It all started with a step off the curb.

In May, I visited Madison for my son Elan's college graduation from the University of Wisconsin. It was the day before the Sunday event, Shabbat, and I found myself on a side street of the state's capital. Thinking about the great blessing I was about to experience, (some would say "miracle," since he was graduating in four years) I wondered if I should be in shul.

That's when I began to hear chanting.

Hundreds of placard carrying protestors were marching down State Street, Madison's main drag. I had seen the demonstrators repeatedly several weeks before. Thousands had been protesting both Governor Scott Walker's anti-labor policies, and the state legislature's votes to take away collective bargaining rights from most of the state's civil service workers.

But I watched all that comfortably from the cooled out vantage point of TV.

This was live.

I looked into the faces of the people who were marching by. Showing lots of glasses and wrinkles, many looked to be in their 50's and 60's. They were the kind of faces you might see working at the library, or at your child's school.

Loving those faces, I stepped off the curb and started marching. Little did I know that I was going to shul.

Immediately, I was tangled up in blue and red: hundreds of red "Stand With Wisconsin," placards picturing a big blue clenched "solidarity" fist. We marched about three blocks to the capitol steps, dispersed, and watched as other contingents of firemen and union workers arrived for the rally.

While a band played, I walked up the first flight of steps to the capitol. Soon, a man came to the podium and gave an introduction that sent me a charge of serendipity, "Today Rabbi Dena Feingold will give the invocation," he said.

Unabashedly, the spiritual leader at Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wisconsin greeted the crowd with "Shabbat Shalom."

I quickly glanced into the faces around me. I saw nothing but acceptance. A couple of people even said, "Shabbat shalom" back.

Then Rabbi Feingold did what any good rabbi will do when presented with an audience (estimated at 7-10,000) --she gave a sermon.

Earlier, on the Rabbis for Human Rights web site, she had asked, "What does the state budget or collective bargaining have to do with matters of faith and soul? How can ancient sacred texts speak to something that is going on in Madison, WI today?"

The crowd was about to find out.

The weekly Torah portion was Behar (Leviticus 25:1-26:2). It's the portion that describes the concept of the yovel, the jubilee year: a year of liberty or release for land and people, a kind of "economic correction," according to Feingold, that comes every fifty years.

Quoting from "scripture" and asking for a "fair solution to the economic challenges that face our state," Rabbi Feingold repeated the portion's famous verse that is also found on the Liberty Bell, "You shall proclaim liberty (or release) throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof."

Since the jubilee year is to be announced with the sound of the shofar, what happened next made perfect sense.

Raising a shofar to her lips, Rabbi Feingold blew one long freedom tekiah to the crowd.

What the crowd heard was pure relevance; an ancient call to justice made new.

Seemingly called by the blast, Elan, the soon-to-be college graduate, who had "enrolled" in several of the spring's demonstrations, was there too.

Without cap, gown, or pomp, but with a bit of Jewish circumstance, graduation had come a day early.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association.