Supremely Protected

And another light has recently shone forth, this time not from laboratories but from the highest courts in the land, lifting the spirits of frum Jews throughout America. Two legal rulings — first by the United States Supreme Court and a month later, by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the New York region’s top federal court — resoundingly affirmed the rights of Americans of faith to practice their religions free of severe, ostensibly health-related restrictions targeting them, even amid the pandemic.

The import of the sea-change inherent in these decisions was not lost on the legal world. “When the history of this era of the Supreme Court is written, we may look back at [this] ruling as the fountainhead of a massive shift in how a majority of the Court approaches religious liberty… It really is a huge deal,” said Professor Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading constitutional law scholar, when word of the Supreme Court ruling broke shortly before midnight on November 25. And in the short time since the ruling, it has already served as the basis for a half-dozen court decisions advancing religious freedom in California, Colorado, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio.

The Supreme Court and Second Circuit decisions were the happy endpoint of a saga that had had its beginnings many weeks earlier, on Hoshana Rabbah. This last day of Succos is a special time, replete with special mitzvos — hoshanos, the final taking of the arba minim, and a last chance to make a leisheiv b’succah — and always, with a hint of anticipatory excitement in the air for the approaching high festivities to cap zeman simchaseinu.

But like so many things that were different in this Year of the Plague, that expectant enthusiasm was gone, replaced by a very heavy sense of foreboding for what the last days of Yom Tov and the weeks beyond would look like. Just three days earlier, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo had issued a far-reaching, unprecedented executive order (EO) by which, with one stroke of the pen, he threw the state’s frum Jews into grave doubt about whether Shemini Atzeres and Simchas Torah could be celebrated with any semblance of normalcy.