical execution of those laws as a purely intellectual exercise.
Whether it is the diamond merchant hyper-focused on his inventory or the Rosh Yeshiva hyper-focused on his theoretical text, the result is exactly the same. When they look toward the Mount, they treat it as if it is simply “I have more important responsibilities to attend.” They are experiencing a collective, comfortable analysis paralysis. They are so busy parsing the text or polishing the stone that they have forgotten how to handle the blood of a korban.
And because the priestly class has acclimated to being honored in their fine shoes and respectable positions, the rest of the Jewish nation is left spiritually stranded. As a regular Israelite, I must stand outside the Soreg, the ancient stone boundary, waiting to bring my offering to the Almighty, but I cannot, because the gatekeepers are too comfortable in their day jobs.
Lately, however, this collective passivity has given way to an alternative that is perhaps even more concerning—a desperate, frantic urge to obey that has manifested in highly publicized, chaotic attempts to force the Korban Pesach (Passover offering) on the Mount. But look closely at what these modern pop-up initiatives are actually producing. These well-meaning activists are not building a legitimate altar that connects directly to the bedrock of Mount Moriah. Instead, they are staging offerings on the elevated Muslim platform, nearly two meters above the true bedrock—a surface explicitly filled in with debris and covered in cut paving stones designed to quash any legitimate, mutar (permissible) offering. The Result? Pasul (disqualified) at the very least and possibly a much greater offence.
This embarrassing spectacle is the direct result of a total lack of structured, institutional training from our religious leaders. Because the Jewish people remain in a state of spiritual impurity (tamei met) without the purification ashes of the Red Heifer, you and I are strictly forbidden from bringing any voluntary, personal, or individual offerings. We are halachically restricted only to public, time-bound communal offerings that override communal impurity—which is why the Korban Pesach is targeted.
But treating this divine decree like a seasonal spiritual festival fundamentally subverts the entire concept of the Avodah. These activists rush the Mount for a single evening of high-stakes theater, experience the emotional rush of a simulated ancient rite, and then pack up their makeshift altar to return home to their everyday lives.
How can a Kohen claim to bring the Korban Pesach with a straight face, only to completely ignore the Korban Tamid—the daily offering—the very next morning? There is no true obedience in a sacrifice that packs up its bags until next year. When we limit our service to a once-a-year flashpoint, we aren’t serving the Almighty; we are merely satisfying our own selfish desires for spiritual excitement and emotional fulfillment while completely ignoring Hashem’s explicit desire for daily, consistent relationship.
The mizbeach, once sanctified, is not a temporary theatrical prop to be abandoned when the holiday ends. Its fire must burn continuously, sustaining the daily, unyielding cycle of communal obligations day in and day out. True devotion is found in the monotony of the morning and evening Tamid, not just the high drama of Passover evening.
To transition from a scattered nation into a people maintaining a permanent, daily altar requires far more than a handful of zealous amateurs playing priest for an evening, and it requires more than yeshiva students debating concepts on a chalkboard. It requires an entirely functional ecosystem. It requires permanent mishmarot—systematic, rotating courses of hundreds of rigorously trained, active Kohanim and Levites who know the protocols of the courtyard as fluently as a modern soldier knows their rifle.
The time for shortcuts, excuses, and self-serving, pop-up compliance is over. The Kohen families of Israel—and the leaders of our Torah institutions—must begin now to send their youth in to be trained for the service. All of them. Just as an eighteen-year-old Israeli citizen steps forward to join the IDF to protect the physical borders of our nation, the children of the Kohanim must begin mandatory, rigorous training to return to the work given to them by Hashem. They must be drafted into the service of all the families of Israel.
The Talmud in Gittin (59b) reminds us that the rigid system of giving the Kohen the first aliyah was established by the Sages “mipnei darchei shalom”—for the sake of peace—to prevent communities from fighting over who was the greatest scholar in the room. It was a temporary mechanism to ensure we didn’t forget who they were during the long night of exile.
But a placeholder is not a permanent replacement for a divine mandate. The honor was never supposed to terminate at the Kohen himself; the Kohen is meant to be a conduit of honor to the Greatest King. By accepting the community’s highest prestige inside the four walls of the synagogue or the lecture halls of the yeshiva, while ignoring the call to prepare the physical infrastructure for the King’s palace, we have accidentally created a closed loop of human vanity. The community honors the priest, the priest enjoys the prestige, and the Creator of the Universe is left waiting outside.
How much longer can we maintain this performance? How many more Jerusalem Days can we celebrate with flags and songs while politely ignoring the truth that our “temporary” break from building the Sanctuary has outlasted multiple modern generations?
It is time for a conversation that moves past the cozy routines of Shabbat morning. We need our Kohanim and Levites to look at the honors they receive each week not as a comfortable birthright to be enjoyed, but as a staggering, urgent responsibility. The community honors you because we desperately want you to be who you were chosen to be. We don’t need you to just be elite corporate executives, nor do we need you to just be brilliant academics or seasonal hobbyists chasing an emotional high. We need you to be the humble, barefoot, permanently dedicated servants of the Almighty.
The keys to the courtyard have been lying on the table for fifty-nine years. The King is waiting. His children are waiting outside the Soreg, longing for the gates to open. It is time for our Kohanim to step away from the diamond wheels and the theoretical texts, roll up their sleeves, take off their shoes, train their sons for a lifetime of daily service, and finally answer the ancient call.