Earlier this week, I found myself walking through a space not yet complete, and yet already filled with presence. In the historic Presidio in San Francisco, overlooking the quiet vastness of the bay, a new institution is taking shape: the Courage Museum (A project of Futures Without Violence). It is still being built, still finding its physical form, and yet its spirit is already unmistakably alive.
This is not a museum in the traditional sense. It is envisioned as a kind of laboratory for human transformation, a space that asks not only what has happened, but what might yet be possible. Its founders, including Esta Soler of Futures Without Violence, (and a member of URJ Congregation Emanuel in San Francisco) speak of it as an effort to spark a movement of young changemakers, to turn courage into action before violence ever takes root.
I was there with a group of rabbis as part of my Reform Rabbis’ conference (CCAR). We were invited not simply to observe, but to learn, be inspired, and to bear witness: to stories of gun violence, sexual violence, racial hatred, harm inflicted in the very places meant to be safest. Stories of antisemitism, isolation, pain carried quietly and for far too long. It could have been overwhelming, except that the telling itself was suffused with something else, something that felt like insistence: that these stories matter, that they must be heard, and that listening itself can begin to shift the world.
I was mesmerized.
We were joined by a panel of four Jewish teens from a local Hebrew Day School. They spoke about courage, about what it means to inherit a broken world and still believe in the possibility of repair. They were articulate in a way that felt almost startling, not because of rehearsal and practice, but because of clarity. They did not speak in abstractions. They spoke about responsibility. About empathy. About the quiet, difficult work of really hearing another person’s story. They spoke their truths.
As I listened, I found myself wondering whether courage, in their generation, may look different than it has in our own. Perhaps it is less about certainty, more about openness. Less about having the answers, more about the willingness to stay present to questions that do not resolve easily. There was something in their voices that suggested not naiveté, but a kind of moral imagination, a capacity to envision a world not yet built and to begin, even now, to work toward a future bright with the promise of hope.
Then, as if on cue, we turn this week to the opening word of the book of Leviticus: Vayikra, “And God called.”
“וַיִּקְרָא אֶל־מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר ה’ אֵלָיו מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לֵאמֹר׃”
“And God called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…” (Leviticus 1:1).
The Torah does not begin this book with action, but with a call. A reaching outward. A voice that invites response.
In our tradition, holiness is not something distant or abstract. It is something we create through attention, through relationship, through the ways we choose to show up in the world. To be called is not only to hear, but to answer. To be called is to recognize that the work of bringing sanctity into the world is not reserved for another time or another generation. It is for each and every one of us, here and now.
Standing in that unfinished museum, listening to those young voices, I felt that call in a new way. Not as something grand or distant, but as something immediate and human. The call to listen more deeply. The call to cultivate empathy, cultivate courage. The call to take seriously the possibility that transformation begins not with systems alone, but with the courage to encounter one another, fully and honestly.
Holiness, then, may begin here. Not only in ritual, though it lives there as well, but in the spaces where we allow ourselves to be changed by what we hear. In the quiet, demanding work of seeing another person’s humanity and refusing to turn away.
There is so much work that remains. And none of it can be done alone.
As we gather this Shabbat, perhaps the question is not only whether we hear the call of Vayikra, but how we choose to answer it. What it might mean, in this moment, to become people who do not wait for a finished world, but instead step, with courage, with empathy, and with open hearts and minds, into the work of building it together.
Shabbat Shalom!