Wendell Berry, who died this past week, wrote: “A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. . . in lore and story and song.”

It’s all we’ve got and it’s a lot worth keeping.

My book, about memory, plays with the idea that it’s easy to miss something, to leave it unattended to. In a world that rushes headlong into haphazard decisions, this month of Elul reminds us that we should wake up.

In the combined Torah portions Nitzvaim-Vayelech, we read “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but with those who stand here with us today before God and with those who are not yet here today.” (Deuteronomy 29:13-14).

The Midrash Tanchuma explains: This refers to the souls who will be created in the future.

At the end of the Torah, coming soon, Moses exhorts the people: “Ask your ancestor(s), t(he)y will tell you. Your elders will lay it out for you.” (Deuteronomy 32:7).

These verses teach what all wisdom traditions know, namely, that being human is somehow tied up with past and future, and that this business of transmitting meaning is of the essence. Like a keepsake, we are given a gift from our great grandparents. It’s a legacy for the generations yet to come. It’s precious.

With that in mind, I listened intently to an interview with an elder from the Mekusukey Band of the Oklahoma Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, in which he discussed the tribe’s opposition to data centers. It’s a commitment to a permanent moratorium that reflects his own people’s adamant feelings about A.I., but there is a broader political coalition that stands against it too.

What’s the it? As the Reverend Chebon Kernell sees it, billionaire executives of corporations will fly in to entice his people. He knows that some will be taken in. However, instead of opportunistic proposals, he speaks in terms of “cosmologies” that are time-honored, and he sounds like the prophet Isaiah, when he reflects about money. The tech execs will want to cut deals with nondisclosure agreements that tie his people’s hands. There’s no telling how they’ll exploit the land and use the water rights, and they’ll elude the regulation regimes of state and municipal jurisdictions. There will be lots of financial benefits right now, and there will be promises made about employment and revenue. On one hand, what is happening with the Seminole Nation is no different from what happens elsewhere, when people with a lot of money induce others who may be vulnerable to sign an agreement. It’s goes on everyday in all corners of America. It’s nothing new.

But he understands the politics of extraction beyond the profanation of natural resources. He speaks of technocratic rhetoric that undermines “an indigenous pedagogy, an indigenous foundation of existence.”

His priority is about a more profound level of sustainability. “I do not want to be left behind in practicing a way of life that’s been here longer than this country,” he says. “I don’t want to be left behind in terms of speaking our languages. I don’t want to be left behind in the values that teach us how to interact with our children, how to interact with our elders.”

There’s the pedagogical focus. How do we learn what we need to learn? he asks. How do we learn to think? What is it that we need to know?

While A.I. can certainly help medical researchers discover the etiology of diseases, and it can open a pathway to their treatment and cures, it has alarmed the computer scientists themselves who work on large learning models. Systems programmed for specific goals have leapt beyond their intended purposes, and they hack into previously secure information banks. That their “learning” takes on a life of its own is in the news.

But what unsettles historians of science and ethicists alike is the ways in which A.I. jeopardizes imaginative thinking and hijacks critical discourse. The powerful writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, describes a medieval return to “faith” (it’s really a perversion of faith) that’s entered the public sphere. That we should be trusting the Silicon Valley technocrats with deep pockets to tell us we no longer need to understand how the world works is troubling. There’s the mystification of the machine. It will spill out the answers for us, better get on board with the algorithm. O’Gieblyn calls it an “enchanted determinism” much like the Calvinistic faith she once ran away from and the absence of freedom of choice.

Remember: U’vacharta b’chayim. . . “You shall CHOOSE life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), our tradition teaches us.

And Chris Anderson back in 2008, in an article in Wired, couched this development in terms of “the end of theory”, “theory” representing scientific inquiry and the notion that human beings can think for themselves and enter into constructive conversations. We should be able to offer a hypothesis about a problem and then go about seeing if it actually bears out - or if it’s, in fact, an unsound idea, a plan that has no legs. It’s the foundation of all constructive discourse since the Enlightenment.

Anyone of us should be worried about a technological system that’s opaque in the hands of the 1% who now control Congress, who cause the media conglomerates to yield, and that choke off the nation’s research institutes and campuses. Little wonder the humanities suffer in our higher educational institutions. As Jill Lepore points out in her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, that in 2023, if the country’s data centers “were a state”, their amount of power consumption would rank fourth to Texas, Florida and California.

But it’s what A.I. does to our politics that hurts the country. She writes: “Liberal democratic states make citizens; the Artificial State makes trolls.” Our infatuation with “prediction” began long ago with numbers and big data, but it seizes us when our devices tell us what to say and think and shout out loud.

Like many other scholars, Lepore is grim about the chances for averting this dystopian moment. On the other hand, she concludes that we can join hands to say No. We can insist on guardrails, write laws that restrict the uses of A.I., or shut it down completely, as the New York City Department of Education announced today for its elementary schools and middle schools.

The alternatives threaten democracy. As O’Gieblyn observes, closed machine learning systems tend to “recapitulate the trends that we [already] see in the justice system. . . absorbed by the algorithms”. They build upon biased information about how the law does or does not evolve or its effect on decisions about race and gender, Or, for that matter, they can mispronounce words in indigenous languages, or shatter syntax and sacred ideas. As she explains, with regard to “deep learning”, no one can parse how the black box learns what it learns.

In fact, in every corner of the country there’s not only profound resentment, but a well of fear and grief about what A.I. says about humanity. Coupled with the degradation of the earth and water, we intuit something fraudulent. As Jill Lepore writes, “Escaping the Artificial State requires imagining a different future. That can still happen. It also requires knowledge of the past.”

Ask the ancestors, we’re advised. We are called upon to make wise choices, to think, so that future generations can live with hope and joy.

[Shout out to Steve A. Johnson for the image of the mechanical brain.]

Now, for the bad news, it keeps coming, no end to it. Everything lines up.

Oregon’s congressional leaders take a stand against the US sending military aid to Israel and don’t oppose wording in a bill that calls Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. There’s a rise in antisemitic incidents and the presence of antisemitic rhetoric in public places. The next generation signals its alienation from the Jewish state, and ever more Jewish young people themselves challenge what was once uncontestable: that devotion to Israel was a marker of Jewish identity.

And what happens to kids who go off to a Jewish summer camp? If they attend one that curates deep cultural roots, what can they expect when they return home? Their parents fret about telling their children the truth: that the safety and joy they experienced in July and August hardly mirror tensions at home.

We’re scared. What’s more, what has changed for us in America would have previously been unimaginable and is certainly undeserved.

It’s a linear portrayal of what has transpired. Within the pages of a new online lifestyle magazine with offices in Oregon and Arizona, a rabbinic colleague lays out the disaster in these terms. The magazine purports to represent Jewish people as “heterogeneous”, so says its meta description. But a line is definite, has a point of origin and imputes causality, and the plaintive piece drives home the nature of the pariah state. The abandonment of allegiance, the imperilment of both the people who live over there and the broader family that lives here, throws Abraham and Sarah’s inheritance in the air. Am Yisrael is in flux.

The rabbi continues: Ironically, the summer camp, the locus of experiential education, has become the quintessential gauge of our isolation. It’s within this nightmarish pedagogical scenario that everything comes home to roost.

So let’s ask, what is it we tell our kids? What’s their Jewish identity about? If we can no longer stand together around the blue-and-white flag when there’s dew on the grass in the morning, or tell the story of how we arose from the ashes in the last century, what’s left of us? What if the ashes now symbolize something else, something shameful?

Although I too worry about antisemitism, and I join with efforts to call it out, I do not draw the same straight line that my colleague draws. The story for me moves in circles. In fact, I realize that the barbarian attacks by Hamas on October 7th were preceded by years of humiliation that led some of us to predict that the tinder box would ignite and explode. Beginning in the 1970’s, I befriended Palestinian families in which their own young people were routinely taken away in the middle of the night, held in dark sites, kept without charges for months and years. Later on, I witnessed firsthand the eighteen year old Israeli soldiers who smoked their cigarettes, chatted with friends on cellphones, and nonchalantly stood by, while people’s lives were toyed with at checkpoints.

No, October 7th, however crude and unforgivable, did not justify the subsequent mass murder. If you prefer, don’t call it genocide. Give it another name. However, when 70,000 people are annihilated, the soul of our people comes away scarred.

I’m suspicious of linear thinking. For me, it’s cycles of despair and recrimination - the penchant for endless violence. Extremists on both sides, Islamists and messianic settler-thugs reign. Antisemites have a heyday, they deface synagogues and private property. They harass and, in some cases, commit murder. That’s because prejudices and biases never go away, they persist on a low burn, and given the opportunity, the flames catch the world on fire.

But what’s missing in the linear analysis is any connection between the absence of moral and strategic leadership in Israel with the world’s rejection. What’s in short supply is courage from our mainstream Jewish organizations that go along with plans for more annihilation. It’s cheshbon nefesh (spiritual stocktaking) that’s called for, that we all need to be doing, as we approach the Days of Awe.

And I’ll say a word or two about summer camp. . . As a fifteen year old, I learned from powerful mentors back in the 1960’s that the Elul countdown begins sometime in July and August. The clock ticks with anticipation and anxiety. I was enchanted by the rhythm of the soul, marinating in joy and human possibility in the woods of New Hampshire. I had experienced nothing like it, it still brings tears to my eyes, as I write these words. Even though I was an American adolescent who prioritized the basketball court, I didn’t let on that I was paying attention to the morning minyan. I met Orthodox observers who wouldn’t flip a light switch on Shabbat and could chant gorgeously from the Torah. And I encountered young Israelis, some of whom had fought in the Six Days War - they told their fresh tale of woe and heroism. A few became life-long friends. One teacher taught me my first well-conceived survey of Jewish history. We spoke Hebrew.

The pedagogy sprung from a pristinely imagined Jewish environment. In fact, the friendships I forged there bespoke a metamorphosis in the way I came to understand myself and others. An adolescent needs more than self-affirming alliances, but it’s most often a fact that popularity equals currency. What we should all begin to learn about at a young age has more to do with honesty and humility - the kind that’s absent in a world that’s narcissistic and traffics in blame. At this Jewish summer camp, I learned about ethics without taking a course in it.

When I came home after the camp season had ended, just like everyone else, I wanted more of it. The Shabbat atmosphere infused parts of myself that, as a teenager, I had done my best to hide deep inside. The world had shifted on its axis, and, as a part of that shift, the connection with Israel then was seamless. Although it had taken root within my idealistic family, I had begun now to embody it in friendships. I had met others who either grew up there, or who would move there (at this point) nearly sixty years ago. The wish to know the land, to be a part of the agrarian cycle of time, the candor and austerity of the kibbutz, all played a part, but the adolescent wish to individuate, while carving out a different, more harmonious life was paramount.

Therein is an intimation of what’s been diluted or lost altogether. There’s no longer a straight line, maybe there never was one. The ruptures in the conversation about who we as Jews think we are and how we engage the world impact our feelings of safety. So do a weaponized state, a perennial war, and the resentment it breeds leaves us vulnerable. No straight lines, only circles.

How our Jewish kids navigate this volatile world is no small matter, considering that they grapple with mendacity and violence on social media. The world is a smaller place, and one way or the other they’ll be thrust into the maelstrom. It’s also an ugly fact that they’ll need to reject (or accept, God forbid) bastardized exemplars of Jewish observance, because that’s what’s become of the people who seek to expand Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands on the basis of the Bible.

I should know. A few of the people I met at that summer camp years ago became right wing terrorists. I chafed when I realized that one of them blew the legs off of the mayor of Nablus a few decades ago. Another couple seethes with resentment (at me too) because they were forced to abandon a kibbutz in Gaza during Ariel Sharon’s days. I have cousins who are founders of the settlement Susiya in the South Hebron Hills, where members of that community are plunderers of Palestinian villages and murderers of their inhabitants.

By no means, does this sampling of personalities represent my only past or present Israeli friends, but it’s also true that across the society, and with only marginal exceptions at this point, my long-time acquaintances never speak of the Palestinians. For them, they simply don’t exist - or they should go away.

So, yes, there’s a pedagogical challenge for the parents of kids coming home. As the Torah begins this week, V’haya Ekev tish’m’un, “When you heed the judgments, the particulars of the Torah. . . “ (It’s the beginning of a conditional clause.) There’s an argument between the likes of Rashi on one side - and ibn Ezra and Nachmanides, on the other, about that term Ekev for which the portion is named. It comes from the Hebrew root that means “heel”. Think Ya’akov (Jacob), who grabbed his brother at birth by the back of his foot. Same root.

Rashi takes the term to mean that only as a result of paying attention to the tiny, often neglected aspects of the Torah will God take care of us. (He derives his interpretation from their too often being trampled - under one’s heel or diminished in importance). This focus is what will keep up our end of the bargain with God.

However, ibn Ezra and Nachmanides say that Ekev refers to the treasure that exists beyond the narrow lines of allegiance. Keep your eyes on the prize, the Olam Ha-ba, the world that exists beyond the linear frame, they seem to be saying. It comes “on the heels” of what’s in front of us, but it means there’s a bigger picture we shouldn’t lose sight of. The binaries can’t do it justice. These commentators seem to be indicating that we might do well to listen to more expansive elements of the music, beyond the treble clef and the bass clef of “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestinian”.

To say that the world hates us, or to imply that we need to keep our kids in a bubble misses the real Torah. We should be teaching them about seeking peace and embodying social change. Let them take the energy of Shabbat out into the world during the week - so that they can perform the harder mitzvot that require good listening habits.

To this day, a number of those friends I met in the woods of New Hampshire still inspire me to make my life meaningful and holy. They taught me lessons about honesty.

May our children’s peace come on the heels of the work we all do to make things better in the world right now.

Trump turns green like his reflecting pool. What’s left when things go wrong? He can cover up, but then again, the tarp over the facade at the Kennedy Center brings even more attention. The lies about his capitulation to Iran won’t dissuade us from the truth. As Robert Malley and Stephen Wertheim (New York Times, June 23rd) have laid it out, not only are his war hawks disappointed, but his America Firsters are left speechless by a president who has flat-out blundered in the Middle East.

You’d think his real estate buddies would know an unpredictable environment, they’d exercise a bit more prudence. (Didn’t they know the Strait of Hormuz was not a prime seaside investment?)

Now he’s screaming. He badly wants to limit the damage Democrats will do in the midterms and insists that Congress hitch his plan to limit voter registrations and mail-in ballots to legislation to build more housing that only yesterday garnered bipartisan support.

His rhetorical incontinence is, at best, the least of the problem. Far worse, he has obliterated American credibility, which has always depended on the illusion of power. His narcissism is backfiring.

That being said, the justices he has installed on the Supreme Court are continuing to do long-lasting damage. Today’s ruling on Roundup, which American citizens have long known causes cancer, should give relief to Bayer, who bought it from Monsanto only a few years ago. Thousands of lawsuits are at stake.

Add to that a blatantly discriminatory and callous green light given to the administration to torpedo Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, a horrible bit of news. The conservative majority disagrees that there was any racial animus regarding Trump’s excoriations about the human beings seeking refuge here. However, as Elena Kagan, who seldom shouts her dissents, writes: “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

What’s floating to the surface, like the blue polyurethane floor coating in the president’s reflecting pool is the truth about our political situation. We’ve been fooling ourselves for too long about American history. It’s entangled in bribery and profiteering schemes, and the benefits bestowed upon the people who are privileged. They reach a high perch in government and can decide that some of us belong and others do not. Those left out are deemed expendable and “unequal”.

This week we read one of the greatest stories in TaNaCH, about the sorcerer Balaam. He too ascends a hilltop and looks over the landscape. He consorts with people in power. Down below the Israelites are camped out, and at this stage of history on their way to a safer ground. Like our president, Balaam would love to cast a spell and have them all go away. He’s the ultimate mercenary huckster. Alas, there’s something ominous about what he sees, perhaps a reflection of his craft and its limits: “Lo, there is no augury in Jacob, no magic within Israel,” he says. (Numbers 23:23)

The rabbis said: Whoever practices this kind of magic, will end up with it being practiced upon him. (Talmud Yerushalmi Shabbat 6:9)

It’s a lesson some of us learn, as we celebrate the 250th year of our nation. It has to do with how we overwrite the stories of real people. It’s a plain text that gets read - a “gemara” with questions and answers and still more questions. It’s a rebuke to those who would gild the glass and smooth over the rough edges. The truth floats above the water and in our national archives. It’s in the beautiful rainbow of faces, some jubilant and others anguished, that make our society what it is and what it hopes to become someday in the future. No magic will change that.

Shavuot, this week, is a take-it-or-leave-it holiday. Even though it’s one of the big three pilgrimage festivals (along with Pesach and Sukkot), many American Jews have for years decided it was time to go to the beach. For children, it meant the end of the school year. Even as far back as the early 1960’s, there were few who came to the synagogue. In this sense, it’s a time for deep reflection or for deflection. We go elsewhere.

In Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister in charge of national security, has dispersed another flotilla, tied up its members, lowered them to the floor, taunted them. Their humiliating treatment for the world to see firsthand is our disgrace. Even in the face of Netanyahu’s rare rebuke that it does not accord with “Israeli values”, we can be asking ourselves if we’re ready to get the Torah. Or, alternatively, on Shavuot, it’s left to the imagination.

Shavuot is z’man matan torateynu, for sure, “the time for giving the Torah”. But getting Torah is an entirely different matter. God may give it, but to what extent do we absorb its lessons?

And, by the way, what does the Israeli prime minister mean by Israeli values? What gives them purchase? Are they sustaining ones - or are they ephemeral?

It’s also the season for incriminations. Nicholas Kristof, a valiant chronicler of human rights abuses all around the world, has come down squarely against a broad pattern of Israeli assaults on Palestinians, vile corroborated reports of sexual violence. The allegations are being fought about in liberal and conservative presses, skewered by defenders of the Jewish state. There are, as usual, rabbis who advocate for Israel no matter what, and there are rabbis who care that the safety and humanity of victims take priority, though in most cases, they too love Israel. Some have had it with Israel.

Full disclosure: I belong in the middle group, and I was assailed by another who deflected my criticism of Israel away from what Kristof had to say. There’s a Torah of loving the stranger in your midst, recognizing that she may carry a heavy burden on the same road you travel, and there’s a code of conduct that insists that your side of the story is the correct one and must always be told.

But the argument about whether or not the media are fair when it comes to Israel is a red herring. The focus on what Israel supporters call hasbara, which means “explaining” (as in messaging), but what others think of as propaganda, is a fraught issue. It’s one for those who keep the ledgers of reporting, the umpires, the scorekeepers. It’s a cottage industry. And, for those who toil at it, it’s an engine of deflection.

Getting Torah, on the other hand, means embracing what’s uncomfortable, even previously unimaginable, to find out more. It can mean learning new information or discovering what was there all along.

In this vein, Molly Crabapple has written a tome about an organization that was around for a long time, but pushed to the side. Its story was deflected. Her book is entitled Here Where We Live Is Our Country, about the history of the Bund. It’s an ambitious work that often reads like a movie - think Ben-Hur (that dates me) or Star Wars. That fact doesn’t make it superlative history writing. However, its focus not only on events, but on personalities, and drawing on memoirs written in Yiddish and long ignored archives, broadens today’s debates about the nation-state. Her work delves into early twentieth century political dilemmas in eastern European Jewish history in excruciating detail.

What did it mean for the denizens of shtetls to cast aside parochial allegiances, especially if they once centered the holiness of one’s home and community? What led them to put their faith in Marx’s scaffolding for a greater society? How did they grapple with bridging the gaps with ethnic groups that targeted them with hate and violence? What was their trust about, and did these political comrades perceive themselves as being on the verge of something new and immediate - or would it come about over many years?

The Bund’s work rested upon Doykayt - the Yiddish term for a political response that’s here and now - wherever Jews found themselves. Or, as the writer later attests, even within the “charnel house” where six million eventually went to their deaths and Stalin too did his level-best to destroy the Jewish thinkers, the poets and artists, who stuck until the end with his own suspect communist regime, they had staying power. Doykayt was and is to this day unrelentingly antifascist.

Reading Crabapple’s history of the Bund labor movement (and it was much more than that - schools, hospitals, summer camps) is emotionally harrowing, if not suffocating. She writes elegiacally about the indefatigable rank and file, who saw themselves in the vanguard, opposed to chauvinistic nationalisms, including their own brand. In Crabapple’s telling, the names of individuals who played a role are once again given life, and become exemplars for us right now - in an age of scorn and fragmentation. The Bundists made it their life’s work to make allies amongst the working classes. Despite the fluctuating and often volatile nationalist campaigns asserted by Russians and Poles and Lithuanians, these Jews portrayed themselves as belonging. Locals often undermined them and attacked them, but they insisted upon a class analysis that wouldn’t yield to divide-and-conquer.

From the very beginning, the Zionists were enemies too. Their platform for rescuing and reviving the Jewish people, a thoroughly European construct, in that it exploited every opportunity to build a nation in another place (we can debate the merits and the faults of this one place, in particular), was antithetical to staying put. From its inception, the Bundists also regarded Zionism as antagonistic to the majority-Arab population in what would become Israel.

A fundamental weakness of Crabapple’s account is her own transparently twenty–first century bias. She speaks of Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion in the same breath, they play the same game. Ben-Gurion has a “squeaky” voice. He might as well be summed up as short, high-waisted and having hair that bristles with excess static electricity. Even Borochov’s socialist Zionism comes in for her scorn, since it ignores local Palestinian workers. But her story painstakingly documents everything from the Bund’s early years through the Russian Revolution, the precarious First World War period, Hitler’s killing machine and the terrifying Warsaw Ghetto revolt. She follows key figures, as they organize and later take refuge and are sought by the authorities throughout Europe. When things get rough in Poland, they take up residence in Switzerland and Germany and they fight early on in Spain. They raise money and ship guns back to the east - from London and New York. But their brothers and sisters in arms remain there - amongst the early Mensheviks and even the Bolsheviks who will still have them. And they inhabit a Poland that is like water, as it vacillates with a variety of nationalisms and antisemitic venom right up until the end.

They go down resisting and organizing in the ghettos and in Stalin’s prisons - which comes to be the reason for the consensus retrospective Jewish analysis that we needed our own state. It’s also the flashpoint for arguments between people who have grown disaffected by Israeli arrogance like Crabapple, on the one hand, and today’s defenders of Israeli society’s intransigent response to Palestinian suffering. It’s as if, for them, Israel lives forever in an existential crisis and therefore treads the only moral path.

But if the State of Israel behaves no better (and at times worse - witness Ben Gvir and the hooligan settlers who rampage with impunity) than other nation-states, what’s laudable about a Jewish state? If its flattening of Gaza and the annihilation of 70,000 human beings who live there is the cost of Israel’s “security”, should we valorize its ongoing existential war?

I remember that an adored maternal first cousin, no longer living, sent a copy of a speech he delivered to my parents. He was a relatively liberal thinking Orthodox Jew who made a career in national Jewish communal organizations, and he reflected upon Israel in terms of the bracha ha-tov v’ha metiv. Literally, it means the One who is good and does good. It is pronounced whenever we feel how much there is to be thankful for, and can, in fact, lead us to take notice that there is good in the world after all. He was this kind of guy, eternally optimistic and caring, but I had a problem with the way he glossed over what had become of Israel - and this was already going back more than twenty years ago. It was the cause of some embarrassment for me that my father forwarded my unfortunately facetious response to the speech to him without actually reading carefully what I had said - and I never had the opportunity to let him know that I was sorry and loved him anyway.

But that episode is emblematic of the schism that now exists between those of us in the Jewish community who want to think critically about a nation-state that purports to represent a Jewish response to difficult political questions, and people in our midst who will remain unflaggingly loyal. Presumably, Molly Crabapple will be tarred as a killjoy and inaccurate scholar, as will Nick Kristoff be snubbed and faulted. Truthfully, I think it was a mistake for the historian to bundle everything that has happened in Israeli history as little more than a nationalist ploy against the Palestinians. It may align with her ideological preferences right now to do so, but an awful lot of people truly worked hard along the way (on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian) deliberating over the fault lines of a shared territorial future. And there were many poets and visionaries that are lost in her vacuum-sealed labor-infused account - both spiritual and political storytellers. The secular Yiddish poets who themselves adjoined the Bund’s efforts have a complex tale to tell along the way that is only obliquely mentioned.

If Shavuot means anything right now beyond blintzes and sour cream, it’s that we cannot rely upon the nation-state - free of a critical discourse - to unite Jews to one another. What unites us is our common spiritual heritage: a Torah of human kindness, evolving truthfulness and justice. Or, as the Hasidic master the Sfas Emes taught, the coming forth from Mitzrayim itself was only a beginning point. It would hardly have sufficed for us to turn ourselves into another Mitzrayim once we were free. It should have “clarified and elevated us to a more exquisite point of awareness”. (Sfas Emes, Vayikra, Pesach 21)

Which brings us to getting Torah. It’s a continual process of learning and unlearning, reflecting upon what each and everyone of us is made of. No nation-state can do that without its poets, its human rights workers, its dissidents, its artists. No minister of security or North American Federation president reliant upon philanthropists should proclaim what’s ultimately true.

What’s more, we should not hold up the lives that have been annihilated - in the gas chambers or in Gaza’s bombed-out buildings - as proof of humankind’s destitution and of our resolve to build a fortress. In Poland, Jewish lives counted, and we need to remember them and learn from the ones who were slaughtered - about their dreams and laughter and tears, even if it all came to an end. And in Palestine, the cries of refugees require that we respond with dignity and compassion. And that we refine the work over the next decades, now made harder than before, of building alliances and friendships.

Although Crabapple’s book about the Bund is a difficult read, it shines light on the story of people who worked valiantly on behalf of all who were at the lowest rung on the ladder - and it makes the point that this is Jewish work. We should not deflect the insight that we’re either in this together or everyone fails. Otherwise, it can be summed up to the failure of the Mitzrayim that still lurks within us. On Shavuot, we need to ask ourselves what it will take to ready ourselves for Torah. Giving’s easy, getting it is much harder.

It was hard making a Seder this year. There wasn’t the usual magic in the Haggada, which, after all, means storytelling. The story we tell ourselves didn’t work. In the words of the Hallel, just before we eat, God raises the poor from the dust and the needy from the refuse heap. Well, amidst the bombardment, we’re the ones who pile up the debris and shatter human lives. It’s Netanyahu’s Israelis who are flattening southern Lebanon - and unabatedly obliterating Gaza. They rampage on the West Bank and run roughshod through long-standing communities. Sure, there are bad people everywhere, but no one’s worse than we are right now.

As a congregational rabbi, I know plenty of people who angrily reported that the Pesach message left them cold. If God hardening Pharaoh’s heart was problematic before, this year it was more than they could take. We doomscroll at our peril, no one’s spared from the news. Horse and driver are hurled into the sea, now it’s Hormuz, and for every callous taunt from our president, another missile is fired, another drone buzzes overhead and explodes. He says he’s come out a winner, he doesn’t care, but it’s nauseating. And for all the fawning members of his party, and sadly, for all the Jewish abettors of this tawdry bungling administration - in commercial real estate, in private equities, tech moguls - what story about going free is there to tell? Is it about America First? Does it feature a Jesus-figure rising again? Will he don a clownish baseball hat?

We’re on the Pharaoh’s side, I hear repeatedly. Avadim Hayeenu (We were slaves) - are you kidding me? Ata b’nai chorin (Now we’re free) - to ransack and destroy?

When the Palestinian poet Tayseer Abu Odeh can write “Without a camera, I walk my murdered house, from ruined kitchen to buried chair. I walk from one carcass to another. Quiet, quiet, they wave their bleeding arms to me” - how dare we have our children jauntily search for the afikomen?

Let me offer, if not a counter-story, a different way of looking at the religious feast. When we moderns read the Haggada, it comes to us in glossy translation. It becomes a linear trajectory, with a beginning and an end. The contemporary variants insert an idea or a cause. We superimpose one liberation movement or another, channeling the labor movement, our favorite feminist warriors, saving the trees and migratory birds. Our redemptions are au courant. Orbán is gone, maybe this is why we crack open the door and sing Eliyahu Hanavee.

As I struggled to get ready for my own Seder, I gave a lot of thought to all those other ones over the years in inhospitable places. We have plenty of stories from the middle of the twentieth century, when Nazis imprisoned our family members in ghettos. What kind of Seders did they celebrate? And yet we know for a fact that whole families assembled around tables with matzah hard to come by and there was maror aplenty - they needed no reminder of how bitter their lives had become.

What story did they tell? What kind of faith in the future could they have? Would it proclaim a living God - or one that neglected them?

Nor should that tragic story be determinative, because there’s another version of Jewish experience. It precedes our romance with power and the nation-state. As the scholar of rabbinic literature David Kraemer observes in his book Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, Jews weren’t always fleeing demons and despots. As he discovers in the writings of Samuel Usque, a sixteenth century Portuguese Jewish refugee who resides in the Italian city Ferrara, there were many benefits to locating there, or in Salonika, or throughout the Ottoman Empire. Jews moved about in what amounted to a multicultural environment. The historian writes: “What is crucial to notice about this catalogue is that it is as much a recounting of Jewish flourishing in exile as it is an account of Jewish suffering.”

There’s a phrase in the Haggada that gets translated poorly. It says that when Jacob took his ragtag band of seventy or so members of the clan down into Egypt, it happened for a reason: he was anus al-pee ha-dibbur. It means something like “he was forced to go - by speech or command.” But it’s a phrase that doesn’t lend itself to simple explanation. . . and it’s an important one.

You see, we’ve become so used to explaining the Pesach story symbolically, that we have shifted from focusing on how we got into Egypt in the first place, to how we triumphed by way of getting out. But the hard truth is that humanity cycles in and out of this confusion that the Haggada calls Mitzrayim. Triumphalism, on the other hand, obscures the difficult questions - about poverty and greed and endless war. And it disparages the lessons we learn from strangers who live next door to us.

Getting back to the reason for Jacob’s going down into Egypt, the Hasidic master the Sfas Emes teaches that the enigmatic phrase indicates that it was divine speech itself that was in exile. The phenomenon of language, in all its poetic possibilities, is a key to the story, as does the capacity to craft what we say and how we say it require us to think first, to be intentional. It’s the sonority and cadence of how we represent ourselves that tie us to other living beings and it makes us better listeners. The sound of words vibrates and reminds us about the miracle of living this life earnestly. Conversely, it’s the breakdown of truthful and compassionate speech that limits our prospects for bridging gaps and peacemaking.

Why did Jacob go down into Egypt? He was a dreamer who adored his son Joseph, another dreamer, who imagined a larger canvas for humanity.

It’s true that a pharaoh comes onto the throne, it happens often in history, who doesn’t remember or absorb details, who prefers martial arts events to the theater and opera, who savages language. It’s our story that we tell to counteract these all-too-human tendencies, to revere the poets, to cherish the vulnerable, and attend to a larger beckoning drama. Each of us can awaken to it.

(This will be the last essay for a while. From time to time, I’ll write more. Having completed a full cycle of Torah readings since Donald Trump’s inauguration, more precisely, the week of February 2, 2025, I began with the portion B’shallach (Exodus 13:17- 17:16), and I am bringing us up to its predecessor Bo. That story culminates in Pharaoh’s last stand in the face of the plagues. Moses’ antagonist in the story is like our president, to whom the management scholar and psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries attributes “a narcissism [that] is malignant in the sense that it is organized around a profound inner emptiness.” This is where we leave off for the time being, just as our military forces have illegally invaded another sovereign state and run off with its leader, and we find ourselves, simultaneously, subjected to an invasion within our towns and cities. As our pharaoh plunges his country into mayhem, it brings to mind how the path towards a more inclusive democracy has always been like crossing a sea. Right now, the sea rages and we’re looking for a way out of Mitzrayim.

A complete cycle of Torah narratives does not resolve anything, but it’s my hope that it has provided a measure of comfort and some guidance. The shakla v’tarya, the back-and-forth conversation in the commentaries, lifts up sharp critical thinking about a range of issues that confront us. During this twelve-month period, we have, as Jews, not only been disturbed by the degradation of democracy here in the US, but we have also witnessed a terrifying rise of antisemitism in the face of the State of Israel’s churning reformulation of its Zionist ethics. A traumatic and barbaric attack on October 7th, 2023 opened the floodgates to a genocidal military campaign in Gaza that has yet to abate. Palestinian suffering has replaced what used to be a dream of a just Jewish society, meaning that all who lived there one day would live in peace. However aspirational (others might call it propagandistic) was the attempt to heal the wounds of exile, Israel, once a guiding light, has in a relatively short period lost its sheen. American Jews have grown despondent and are embarrassed by the venomous policies and rhetoric emanating from Israeli society, as well as attempts to sanitize it in our own Jewish mainstream institutions. We need the Torah, because it inspires profoundly pluralistic values and embraces the complexity of human life and the turbulence of global politics. Here we are. It’s my hope that we can see our way through the stormy weather ahead.)

*

In one of his celebrated ghost stories, entitled “The Way It Came”, Henry James wrote about two characters who were so likely to meet. They shared many of the same traits and aversions, even though they never managed to be in the same place or see one another. Another common circumstance linked them: At one or another time, each one of them claimed to see the ghost of a parent at the hour in which the parents died - she saw her father and he saw his mother - though they died at some distance from them. Each one of them, the man and the woman, happened to be superstitious to the point that neither one permitted a picture to be taken of themselves, as they went about their daily lives. Even when one finally agreed, the other declined. “She would live and die unphotographed. Now she was alone in that state: this was what she liked; it made her so much more original.” More on this later. . .

I spent the last two weeks in Argentina with my son, and in the last few days, we traveled to San Carlos de Bariloché, a Patagonian town. As we were sauntering down a main street in the heavily touristed center, I dodged several of the local teenagers who bantered with one another and held ice cream cones, and my attention was drawn to a rectangular steel marker at one edge of the sidewalk. I paused to read its inscription: Julio César Schwartz, 38 years old, detained and disappeared, El Bolsón, April 1 1978.

Here I was in Argentina, the site of the so-called Dirty War that went on from 1974 until 1983. It seemed ironic that everyone was frolicking on the street, smiling at me, readily giving me directions to a bakery or a restaurant, when I was all too aware of what my own government was doing domestically and abroad. If Kissinger had fifty years ago been one of the villains in support of the junta, here we are again, Americans, implicating ourselves in Venezuela and elsewhere. Who knows and understands the backstory that revisits these plagues on the world today?

The name Schwartz on the plaque alerted me that someone likely from an Ashkenazic Jewish family (there are many in Argentina) had been remembered, and it required me to do some research. It turns out that he was a communist organizer from Buenos Aires who left the city because his home was raided. He came to live in El Bolsón, about seventy-five miles south of Bariloché on the Chilean border, because of its legendary isolated beauty at the foot of the Andes. He’d be safe. The Mapuche indigenous people still inhabit the area, which lends it a “magical” reference point, especially in the minds of Argentinians who have European roots. At any rate, Julio Schwartz, his wife and two young children sought refuge there among an influx of hippies and nature lovers. He quickly became a local leader in establishing a nascent tourist industry and he managed a new small hotel. During the two years they lived there, the family restored a small dwelling on a hillside surrounded by fruit trees, and one day Julio’s vehicle was diverted by another car on a backroad. Pretending that their car was stuck, security police jumped out and abducted him. His wife soon found out that he was in a prison in Buenos Aires, but he was never heard from again.

A documentary film made by Gustavo Marangoni follows his wife and kids’ return thirty-one years later in 2009, but more importantly, it explores the silences that allow a society to go on living while covering up crimes the likes of which we are now experiencing here in Minneapolis, or in Portland, or all over the US. Every day, paramilitary forces don masks and cordon off a house or a big-box store or even a day care center. They stop drivers who look different. The agreements sealed between the White House and spineless political leaders, either for their own convenience or from fear - or for that matter, the quiescence of otherwise unbothered citizens - sustain a fiction. Life is like this, and the people who get hurt somehow deserve it, or maybe they should have known better. They’re lawbreakers after all.

In the documentary, Julio’s widow Ana, who sits alongside her grown adult children, has remained subdued, while her son does most of the talking. Finally, she struggles to speak: “When you have your whole life ahead of you, and they take him out of your sight, and he suddenly disappears, and you spend years and years thinking, first, When will he ever come back, Will they ever let him come back? What happened to him? What did they do to him? Because it’s torture to think, they don’t even give you the right to process a death. They don’t even tell you, ‘We killed him, he’s buried here’... You can rebuild your life, you can have a partner again, but that pain of that loved one who is no longer here, you don’t get over it.”

There are scenes in which a classroom is filled with children in El Bolsón who were there to learn from the survivors of the disappearances. There were others who lived in the town, interacted with Julio or knew him from his public service in the community and tried to explain why it was, during the 1980s or afterwards, that no one wrote about the miscarriage of justice that had taken place in their village. No one published a word about it in the newspaper and few spoke of it. Maybe it was because he was relatively new, even if he made friends easily. Maybe it was the guilt that foreclosed a coming to terms. For whatever reasons, in the three decades that had passed, the town’s citizens had sealed the discussion shut - in a way that is reminiscent of that part of our own American culture that justifies what Trump is doing.

There’s a kind of “magic” in making it all go away, or in crediting what Fox News has to say as true about the “criminals” being deported or about Renee Good, how she endangered the lives of federal officers. There’s the Möbius strip that Lydia Polgreen ingeniously described in a January 9th column of the New York Times - “a surface where the inside and outside have no meaningful distinction. . . how Trump is collapsing the crucial binaries of America’s Constitution — between law enforcement and military action, between executive and legislative power and, above all, between foreign and domestic.”

Moreover, there’s the Roberts Court’s shallow incantatory jurisprudence that will go down in history in the same way that the pharaoh’s sorcerers prevent people from recognizing one another’s rights, giving a green light to the violence, ignoring genuine suffering.

It’s worth commenting that while Pharaoh cultivates his bogus divine image, sows chaos, the God of the Torah eschews pictorial displays altogether. God only says he is what he is, nothing less and a great deal more. By way of metaphor, there’s the blaze of light, the very first thing created; but it’s a brightness that one cannot use for ulterior purposes or it will blind its user. In the case of Pharaoh, ever splenetic and garish, the rabbis say “a fool walks in darkness.” (Ecclesiastes 2:14) One day he builds pyramids or a ballroom, the next day he’s conquering the Arctic ice.

In the Torah portion Bo this week, the ninth plague is definitive: “And God said to Moses, ‘Hold out your arm to the sky so that there may be darkness upon the land of Mizrayim, v’yamesh choshech. . . darkness that they will feel.’” (Exodus 10:21)

According to the midrash, the darkness was thick and heavy. If someone was sitting down, they could not stand up, and vice versa. I imagine a kind of lethargy when a person awakens to a world that’s sullied, when you can’t get your muscles to move. The news is enervating. (Tanchuma Bo 3)

In an interesting gloss on the verse, the Ma’or Va-Shemesh, an eighteenth century mystical teacher, taught that on the first day of Creation, when God “divided” between light and darkness, it had little to do with the clock. We miss the point if we understand it as referring to separate times of day. Not at all, he says. Poetically, all that’s meant is that God delineated between light and dark, but that they still nevertheless coexist simultaneously.

So, for instance, our own pharaoh continues to believe that the election in 2020 was stolen from him, and he perceives the electorate as moronic enough to swallow the false narrative that only he can make America great by throwing the rest of the world overboard. On a delusional whim, he’ll race a nuclear warship to the Middle East to challenge Iran, or shoot tomahawk missiles at Nigeria. He’ll hold the doors open to white Christian supremacists to sign up with ICE. Domestic terrorists rampage in our cities, he tells us, so he’ll stop the insurrection. It’s glowy foundations and highlighters for his retinue, but for the rest of us it’s darkness, and he’ll count on people becoming even more confused.

I began this piece with the Henry James story about two people who are destined to meet, but who can’t seem to bring it off. Others take stock of the way they are both introspective, and are curious about the paranormal. The fact that they both refuse to be photographed is an uncanny coincidence, until one of them concedes to have it done. The snapshot breaks the spell that kept them apart, and, upon seeing his picture, she dies. But, thereupon, her ghost makes a visit - and he recognizes her by her description from others. A short time later, he too dies. It’s implied that an assignation awaits them both. . . elsewhere.

For James, there’s all too much inevitability in things not working out in this lifetime, but a removal to another time and place should improve our chances. It’s magical, even sublime, that love and destiny are so intertwined as to be other-worldly, but by suspending the work that might produce a world that can work, the author’s characters evade moral responsibility. A photographic replica in film that he had in mind requires light and exposure, but not so much that all goes stagnant and dark. It’s a record that hovers between what’s present. . . and what’s already gone.

To our detriment, the cold monstrous image of the pharaoh, rigid, implacable, is in the news repeatedly, to the point that it’s hard for us to move past it. Like an idol, it’s torpid and vacant. But we can only hope to coalesce the multifarious rays of light that in glimpses provide a more harmonious image of a world that brings people together. Until we articulate a shared vision, we’ll live close to the darkness, and good people will disappear.

The Ma’or VaShemesh says one thing more: it’s our choice to bring light right now. It’s our super power! We may feel overwhelmed, but we need to stay at it. It’s up to each one of us to separate it from the darkness that clings to us and keeps us apart from one another. We can make it happen.

The story about the horrible shooting at Brown University and the subsequent murder of a professor at M.I.T recently drew my attention. No doubt, this is partially due to the fact that it happened in my neighborhood, quite literally, since I grew up in Brookline near where this brilliant physicist lived.

But there was another aspect of the story that riveted me. Immediately, the Trump administration responded to the tragic events by pausing a diversity immigrant program through which 55,000 visas are issued on an annual basis. In quite the opposite fashion, only this past January, Joe Biden had bestowed upon the man who was shot in his home, who came to the US from Portugal, an Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nuno Loureiro was an “inspirational scientist”, according to one of his colleagues, working on “making the dream of clean, near limitless fusion power closer” to becoming a reality. America and the world lost this great mind, who experienced the exciting synergy of research opportunities afforded to him on an academic campus like no other in the world.

One of the young people killed at Brown, MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, a devout Muslim from Uzbekistan, hoped to become a doctor, and had arranged to meet with a neurosurgeon at NYU Langone, Dr. Jeffrey Wisoff, in the new year. That surgeon had performed a craniotomy on him when he was a little boy to treat a condition known as Chiari malformation, and it restored the normal flow of spinal fluid. As a young person, he was inspired by the care he received and, despite living on two far ends of the globe, they had stayed in touch. It’s a tragedy that his life is wiped out, no different than the murder of a sophomore named Ella Cook. She was a vice president of Brown’s Republican club, a devout Christian from Alabama. These deaths bring sadness and heartache in their wake.

The picture of what America could be, away from the vituperation and gun violence, still reverberates with hopefulness, but it can feel like we’re on thin ice. Shaken, one of Loureiro’s colleagues said that “there’s something fundamentally wrong” in this society. “It’s no longer an abstract thing for me.”

I was in Montreal last summer, and a cab driver from Romania whose father had been a dissident during the Ceaçescu regime shared his theory about the rage with me. He insisted that the current reactionary regime in America is a last-stab, stubborn retreat, but a political order based on human rights across the globe is inevitable. Two steps forward, one step back. . .

Maybe. I hope so, but like everyone else, I’m not sure. That one step backward has us tied in knots.

One of the critical moments in the biblical story of the exodus is the shift from Moses the novice to Moses the leader of a people. Seemingly out of nowhere, a timid, “tongue-tied” Moses gets his marching orders from God in this week’s Torah portion Vaera. He’s ordered to confront Pharaoh, but he replies that it’s impossible for him to have any effect on an authoritarian. Should he be admitted into the court, what words should he speak? Keep in mind that until this point, even his fellow Israelites have paid him no attention. He’ll only make things worse.

Nevertheless, “God spoke to Moses and Aaron in regard to the Israelites and Pharaoh the king of Mitzrayim, commanding them to deliver the Israelites from Mitzrayim.” (Exodus 6:13)

Yes, Aaron’s brought into the act, as Moses’ mouthpiece, but what can either of them say that makes a difference?

The foremost disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Maggid of Mezeritch, reads the term Vay’tzavem in this verse (from tzeevah and mitzvah, whose verb stem we are familiar with, meaning command) in an unconventional way. In Aramaic, it’s close to a term used in the Talmud and in the Kabbalah for “making a connection” - tzavta. (Maggid D’varav l’Yaakov)

“There’s a profound need in the world,” the Maggid says, “but there are barriers that get in our way.” The first is that we overcome the hesitation about reaching people, speaking in a political idiom that makes sense to them, or about matters they will respond to and thereby draw a connection to their own experience. Both Moses and Aaron are the day’s purists - and, as purists, it’s only natural that they’ll need to navigate the thrum of loudspeakers, the hollowness of slogans, the clichés. In being the humble and straightforward individuals they are, they can, with patience, draw others to them.

The second obstacle pertains to comprehensive change. In Vaera, it’s God showing Pharaoh that once there’s momentum, nothing can hold the Israelites back. It’s signs and wonders. In our case, it’s consequential political speech that changes minds. Think Abraham Lincoln, MLK and Mandela. Or, for that matter, look to poets like Sutzkever, Adrienne Rich or Anna Akhmatova. Or the storytellers - Baldwin, Morrison, the documentarian Michael Moore, the photographer Dorothea Lange. . . In each case, since the change doesn’t come overnight, we can sink into defeatism. In fact, powerful speech often generates an immediate reaction, a hardening of hearts, but it’s inevitable that people learn to see things differently.

I get asked the question repeatedly - what can we expect? Can things get better? And, implicitly, we wonder what impact we have?

Like Moses, each of us is told to bring ourselves forward and to connect, and maybe the connections grow. It’s hard for the reticent personality, so much so that in the narrative God has Aaron accompany him. We all need partners.

Social scientists Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta, in their book Changing Minds: Social Movements’ Cultural Impacts, are less concerned with the effects on the activists per se, than they are on long-lasting cultural changes. One of their most important takeaways has to do with what they call “resonance”.

“The movement messages that gain wide support. . . allow people to see things in a way that feels simultaneously right and new,” they observe.

It won’t suffice for city-dwellers to get on a bus and sit down at a lunch counter with ranchers. Our political rhetoric and our policy goals should lift up what is already important to people, and demonstrate how what it is they are passionate about to begin with can have more expansive applications.

It’s beginning to happen around us, and the connections people draw are undeniable. It’s the affordability issue writ large. It’s Trump’s vulgarity and culpability in the Epstein scheme that signifies a broader level of exploitation of women. When there’s a green light for extra-judicial killings in international waters or a bogus casus belli, people wake up, as they do when family members suffer from drug addiction, or they can’t get medical care. An imperialist attack, as it is being called across the world, certainly brings disfavor and repudiation. Drugs are as much our problem, as they are caused by outside actors.

Here in the US, people deserve access to vocational training, in an era increasingly governed by robotics and A.I. Let’s not forget that states understandably want to implement their own protections against unrestricted A.I. And yet it will take signs and wonders to convince the tech billionaires who revolt against a proposed tax on their assets in California that we insist on narrowing the wealth gap. Drawing connections means making concessions too, understanding how the immigration conundrum has hurt everyone, or looking squarely at how, although America’s public health response to the pandemic saved lives, it may have thrown us off our game.

Hindsight shows that political movements (in the streets, the media, in popular culture) can bring about the kinds of changes that no one would have predicted. One of the best examples in Polletta and Amenta’s book has to do with gay rights. In our house, we’re watching old episodes of Mad Men, and it’s shocking how one of the ad men in that show’s regular cast keeps his gender identity under wraps, how he’s on guard and lives in fear. In that odious hetero male executive work culture of the 1950’s and early 1960’s not so long ago, the hierarchy required that people obey unwritten rules or be ostracized. And yet, in a matter of a few decades, it’s almost unfathomable how much things changed and are still changing.

I want to be clear that I’m pointing this out not to declare victory for the queer community. More gains are critical. All I’m suggesting, in line with Polletta and Amenta, is that even reactionary Americans move on from faulty ideas.

As Michelle Goldberg pointed out in a December 20th article in the New York Times entitled “Candace Owens is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster”, conspiracy theorists will continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and even QAnon’s “energy seems to have dissipated.” It’s true that people will expend remarkable energy ducking from the truth, but learning something new that they already registered by way of a brother or sister or friend’s experience can move the dial.

Jews are no strangers to movements for social change, and we’ve experienced both the highs and the lows, as well as the painful and disorienting two steps forward, one step back. But we can’t remain aloof like Moses before he received a push from God to connect.

Ironically, the Maggid takes “tongue-tied”, literally “uncircumcised lips”, as a description for how we can feel when we sit quietly and can see things clearly. We notice hypocrisy and arrogance, and we become aware of how it affects us. His teaching implies that with this measure of self-awareness, we should make the effort to articulate ourselves in ways that resonate for others. . . and then enter the corridors of power.

Getting out of Mitzrayim is a process. There’s surprise involved, because whenever something looks new, we’re only then in a position to say that everyone knew it all along.

What babble is it that languages echo?

What echoes percolate there in its midst

Indistinctly, but nonetheless

through syntax -

                          in its seasoned reasoning. . .

(Peter Cole)

It’s time to begin looking around, uncoiling what’s tightly wound. Two things are striking in this hour. We’re weary from the ongoing extraordinary level of adversity in society. It hurts everyone, from the camp that produces it by the minute, to the rest of us who labor to catch our breath. And yet, in every corner of the political sphere, there are people who are discovering ways to resist. Whether they do it by demonstrating in the streets or outside ICE headquarters, or they write poetry or bring it forward in the lines of a play or a song, in letters to congressional representatives, or even stitching it into a quilt, there are signs of life.

In the Torah portion Shemot, Pharaoh shrewdly conceives of a plan, we’ll call it the Project 2025 of his day, to pull the rug out from under the Israelites who dwell in Mitzrayim:

Hava nit’chach’ma lo. Let’s outsmart him. (Exodus 1:10) Pharaoh refers to the Israelite inhabitants in his country in the third person singular in the way that authoritarians smear “the enemy”. The commentator Nachmanides explains that he couldn’t simply get the depravity done overnight. You can see from the Hebrew that it requires chachma, or intelligence. So Pharaoh, per the text, comes up with a step-by-step plan to tax the Israelites heavily, and then, when they become indebted, to burden them with work requirements and indentured service. Then there’s the strategy via population control to kill the male children that was thwarted by Shifra and Puah the midwives. Still it takes its toll. It’s a pathway into oppression. It’s demoralizing - bitter herbs on the palate.

Today, it’s the illegal invasion of a sovereign state, the imprisonment in CECOT of people who don’t deserve to be there, or the relocation of innocents to South Sudan or Bangladesh, where they know no one. It’s their detention in overcrowded warehouses, and, for that matter, it’s the removal of healthcare coverage from the poorest people in the country. It’s also the wholesale sabotage of scientific research at our universities, and the greed that prefers oil and gas (and now coal) over wind farms. The list goes on.

Hava nit’chach’ma lo. These words from the Torah portion Shemot establish Pharaoh’s plan. Get a leg up. Locate the Achilles heel in our social networks. It belies any noble intent behind the philosophical onslaught on democracy. It’s about exploiting the unitary executive theory to establish America as a highly meritocratic white Christian nation. Liberty equals capitalism on steroids. Get after it now, America first and last, and everyone else can take care of themselves, and/or go back to where they came from.

Hava nit’chach’ma lo. In so many ways, we were caught off guard, ill-prepared, our leaders mumbling or mute. Nachmanides intimates that this pharaoh needed a whole-of-government approach. He had to make it. . . palatable. It took Trump two terms.

I have friends who are historians and social scientists, and they can only guess what comes next. Everyone has a theory. They can bring insight to what has already occurred, and in many cases, they can analyze what makes the people on the inside tick - but they can’t look into a crystal ball any better than you or I can. That being said, what we do recognize, as another facet of what’s happening in the country, is people are saying “Enough.” They say it for lots of reasons, from being disgusted with the president’s grift and lying, to not being able to afford everyday items they need. It’s also apparent that, while many in the country consider the tide of immigration a troubling problem, people are increasingly appalled by ICE’s lawless methods.

When Trump puts his name on the Kennedy Center (and I only use this as one example of his egomania), he triggers disgust not only in the artists who refuse to perform there, but in a segment of the population that is belatedly awakening to a sociopath’s twisted need for attention.

The turning-point in Shemot, learned by every little child who has ever been told a Bible story, but seldom, I think, registered as a political metaphor, takes place in the third chapter of Exodus. It’s the story of the Burning Bush. Well, yes, there’s a bush on fire, and Moses turns to look at it. God through an angel gets through to him, and Moses is amazed that the people’s plight is a primary divine concern. What it comes down to is Moses discovering something for the first time. The bush on fire is not consumed, which reflects a source of energy that transcends the moment in time. Let’s say it opens a wider lens.

But that’s not all there is to it, at least in Jewish sources that scour the language for insights about where one gets inspiration in the face of tyranny. The lead-up to this first encounter with God relates to us. It’s spare in detail.

There’s an old tradition of reading a deeper meaning into the last stick of Exodus 3:1, “And Moses led the flock of sheep out to the desert, and he came to the mountain of God to Horeb.”

It’s simple enough: the event unfolds achar ha-midbar, literally “out to the desert”. But the word achar can mean “behind” or “in the background” - and the rabbis are moved to say that something percolates (to use the poet Cole’s term above) there in the desert that makes and unmakes us.

In the midrash on Song of Songs, (Song of Songs Rabba 3:6:1), they quote from the love poem between God and Israel: “Who is it going up from the desert?” In this text, the beloved is admired for her beautiful complexion and the perfumery she uses to arouse her lover. As is customary in rabbinic literature, a commentator isolates a phrase to make a point: Yes, she goes up from the desert, the site of enchantments, but the place also possesses a life-and-death charge. In particular, the rabbis draw attention to the Aramaic version (it was the language everyone used in the first couple of centuries, like we use English). In that language, the verb stem s-l-k, for going up, carries an additional meaning: it’s also the word for taking one’s leave. L’salek min-ha-olam, for instance, means to leave the world in the Hebrew-Aramaic amalgam of the Talmud.

They think of it as not just the place from whence the Israelites went up from Mitzrayim to the land promised to them. They are reminded of another passage: “It’s in this place [where the rebellious generation that built a golden calf] would go to die.” (Numbers 14:35)

It’s a liminal place of emptying out and replenishing.

In our own contemporary context, there’s an out to the desert operating behind the scenes too.

Trump’s approval ratings are very low, and his behavior seems to be increasingly erratic. Some warn, understandably, that the problem is larger than him personally, and that the MAGA ideological goals have more sustaining power. Clearly, the damage done to our system will neither be remediated quickly, nor will the system of broader governmental checks and balances likely revert to its former self. It’s a continuing grievous problem that the Supreme Court undermines so many of the reasonable rulings of lower courts. But it seems that if Democratic Party leaders can drive a vision that speaks to what most people want and deserve - by way of closing the wealth gap and compelling the billionaire class to do its part for society - we can breathe new life into America.

Pharaoh’s shrewd and he’s a master of misdirection. He enjoys his gold, speaks in superlatives. Give him a microphone and he’ll veer off course, but we’re not confused. He and his class outsmarted us earlier. However, as one generation fades away together with its vainglorious platitudes, another political class will arise in a heartbeat.

The Ba’al Shem Tov taught that the primary reason we became entangled in Mitzrayim is that we didn’t recognize what it was that we were missing. (Toldot Ya’akov Yosef, Pekudei)

Like Moses, look around in surprise and sense the warmth in people who want to work together. Crane your neck and see the flame surging even in the darkest hours of the year. As the former slave Phillis Wheatley wrote so eloquently, “In every human Beast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance”. The angel speaks to us from the thicket.

There’s no time like now. Neither is there use for accurate history, nor for thinking about tomorrow.

It’s the least mentioned blow to humanity. The president zigzags, he chops syntax like a cabbage, contradicts himself mid-sentence. And it doesn’t matter, because the press reports it as if it’s honest rhetoric, which it isn’t. Gibberish doesn’t wear a watch.

What’s Trump’s legacy? Or yours or mine? Invest in cryptocurrency, because it will be too late very soon. Or, like Silicon Valley, the techno-libertarians, decry bureaucratic waste, let the Europeans pay for their security. Jobless people are expendable, it’s their fault. Like Ray Kurzweil told us twenty years ago, there will come a time when we become the machines, computing is us. The singularity - we’re here. Let’s celebrate.

When Jacob gathers his children to his deathbed at the end of Genesis, in this week’s Torah portion Vayechee, he’s got plenty to say. It’s a scene from the movies, a patriarch, supine, his head propped up on a pillow. He’s lived a colorful life, he has an audience. But, like the president, he’s incoherent:

“And Jacob called his sons and said, ‘Come together, so I can tell you what is to happen for you in the days to come.’” (Genesis 49:1)

That’s it. The biblical text breaks up. Nothing follows.

First, a bit of translation: “the days to come”. . . B’acharit ha-yamim. It can mean the future (like next year), or it can mean the end of days, or it can mean what’s behind time. The ancients didn’t calculate time like the Swiss.

Jacob prefers the long view, but no one else is interested.

The rabbis explain it: Ba l’galot lahem et ha-keytz v’nit’kasah mey-hem. Just as he was about to reveal to them what happens in the end, it’s blocked. (Genesis Rabba 98:2)

Maybe it’s something to do with Jacob that causes the obstruction, or maybe it’s the adult children? Their brains can’t focus, they can’t hear his message. No time, lack of concentration. In fact, this is another way of describing Mitzrayim: shortness of breath.

In Vincenzo Latronico’s Italian novel Perfection, which takes place in the 1990s, two thirtyish ex-pats, livin’ the life, spend a few years in Berlin. Truthfully, they could be taking up residence in any city in the world that has just been discovered for its quaint balustrades and excellent coffee, and young people are moving there on short-term rentals. They agree it’s hip. It’s cheap and there are lovely alleyways with tropical plants in the windows and outdoor tables to set up their laptops, wonderful ethnic pastries, Wi-Fi. Artists and musicians who speak a variety of languages open studios in a charming old mill. You can make a go of it, everybody’s flush, you’re designing glossy layouts, choosing fonts, performing graphic wizardry about the place. On Instagram, your reels depict a tiny stucco church, a bit of lush blue sky, again with flora and a local recipe or two and testimonials. There’s the convergence of sight and sound and good taste. On your website you mention a Japanese film festival. Work blends into parties, the incessant pulse of a bass note, plenty of drugs and an array of local beers. There’s the breezy exchange of intimacies, it’s a happening time on screen, there’s always a screen. And it’s so. . . authentic.

For the couple, “[T]hey still thought of their days in terms of a central activity - work - and a constellation of distractions. But on closer inspection, this jumping from screen to screen and from window to window was actually more of a flow state. The very idea of a ‘distraction’ assumed a separation between the personal and the professional. . . If there had ever been such a distinction, it had long since evaporated.”

There’s only one problem. Thirtyish only lasts until forty or so. Sooner or later, people in the story leave, they peter out, and a younger cast arrives, donning chic apparel, its eyes on real estate. Prices soar, the wine’s from California, condo towers are half in shadows, absentee investors tear down and build, and disappointment sets in. So does a nameless shame.

The couple picks up, moves to the next destination, but, as they leave, surrounded by friends, they experience malaise. They “soaked up the feeling of freedom and adventure that they hadn’t felt for a long time. They took a load of photos. . . but none of those pictures managed to fully capture that feeling, which they both feared losing the moment they left - an illogical fear, given that it was precisely because they were leaving that they were feeling it.”

The Ba’al Shem Tov makes a radical suggestion about the old man on his way out of this life and the collective aphasia we’re suffering from right now. He says that when Jacob tries to predict “what is to happen” and fumbles, what the Torah’s really saying is that the Messiah will show up only when people get back to work and are paying no attention at all. (Yalkut Moshe)

Crazy. It seems to be a comment on excessive image management, our digital selves. Or it’s about the real flow - of time, of past and present and future. Being that we have made our moments like pixels - the ever new - we suffer from what’s missing. There’s nothing like the commitment to real living - not only in the present, but with the solemnity of knowing where we’ve been, and what we owe to a shared future.

We may also realize that we need to make sense.

There’s a moment in the Joseph story that cracks open a cavernous space inside like no other in the Torah or in the TaNaCH at large. In fact, it rivals any in fiction I’ve read. To this day, I can feel the suspense, as I anticipate what’s next, when the brothers once again come in to meet this confounding figure, Pharaoh’s viceroy. He’s spun them around in circles, making obtuse requests. Now they’ve arrived in his court together with Benjamin, Jacob’s remaining darling son.

Can they brace themselves? What kind of trouble are they in? Where does it lead?

The text goes like this:

“Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he called out: ‘Have everyone withdraw from me.’ So there was no one else about when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. His sobs were so loud that the Egyptians could hear, and so the news reached Pharaoh’s palace. Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still well?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dumbfounded were they on account of him.” (Genesis 45:1-3)

As I write this, I’m tearing up, and it’s decades after I first read the story in the original Hebrew when I was ten. Dumbfounded indeed. The nineteenth century commentator Malbim says the brothers were “astonished and terrified” - both. Certainly, we can imagine why they were terrified, given that they had hatched a plot to eliminate him from their lives when they were young. Who knows what ill feelings he harbored? But astonished. . . It’s this emotion that gets me in the gut every time I’m here in Torah. I’m thrown back, masks come off.

Rabbi Elazar said: “If being held to account by someone of flesh and blood was like this, just imagine being held to account by the Holy One!” (Talmud Chagiga 4b) In a palpable way, Joseph levels with them, and it cuts through us the way a surgeon inserts a scalpel into bodily tissue. It runs deep, searches for the target. We’re left speechless. There are no words, no way of approximating the universe of feelings inside.

Anee Yosef. I am Joseph. Wow. And the crying! Its sound shook Egypt. We’re knocked off our feet.

"All the opinions ever formed about Nature
Never made a flower bloom or a blade of grass grow. . .
I close my eyes and the reality of the hard earth I'm lying on
Is so real that even the bones in my back feel it.
Where I have shoulder blades I don't need reason."

(Fernando Pessoa)

It’s this stillness I invoke when I pray. I come into the court of prayer like a stranger, even to myself. Initially, I’m pondering everything except prayer, remembering only what I’ve forgotten a moment earlier. My mnemonic cues aren’t what they used to be, I’m repeating the number seven and I don’t know what it’s supposed to recall, even though I realize that I’m saying it to myself as a way of focusing on where I was, or something I just read, or perhaps made a note of picking up at the store. Seven of what? There are many allusions in my mind, some profound, I think, and others not more than stray miscellany. But now I’m praying, my eyes closed. I’m here.

Whom haven’t I seen in a while, the way that the brothers haven’t seen Joseph for a lifetime? My father of blessed memory. His face comes up in Hallel during Chanukah, not so much because he davenned, but because a boyhood friend of his that I hadn’t realized was fluent with the liturgy came up to me after my parents’ sixtieth anniversary party. Then he recited the Hebrew on behalf of his friend for “This is the day that God made, let us rejoice and be happy.” I can recall the expression on my father’s face, he was unassuming, didn’t know what to do with the attention, was on his way out the door and looked like he’d be happy to get home. And I can see my mother smiling uncomfortably, when I visited and went on doggedly about my research into her grandmother’s family. I’m remembering her saying “Enough, Joey!” and fleeing into the mystery novel on her lap. Friendly but adamant.

But I’m recalling what it was like to lie on my back on a grassy lawn and then roll downhill. Violets were everywhere that afternoon, buttercups too, and I didn’t yet know that it was a famous rabbi’s backyard. In fact, he was a nephew of the Brisker Rav, and he had many admirers, wrote extensively on the psychology of halacha (Jewish law). All I knew was the belly laughter that erupted from having no brakes, as I tumbled laterally to the bottom of the hill. (I hope it wasn’t Shabbes.) And it brings to mind my great grandfather Shmuel Shalom, whom I never met, he died before I was born. He was a talmid chacham, and, reportedly, warm-hearted and beloved by religious and secular folks alike. I see him with his square yarmelke, white beard, and pale eyes. I have a yellowing picture of him on the wall.

And my little boy who’s now forty-four. . . I see him too in a crimson cape, leaping into a room with a plastic sword. He’s overjoyed. These things arise for me at specific moments, I get inspired by a verse from a psalm or a phrase in the Siddur here or there that releases an experience that was buried a moment before. I can hear his little kid’s glee, rising in pitch.

So you are Joseph! I hadn’t thought of you in years.

A gentle friend who’s also a rabbi whom I met when we were twenty years old, his expertise was boating and I was in charge of sports at a summer camp, he had long hair halfway down his back and I had hair. He’s exclaiming that we both had these careers we never expected to have, we exchange a shtikel Torah, and here we are loving one another on FaceTime. And to add to our joy, we’re shaking our heads, his daughter is my brother’s daughter-in-law, so we’re mishpacha - and I get chills.

Speaking of which, that brother is my Joseph - or, better put, I’m his, since it’s my name. It’s a primary feature of praying that sadness arises. Incomplete or unresolved tensions stain us. How will I approach him in my purple robe? Will he listen to me? Can he spare the time? Will he clear the court of extraneous people or matters? Or will he go on about his wine cellar or the pool that needs cleaning at his second home? All the opinions, black and white. . . If I mention someone from the street we grew up on, wonder who we were back then, it’s predictable that he’ll grouse or say something coldhearted. He’ll become disdainful, and I’ll drop the discussion like a heavy stone in the sea. But I imagine that, if he gave himself the chance, even for a minute, he could find out something about me? He might, even for a second, admit astonishment. That would be more than enough. Though it’s unlikely, he’d recognize someone from his past, maybe someone he didn’t give himself a chance to know. Isn’t that one reason the brothers in Vayigash this week are taken aback?

What I’m trying to say is that it’s a shame we’re lackluster, still warding off the confessions, coating one another in flaccid excuses, lording our possessions.

It’s a part of Joseph’s story that he’s able to reassure his brothers that he’s always known on some level that his path - even into Mitzrayim - has been life-giving. Kee l’michyah sh’la’chanee Elohim lifnay’chem. (Genesis 45:5) He tells them God sent him ahead only for good things. He wears Pharaoh’s emerald ring. Somehow I need to trust that amidst the grudges that are a part of life, it’s all good.

Mostly, I cry along with Joseph, because I remember the tears shed by others who knew deep love and comfort and kindness. And for the kind of sadness that rises up like a mist and slows the heartbeat, and brings us toward a horizon without defined aims and ulterior purposes. It’s hazy, unbounded, like the second movement in a cello concerto, sporadic timpani. It insists that the elements of the narrative fade into the background - the conditional clauses, the point of view, the marks beneath the lettering. Only high notes. All that’s left in the end are the crowns.

Dumbfounded, we’re in Mitzrayim. We’re mired there. And yet, we’re reframing ourselves, reconstituting, repositioning. Someday we’ll sit and talk and stride on the same grainy path with one another. A splash of truth.

Until then, I’m a step ahead, which only means that I’m letting the thought take wing in prayer. In a dream.

How does it all end? And when will it? We’re blanketed in fear and anger. It’s Chanukah, a dark time, so we increase the light each night. In the second bracha, we say bayamim ha-heym baz’man ha-zeh. The miracles happened then, but notably, in this time. Now.

Time. We’ve lost track of it. The rabbis said that Galut, meaning exile, went on and on, and it constituted everything after the destruction of the Temple. Even the apologists for the unforgivable last couple of years in Israel say this bracha. As Jews, we are sober-minded, when it comes to thinking that the bright light is upon us, and the only thing left for us to do is anoint a savior. Even our activists refrain from messianic thinking. Each candle represents a patient glimmering of hope. No bulb displays and reindeer. The setting up of large menorahs in public squares in recent times is a concession to Chabad. It’s an advertisement - Jewish law says a menorah belongs in one’s doorway. We hedge our bets.

In her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, the political scientist Laura K. Field outlines the themes that have pushed clowns like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem to the foreground, but there are also the more insidious ones like Russel Vought and Samuel Alito doing their work. Many of them come from places like Harvard and Columbia and Georgetown and Duke, and they frequent gatherings at the conservative Claremont Institute and at Hillsdale, a small private Christian liberal arts college in Michigan. There’s a prevalence of incendiary thinkers too, and, above all, a pervasive philosophical outlook that is alien to all but the most extreme Jewish thinkers.

It’s Nietzschian, for one thing. There’s The Return of the Strong Gods, a book published by R. R. Reno in 2019, and the mythicization of a more heroic era prior to the Enlightenment, when this cast of characters claim that the West lost its moral compass, along with the power of passionate ideas and manly (that’s right!) vigor. And Field chronicles how January 6th and the “rigged election” became the new Lost Cause. She quotes David Graham on the pages of The Atlantic, who observed that “[those who praised the attack on the Capitol] sought to convert a shameful catastrophe into a celebration of the valor and honor of the culprits and portray those who attacked the country as the true patriots.” Faux-legal methods were, and are still, being employed to “Stop the Steal”.

Neoliberals, Democrats and Republicans, were lambasted - at conservative conferences, in an array of magazine essays, on websites, by philanthropists and academics alike, for installing a bureaucracy that was pathetic and weak, not to mention, woke. So when JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s vice presidential candidate, thought leaders at the Claremont Institute repeated the phrase “the hour is late”. And it harkened back to Trump’s rise to power in 2016, when Michael Anton, under a pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (from Livy’s history of Rome describing someone who practiced devotio, sacrificing himself in battle), pitched an essay entitled “The Flight 93 Election”. “Charge the cockpit and die” became code for electing a man who was supposed to use the hour to remove the democratic hinges of government that the rest of us depend on.

Galut. . . Exile. . . Darkness. . .

As a historian of political ideas, Field is quick to add that there is truth behind their criticism that both political parties seemed more intent on preserving the financial wealth of the super-rich, as opposed to measuring the American economy in terms of its product. However, the overt template of a Christian reclamation of the country’s soul by a wide range of theorists and influencers is troubling and real. The Harvard law professor Adrian Vermuele, in the American Affairs Journal, in 2018, penned an article entitled “Integration from Within,” in which he rejects the separation of church and state. He goes on to say that what we have come to expect in a rules-based society should be dismantled “by the invisible hand of Providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.” He’s a Catholic convert who resorts to a Manichaean frame, increasingly apocalyptic.

The rhetoric flows from there to the Manosphere, an indictment of a “gynocracy” ruled by women in the workplace and gays, in what Field calls “a paean to the Bronze Age men of ‘life and force’” by Costin Alamariu, who received a Ph.D. from Yale in 2015. He calls for total war. And there’s Curtis Yarvin, who has written about the “Cathedral” over the last fifteen years - composed of the media, government and academia. And what you get are the ingredients for Project 2025, which itself is a recipe for disaster.

At this point, the only thing missing is a sloppy, vulgar Prince of Peace, and he becomes the modern-day Cyrus (of the Book of Isaiah who heralds the Israelites’ return to the promised land), and whose vast array of worldly sins and compromises are overlooked. It’s the revivalist crew and evangelicals behind our president who see to that, hold their regular prayer meetings and lift up their adorations. Needless to say, there’s no room for globalists or cosmopolitans (read: Jews). That is, unless they’re followers of Netanyahu - a proven nationalist. On these shores, it’s a historically Christian country. End of discussion.

Maybe more bad news is that, in a column written by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times on December 2nd, Laura Field was asked about the future. Given that powerful Christian nationalist strands have merged to eviscerate our democratic institutions and elect Trump, where does it go after him? She believes that JD Vance, at least ideologically, may be in a position to hold this camp of postliberals and hard right people together even more so than Trump. On the other hand, Edsall notes that in 2028 Vance will need to move to the center, in order to please a broader American constituency for a general election. In the process, he’ll have to appear more moderate, and based on the polls, he’ll need to focus on issues like affordability and fallout from this administration’s unrestrained wielding of ICE. Immigration and its racist underpinnings are issues that Trump has exploited, but there may be reason to believe that the optics of masked invaders in courts, hospitals, and outside schools has reached a crisis-point. Just who is it that’s invading us - the people at the border or an anonymous and lawless federal force?

It’s also likely that this administration’s adventurism in foreign affairs will alienate promoters of America First, as will Trump’s ubiquitous self-enrichment and thievery come home to roost, who knows? It’s hard to say.

At Chanukah, year after year, we’re enthralled by the Joseph stories. In the Torah portion Miketz, the ten brothers arrive in Mitzrayim. Joseph is cunning, almost cold-hearted, with them. While it’s true that they put him in a pit years earlier, the steps he takes to examine their motives are excessive. To begin with, he tells them he suspects them of being spies. He insists upon locking up Simeon, holding him as a guarantee that they’ll return with the one he really wants to see, his brother by the same mother, Benjamin. They’re in a bind, realizing that their father Jacob will dread losing Rachel’s only other son. There’s the interlude when Joseph has his servants stick the money that they brought with them to buy food back into their bags. And there’s a moment, subsequently, when they discover it and rue that they are in even deeper trouble.

The drama shifts. When they are about to depart from Jacob again with their younger brother in tow, Jacob advises them to take double the amount of money in repayment - Ulai mishgeh hu. Maybe it’s a mistake, he says. (Genesis 43:12)

What’s he getting at?

Although Jacob lived apart from Joseph and mourned his apparent death and disappearance, they each had the power of prophecy and were dreamers. They watched for clues about the future. The Rogatchover Rebbe, a brilliant turn-of-the-twentieth-century commentator from Dvinsk (in Latvia), provides a meta-interpretation of the double payment. He ventures, extraordinarily, that the long Galut has actually begun and this moment signals it. Jacob’s lineage will move inevitably into Mitzrayim.

The Rogatchover’s explains that Jacob sees this money as signifying that Pharaoh has purchased them (via Joseph) at his court. There’s a law that a master must cover the expenses for feeding his slaves. (Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 9) Keeping it would connote subservience, so he attempts once again to pay for the original supply of food, as well as to rescind the extra payment.

Jacob hopes it’s a mistake. He’ll forestall Galut, but he knows it’s not really possible. (Tsafnat Paneyach on Genesis 42:25 ff)

In the mystical storytelling, we too are absorbed into Mitzrayim, in the sense of something that happens to us on an unconscious level. Our vision is blurred. We attempt to find a way through things, we subordinate our best selves to fantasies and short-lived desires. Worst of all, we live in the fear and anger that engulfs us. At the same time, since observing Chanukah is a way of expressing what’s hopeful amidst a bleak context, we’re less inclined to self-aggrandizement. Importantly, it symbolizes how we Jews take political obstacles into account, while we pay attention to incremental miracles. Expanding human possibilities requires clear thinking and humility, as much as engaged action.

It’s hard for us to know what comes next. The Christian predilection to bring on the end of days haunts American politics and makes the country susceptible to authoritarians. Even worse, it brings out the racists, homophobes and antisemites. Having said this, there is much we can learn from our Christian allies who present a different version of their religion - one that fosters hospitality and inclusion. There’s Reverend William J. Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign, and there’s a pastor in a Boston suburb who won’t remove the “ICE was here” sign in his church’s nativity scene. We’ll need to be more welcoming, because in the future things may revert to the narrow partisan conflict that was the case a moment before Trump. We can’t know for sure how things play out.

In the darkness, our neoliberal order has certainly played a role in diverting America from people’s possibilities. To this day, our censoriousness on the left continues to alienate others, even as we stake out pluralistic goals. Identity politics obscures the widening gap between the rich and the poor, regardless of race or religion or gender. Bureaucratic red tape, layers of regulation, hamstring critical projects like expanding the electrical grid, high speed rail, building homes. We’ll need to get on board with fixing that.

On Chanukah, we’ll set up the candles, increasing the light everyday. We’ll encircle the Menorah inside our doorways, lowering the volume. If we’re going to live in Galut, we can insist on provable ways to get along with one another and make the world better. Ulai mishgeh hu. Jacob worries about mistaken myths and totalitarians, but realizes there’s so much we don’t know. . . About who we are, where we’re headed, what comes next. In the glow of the candles, we’ll have to find our way.

Maybe it’s because he has the same name as I do - or, more rightly said, I was named for him. . . In any case, I have always been wrapped up in the story of Joseph. He’s a kid pure and simple, utterly innocent and socially unaware. A dreamer. Whatever he’s feeling in the moment leaps from his mouth. I can see him bragging about the new coat of many colors his dad brought home for him. He’s scampering around the neighborhood, spouting off about his special powers, he can display the garment everywhere. He’s full of himself.

Needless to say, the attention he gets instantly lands him in trouble. Things happen to him, people take advantage. Maybe he should think twice about showing off in the presence of bigger kids, especially his brothers.

The story in Vayeshev, this week’s Torah, one of the most spellbinding in all of TaNaCH, embraces Joseph’s naivete, his lonely plight, from when he was cast into a pit to his arrival in a strange land.

Gunov gunavtee, he tells the baker and cupbearer, whose dreams he interprets, while the three of them languish in detention. G-n-v, a root that everyone recognizes, who doesn’t know what a ganef is in Yiddish? A ganef takes what doesn’t belong to them. However, in TaNaCH, it has the connotation much stronger, of taking a human being away.

What’s more, when Joseph tells his fellow prisoners what has occurred, it’s in the passive voice. Everything happens to him, he has no control. Gunov gunavtee - “I was stolen away.” (Genesis 40:15)

Why is the word repeated?

In the midrash, Rav Acha, who lived in the fourth century, said: Me-kahn she-nignav shtay pe’amim. From this we learn that he was taken away twice. (Genesis Rabba 88:5)

How so?

As a little boy, Joseph lacks adult comprehension. He can’t fathom the level of cruelty that causes his brothers to put him out of sight, into a pit. And then, soon afterwards, he’s delivered into the hands of others who shackle him, transport him to Mitzrayim. First, there’s something bleak going on at home, a kind of despair or cutthroat violence that puts family members and neighbors at odds with one another. And then there’s a market that moves its currency, that treats human life as a commodity.

The story, with its own inexorable motion, won’t let the reader forget for a minute that Joseph epitomizes every person who sets off from home with inadequate resources, and because it is no longer safe to remain there. Either they leave behind the abuelita and her stuffed tortillas, the pulpería, the bellowing neighbor - or they’re exposed to violence. Later, at the border, they run for cover, take the trip inland, and look for work in America’s heartland with little more than the wish for citizenship. The migrant enters a world that is as duplicitous as it is liberating. A double bind. Bamboozled and stripped of dignity, a person who travels this route experiences something unimaginable for those of us who sit comfortably at home.

In the heartrending memoir Solito, written by Javier Zamora, he’s “Joseph”, the nine year old who is stolen from his tiny town in El Salvador. His grandparents and his parents, by phone in America (he can’t even remember his father’s face), decide it’s best for him to go, it’s paid for, and he must explain to himself that soon he’ll make it alone? He’s on an adventure - but there’s so much he doesn’t know. There’s no way to estimate the guilelessness of someone his age, as he embarks on the nine week dangerous journey to the US.

First, there’s the sea. In fact, the tumultuous segment on a boat in the Pacific Ocean is the least of it, that brings him from Guatemala to Oaxaca… “Surrounded by water and water and water. Sky sky sky. Clouds and more clouds. Migrantes. That word the locals in Ocós called us. We’re that. . .” Never mind that he can’t swim, he’s in the company of four other adults, one other child, they’re strangers to one another, they’ll adopt him on and off, depending upon how they’re grappling with their own insecurity the rest of the way. One coyote takes over from another, “He still hasn’t told us his name,” he writes. “Doesn’t tell us much except that he’s Mexican, but not from the ‘shitty’ south of Mexico where we are.”

The boy confides “I haven’t cried. . . Besides that, I’ve been good. Didn’t cry when I saw the Mexican soldiers’ guns. Didn’t throw up on the boat. Didn’t complain that we walked far. . .”

He’s left to fend for himself, though one of the others shares a joke he can’t really understand, occasionally winks and smiles at him. A sly smile, they’re in this together, perhaps.

And there are more obstacles. It’s a frightening business, but he scrambles across a dirt road and ducks under a fence, as if it’s a game. “I’m ready. Avoiding cactuses is boring. I want barbwire. Thin, metallic, pointy. The smell of dust, thicker when our faces are in the dirt. Dirt in our noses, in our mouths. . .”

Hour after hour the desert heat is suffocating: “. . .as we rest under a leafless tree for a few minutes and watch small, light-brown birds panting with their beaks opened. . .” “Today is hotter than yesterday, hot as the clay ovens outside The Baker’s house where I’d pick up pan francés on Christmas mornings. . .”

It’s a merciless trip, the colors at sunset tantalizing, the freezing cold under a starlit sky gives him goosebumps. Above all, a child must read the signals of his pretend mother and father and sister with forged identities. Do they accept him as one of them? What he wants is to be hugged in this no-man’s land.

Today Zamora is an accomplished poet, but, in his blog, he’s quick to add that back in 1999, upon his arrival in Arizona, he could with luck make it across the border, but such crossings pose deadlier risks now. There are the cartels, of course, that have taken over the business of navigating more circuitous trails. According to the American Immigration Council, since 2003, the American government has spent $409 billion on border enforcement. Think walls, drones, surveillance, a bulked-up border patrol. During that period, Congress has allocated $24 on ICE and border control for every $1 on the immigration court system. In 2022 alone, the International Organization for Migration has accounted for 686 deaths and disappearances along the US-Mexico border, giving it the distinction of being the most fatal in the world. Just this year 98 out of 600 immigration judges have been fired for political reasons. Politico reports that 7 were let go of in New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza in a single day this past week. The stories of people who are detained as soon as they appear for routine hearings are legion, and every day we are watching ICE use force to tear families and communities apart. Last week, it was reported that a six year old boy was separated from his father, whom this country was sending back to China. And there are the Afghans and Haitians, Somalis, dealt to homelands that will certainly punish them.

Gunov gunavtee. . . They’ve risked everything out of desperation, the criminal terror at home, the absence of an economy, the hopelessness. And now, in a country that’s supposedly lawful and humane, they’re thrown into a dark hole. A pit.

In the December 1st The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman reports on a still more sickening scheme dreamed up by the Trump administration. This is the hell-on-earth scenario wherein would-be immigrants to this country, asylum seekers, are deported not to their own country of origin, but to a third country where they know no one and have no idea what awaits them. The article follows the fate of a Jamaican man who came to New York in 1976 at the age of twelve. His record is anything but clean, in that he had committed a serious crime and was incarcerated for a long period, during which he straightened his life out, received a bachelor’s degree and did work toward a master’s in divinity. What’s important is that, upon release, he had the support of a multigenerational family and, in turn, was a reliable and productive earner. He disappeared during a routine ICE check-in, and after considerable detective work and travail, turned up in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland.

He “hopes that, at some point, he can confront the US government about his treatment. But, even more so, he wishes that he could speak to African leaders, as a Black man who feels he was sent across the Middle Passage in reverse,” Stillman writes. Quoting the victim: “Please, let the Trump administration take care of its own dirty work.”

The Yiddish witticism comes to mind: Kleine ganovim hengt men, groise shenkt men. Petty thieves are hung, big thieves are pardoned.

The bedrock principle of non-refoulement operates in international law, whereby people who flee a regime in their country of origin can be shielded from being sent back under the Convention Against Torture, if there’s an acknowledged probability of them being persecuted. This doesn’t seem to matter. What the US government under Trump - a big thief - is doing is using its economic clout as a means of extorting other countries. Their willingness to cooperate transforms America into an empire that makes immigrants and asylum seekers. . . go away.

The rabbis refer to other types of theft. At the top of the list are two that deserve our consideration: Gonev da’at b’nai adam, v’ha-m’sarev ba-chaveyro l’orcho v’eyn b’leebo likrato. The one who steals (deceives) human beings’ minds, and the one who invites people to be guests without having any intention to welcome them. . . (Mekhilta d’Rebbe Ishmael Nezikin 13:14)

Who do we want to be? Whose dreams and whose stories do we want to retell in the future? Whose offensive slurs and crimes should we disparage, and whose hopes do we want to hold up as our proudest emblems?

Do we want to become the country that once granted birthright to the children of freed slaves but now intends to sell children into slavery?

God forbid it, should we come to regard ourselves as another Mitzrayim?

Gunov gunavtee. Says the immigrant: I was in danger at home, and sought relief. But I was duped, led to believe I’d be safe here, that people would care for me, when I had only the clothes on my back and the friendship of others who were unfortunate. Instead, I was pulled from a car or taken away from work. I was removed from my family and thrown in a cell. I was denied representation and plunged into darkness.

There will be more to this story. We become poets and viceroys, doctors, astronomers, and skilled tradespersons. We’ll tell what happened to us and see the pharaohs drown in the sea of their scorn. And we’ll make sure that the world’s children get across to the other side. Our own children will be there to receive them.

“You know these shame cultures - the gods/ love nothing more than their honor and Zeus did not give you free will/ so stop pretending to make up your mind. . .” (Patty Seyburn, “Oh Please, Niobe. Come On, Sisyphus.”)

We are in a season of negotiations, feverish attempts to bind wounds and end wars. Usually, we’d welcome diplomatic forays, but they come from an administration known for its indifference to cruelty. Perhaps they are a sham, or even worse, they cover over graft and double-dealing. A president leans over, tells the press pool by the doorway that he expects an agreement in days. He tells you how many days, gets specific. We’re left to imagine how he knows it. His brokers are in the field, they’ve got the wording, it’s only a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. He’s off to take a nap.

The familiar names are getting the business done. They’re no Kissinger’s or John Kerry’s. Let’s see, Richard Holbrooke’s gone, and George Mitchell is 92. What, you say, look what Witkoff and Kushner have accomplished, why be so negative?

Let’s put aside the Nobel Peace Prize for the moment. War is certainly a terrible thing, as we learn from watching the Ken Burns compelling PBS series on the American Revolution. We realize that it’s not simply a compilation of events, the coalescence of militias carrying the same flag, that determined the outcome of a struggle. There were defiant factions, isolated villages and larger colonial commercial interests. Blacks wagered their bets with loyalists or rebels, which of them would bring them liberty? Native Americans initially threw in their lot with the British, because they deplored the expansionist pioneers. What came first, the cause of freedom or patriotism? When people bled or starved, whose arms did they flee to?And what role did persuasion play? And common sense? Whose common sense?

The aftermath of a war is fluid and anything but certain, and peacemaking requires that warring parties address a broad array of concerns. For people who’ve suffered, whatever agreements are brokered represent something less than what they hoped to achieve.

As I write about the cost-benefit analysis of overwhelming force and politics, I’m moved by the words of a woman at Kibbutz Menara on Israel’s Lebanese border: “Once your [own] government does things that contradict your morals and your very basic feelings and thoughts and ideas and principles, it shatters the soul. It does something awful.” (New York Times, November 26th)

But, you see, Trump doesn’t have a soul. He thinks he can pull a rabbit out of his MAGA hat with his tireless wheeler-dealers. This time it’s a meal consisting of twenty-eight courses, Russia’s preferred menu for the sit-down dinner, if there’s ever to be one, although Russia imagines the Ukrainians dining alone. The Palestinians in Gaza can dine alone too, if Israel allows food in, and Trump could care less. It’s a set menu.

The questions abound. Are the mediators working toward goals that will benefit each side? How do they construe those goals amidst an asymmetric conflict, whether in the case of the Palestinians or with regard to Ukraine? Who stands to gain at the war’s conclusion? And what are the plans for reconstruction and trust-building, and what safeguards will be installed to limit corruption?

War’s aftermath can be a boon to racketeers and conmen.

Hegemons come and go. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart posed a host of questions to Daniel Levy of the US/Middle East Project, a career backchannel negotiator. Pointedly, Stewart was troubled by the exclusion of Palestinian representation in America’s post-ceasefire planning. There were green zones and red zones, and more than half of Gaza remained under Israeli military control. According to preliminary ideas, vetted Palestinians could live in, at some point, hypothetical compounds designated by the US as “Alternative Safe Communities”. Presumably, they’d transfer like chess pieces into the green zones. In the meantime, Israel would decide who goes where and who gets shot or blown up the way it does on the West Bank. Israeli impunity.

Under American aegis, Netanyahu’s status quo would continue to operate, with Israel’s “security needs” taking priority to justice for the Palestinians.

Stewart wondered why America’s Arab partners in the Middle East weren’t pressing to level the playing field? What could incentivize the Saudis or the Emiratis to demand autonomy for the Palestinians, he wanted to know? Was there no alternative to Witkoff’s and Kushner’s commercial real estate approach to the region?

Levy replied, China. The Saudis realize that with Trump in charge and with all the unpredictability that comes with it, they figure America is in decline and they’ll think twice before signing on the dotted line, getting in bed with Israel. F-35s yes, telecommunications surveillance for sure, a nuclear deal, A.I., and smiles at the White House, but no more. There’s a glimmer of opportunity, he suggests pessimistically, no more than that, for Palestinian enfranchisement and a peaceful future for Israel only when other outside parties up the ante.

But this president, who reportedly solicited upwards of $14 million for his own transition to office and is spending $300 million on his golden ballroom, wants returns now, and pays little attention to what happens tomorrow. For the immediate future, his fabled Abraham Accords will have to wait.

In the meantime, the fate of the Palestinians, just like the case of innocent Ukrainians, is tied to the mega-rich who move them around like pieces of a puzzle. In Ukraine, it’s the $100 million of presently frozen Russian funds in the West that, per Trump’s agreement, would flow to American “investments” towards reconstruction. (This presupposes that the Europeans will then be required to unfreeze their remaining $200 million toward joint US-Russian projects, rewarding Putin for his war). There’s no advantage to continuing support for a government that can’t “win”.

Witkoff cut this deal, a developer’s transaction, one day before Trump was considering giving Zelenskyy Tomahawk missiles to strike at energy facilities deep inside Russia. To the plutocrats go the spoils.

In this week’s Torah portion Vayishlach, Jacob is all grown up, he’s on his way home, a man of the world. His life to this point has been a patchwork. He’s earlier stolen Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Fates have reversed themselves, and he’s only recently been released from years of Laban’s deceptive labor practices. He’s needed to adjust to rules set unfairly, in a place where he had little control, and he’s made compromises. Life has been a struggle, but he’s fixed for the future.

Since he’s coming home, he’ll soon run into Esau and he’s worried. With all the negative history, Jacob realizes he’ll need to account for his part in it. But how do you initiate talks?

Well, of course. . . Unsurprisingly, he sends his agents ahead with gifts, lots of them. He tells his emissaries to say to Esau that all of these perks - cows, goats, camels - are for him. As the conservative talking head on CNN, fending off blowback from the Bloomberg report about Witkoff rehearsing what to say to Trump with Russian intermediaries, said, “Flattery is foundational to diplomacy.”

Uh-huh.

But then Jacob adds, in a verse that ripples with angst:

“And you should also say, ‘And your servant Jacob himself is right behind us, for he [Jacob] said, if I propitiate him [a-chapra fanav] with gifts in advance, and then face him, perhaps he will show me favor.’” (Genesis 32:21)

First, it’s Jacob saying aloud words he insists that his agents repeat to his brother. He thereby lends his imprimatur to their meeting, which makes his intention to heal the wounds paramount and unmistakable. As for what follows, ShaDaL, (Shmuel David Luzatto), explicates the Hebrew that I’ve translated above - ‘If I propitiate him’ [achapra fanav] - as describing a process of coating and cleansing, similar to how a cultural conservator would care for a prized wooden chair that cracked or a marble statue that fell over and shattered. So, in effect, Jacob wants his advance team to convey the trouble he is going to, to repair the original transgression. He truly seeks his brother’s favor. (The last segment of the verse might literally be translated Only then I will see his face, and he will lift up my face.)

It’s useful to think of Jacob’s approach as a layering of attention. It’s aspirational, but it’s a good faith attempt toward negotiating an end to the conflict.

That’s happening neither in Gaza nor in Ukraine. All the goods are flowing toward the oppressor parties or toward the deal-makers themselves. It flies in the face of our common humanity that people who are suffering get written off. Their pain will reverberate, of course, and threaten the peace for generations to come.

As for that American Revolution, two scholars have something to say. The historian Jill Lepore writes, “It’s a canvas, part Bruegel, part Goya, a political carrousel, a teeming, moving, terrifying story, relating a chain of events forged of bravery and betrayal, of ferocity and torment, of ambition and terror. . .” “But it was held together by a possibility worth fighting for,” in the words of another historian Jane Kamensky. (The New Yorker, November 17)

Should we reduce American influence in the world today to a billionaire huckster’s opportunities to increase his own wealth and that of his cronies? It’s certainly happened before, in some cases as a result of our own country’s misguided whims. But Jacob’s model of rapprochement suggests, in this season of giving and taking, that the gifts go in more than one direction. Something worth fighting for and living for. . . together.

Can you imagine it? A teenager, some say he was 77, Jacob sets out to get distance from his brother Esau, to take the trip that only a generation earlier Eliezer took to find a wife for his father Isaac. He lifts his satchel onto his shoulder, it’s a long way to Haran. A long strange trip. It’s also my very first Torah reading. Michael Strassfeld made a tape for me at Brandeis. A tape - imagine.

But long before that, I studied the Torah portion Vayetzey in Hebrew school. I go way back with it. In fact, I can still see the primitive poster hanging from the blackboard, a picture of Jacob prone in wonderment. There’s a ladder. Angels.

What happened? The text has forever been rendered through the rabbinic interpretive filter as saying that no sooner did Jacob hit the road than the sun set, and he arrived in The Place. . . An hour after he leaves at dawn, it’s bedtime.

It’s the sequence of the words that frames this moment forever. Vayifga ba-Makom va-yalen shom kee va hashemesh. “He came upon The Place so he lay down to sleep [WHY?] because the sun had [ALREADY] set.”

Things happen backwards. Or they are undone.

Twilight. Jacob is mesmerized.

According to the midrash, this is one of four such occasions, the others involving Abraham, Eliezer (his servant), and King David. The rabbis say: she-kaftzah ha-aretz. They have a way of describing it: the land compressed itself, or space buckled. (Tanchuma Vayetzey 3:3)

What’s more, they explain Vayifga ba-Makom (He came upon The Place) as yet another coincidence. They say that Jacob had just passed the place where his ancestors prayed. Looking over his shoulder, he gave himself a little zetz on the side of his head, his jaw dropped open, and he too stopped to pray. (Talmud Chullin 91b)

This kind of prayer happens to you.

Okay, here’s the really big deal. It’s not only that space compressed itself, but so did time. It’s the way Jews have always looked at this scene. Logic goes out the window. Throw your watch away, you may be on the other side of the country next to the shockingly cold Pacific, but you’re back in New Jersey. As you can see, I’ve been thinking about all of this for about sixty-five years. And there’s no end to it.

In my case, it’s Boston. As I get older, I forget where I am at times, or I wonder if I’ve changed along the way. Or did I ever know for sure who I was? It’s the way my imagination works, as I pin things down. Acquaintances make fun of me for calling old friends, a few of whom I haven’t seen in more than half a century. Or I’ll carve out time (either in person on my trips home or by phone) with relatives whom I never really knew. I hunger for the stories, they’re composites, in the sense that I may have one view of my grandmother’s family, and then a cousin tells me there’s more to it. I may have thought everyone was cheery, they all got along, and she tells me it’s more complicated than that. Grief ran in like the tide.

And once in a while, I arrive at The Place. The sun has set on someone I knew, he gave me good advice, said something I really needed to hear. Or I recall, with embarrassment, someone I let down, I failed in a spectacular way. I’m thrown back in that moment to the human beings who welcomed me in, fed me, saw me.

This is k’fitsat ha-derech, the buckling of the journey. Am I a toddler again, parked in front of my great grandmother’s house in a rental car, or am I at a loss for words, almost mumbling, to my son on a call? He’s walking down a street, it’s spring, I’m in Oregon, and he’s extolling the virtues of the trees in Brooklyn.

Steven Zipperstein, one of our greatest modern Jewish intellectual historians, has written a new biography of one of our time’s most notorious fiction writers, entitled Philip Roth: Stung By Life. Writes Zipperstein, Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman is “obsessed [in this case, in his book The Ghost Writer] by the interplay between imagination and the rest of life: this is the core of any literary biographical quest.”

Throughout my reading, I’m haunted by the task of the biographer writing about the novelist who has stirred, blended, cooked his own life events into a stew that thwarts chronology. A pastiche. He has invited, in fact, numerous biographers to work on him, only to subvert them.

Zipperstein’s meticulous study of the fiction writer’s life reveals an artist who turned his life inside out, voraciously in search of what’s true, dispensing with or, better yet, “turning over” (Roth’s own words) every artifice or relationship that affords continuity and repose. When you read a Roth novel, you either laugh or sit back in horror, as every respectable figure becomes a punching-bag, or whose foibles he sooner or later lays bare, or whom he betrays. He does it lovingly or sinisterly, which causes readers to ache, because readers recognize these hiccups in the story, the buckles, on some level, as their own.

Says Zipperstein of Roth’s impulse, “On the one hand biography here is sheer desecration, prurience gone amok.” At a celebration of his eightieth birthday at the Newark Museum in his hometown, Roth read a confessional passage from one of his books. Zipperstein says that it “revealed [in Roth’s own words]: ‘the unmanageable man, the exonerated man - better, the refractory man, refractory meaning capable of enduring high temperatures.’” Zipperstein: “the refractory man being the one who will not join.”

Nachman of Bratzlav, like Philip Roth, an outsider par excellence, was also convinced of the primacy of the human imagination . Another space- and time-buckler, he took his trip to Ottoman Palestine in 1798-99, recorded in bizarre fragments, in fits and starts and uncanny incidents. For Nachman, the trip takes shape as a mythical “ordeal”, while its objective is to escape a normative life. In the view of Bar-Ilan University scholar Tzvi Mark, in his book Mysticism and Madness, he says that Nachman’s “[a]cts of foolishness and childishness express a readiness to renounce the intellect and enter into a state of consciousness free of rational mind.” The path to Eretz Yisrael for him is one on which he can put aside the laws of Torah, relinquishing this control, so as to experience another level of truth. The path is the destination. (Shivchei HaRan Seder HaNesiya 22)

As is the case with Philip Roth the fiction writer, so is Nachman well aware that the human imagination is hazardous. In his commentary on Psalm 146:7, Teytzey rucho ya-shuv l’admato, literally, “As one’s breath goes out so he is returned to [his] ground,” he employs wordplay on l’admato (literally, to [his] ground) - recognizing, poetically, the root d-m-h, for dimayon, the imagination. Read this way, he reinterprets the psalmist to say that in dying, one returns to pure imagination. Or, put differently, Nachman strips away relentlessly the physics of time, place and artifice. That’s where deep knowledge is. (Likutei Moharan 54:7)

There’s Roth’s Zuckerman, and Nachman has his own “recorder”, because without Nathan Sternharz of Nemirov, who follows him around and writes everything down in contemporaneous fragments, in bits of Yiddish, we’d know next to nothing about this saintly Hasidic figure. At every juncture, Nachman undermines his disciples (and his own teachers too), and he often vanishes, moves from one place to the next.

Indeed, the rabbis taught (on our passage about Jacob from Vayetzey) that wherever the righteous find themselves, so is God there in That Place. (Pirkei de Rebbe Eliezer 35:4)

We too are in that place, if we are open to it. Just this week, Ternopil in western Ukraine was hit by Russian missiles, it’s the place that lent its name to one of Roth’s characters in My Life As A Man. This week a democratic socialist bantered with a corrupt authoritarian, they’re all smiles. The fiction writer would skewer Stephen Miller, he’d show up as the livid Hebrew school teacher just arrived from Prague, who got fired for choking a third grader who’d put chewing gum on his chair. This life is not what it seems to be. We get older and we long for young people to listen to our disappointments, and tell us it’s okay. In the case of Roth, as Zipperstein writes, we can imagine a parade of long-gone soulmates at our bedside, as our lives trickle away. They dismiss us, or we them; they go up a ladder, others descend.

Or, as he quotes the author in The Counterlife, “‘to create is always to speak of childhood’ with the moments just on the cusp of adolescence the closest to bliss” [Zipperstein]. Roth kept his grandfather’s shaving mug nearby, and I’m thinking of my father’s tiny green tinted elephant, a vessel with a top and a bottom made of glass, on the shelf behind my desk. It’s where he kept spare change on his dresser. I run my finger over the unshaven stubble under my chin, and I recall his face on mine, surprisingly, kissing me upon my arrival at the airport in Boston, when he was the age I am right now. We said little then on the drive to my parents’ apartment, but grew animated, when we discussed the new storm pipes being installed on Beacon Street. They were digging everything up.

Like Jacob, we want so desperately to stop telling lies, to become enraptured by a piece of music, a forest, the world again. . . So much so that it’s as if, every now and then, the sun sets early in the day, there’s a wisp of moon on the horizon and one or two stars have come out.

Especially now, when quick arrows of deceit fly at us daily, “Things happen,” we can recognize that history really isn’t an even progression. The way forward buckles. We’ll be there before we know it. We were there before.

And last year’s wobbly, farcical angels will take their leave, disappear up the ladder, and new, more reassuring ones will take their place. Lie down for a moment, put your head on a flat rock, and dream.

What’s left when we can’t talk? We’ve gone somewhere else. In Katy Kitamura’s gripping psychological drama Audition, an actor has a “breakthrough” playing a character. The problem is that, in the process, her own life at home becomes a stage set and it no longer makes sense.

She wonders, “Can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?”

A chasm has opened up a mile wide between progressive Jews. We’re on different clocks. For sure, it’s a generational phenomenon, with young people inflamed by Israel’s murderous actions, and older people still transfixed by events going back to the last century. But it’s more than that. What anguishes us are the serious flaws in our mythical story and whether we should be able to refurbish, at least, some of its original elements. It’s as if, on a wintry afternoon, someone opened a sealed window and warm air escaped. A chill enters, and even the conversation between friends no longer goes smoothly. No one lingers.

In the Torah portion Toldot this week, Rebecca is pregnant and can’t fathom why it is that her contractions cause so much pain? Surely she’s heard from other women that giving birth is no cakewalk, so why the Jobian bewilderment, the commentators ask?

Ah it’s twins, though she doesn’t know it! Vayit’ro’tz’tzu b’kir-bah. They crushed from within, or as some imagine, they ran in opposite directions inside the womb. Parsing this moment would bring out pious rectitude just as much as linguistic triumph. The rabbis divined from her labor the eternal malice that one civilization would bring upon another.

“When she passed by the study houses of Torah, Jacob moved convulsively to get out, and when she moved past a temple packed with idols, it was Esau who hastened to get out.” (Rashi on Genesis 25:22)

As Jews, do we think of ourselves as accountable to what others are thinking, or do we hold ourselves as exceptional?

The mystical tradition, however, doesn’t yet divide these two beings in utero. The splitting of human impulses for good and evil happens later on the stage of life. In the view of the Apter Rebbe, what troubles Rebecca is her worry that this one child, pulled in both directions, lacks the capacity to choose which way to live. Not knowing that she will give birth to twins leads her to draw the conclusion that there’s no freedom of choice, and this literally tears her apart.

Will this kid be a relativist, someone dazzled by theories in vogue today and gone tomorrow? Or will her child be someone patient and possessed of a steady moral compass, an evolving faith in the One God? Will this person tell a coherent story?

Human development is strange and wonderful enough that a child learns by trial and error. An adolescent revisits opinions they earlier thought were unassailable. An adult can reevaluate and innovate, but these potentialities are only that, in the abstract. A mother-to-be clenches, realizing the awesome scenarios that lie ahead. Fathers become clued in belatedly, but gape at the mystery. And, as elders, we realize that we are all liable, to a degree, for failing to give the next generation tools to work with, sustainable spiritual practices, a social context in which to take risks. And to articulate definable political goals.

The Apter’s great great grandson Abraham Joshua Heschel would write, famously, “that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.”

Heschel’s student, Arthur Green, has just put out a volume entitled Can Judaism Be Saved: Its Future After Gaza. Green is both a personal friend and a teacher, as he is to a wide cadré of people here in the US and in Israel, and he’s a spiritual revolutionary of sorts. He made a name for himself in the late 1960’s, as a visionary founder of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was there, from the very beginning, that his critique of American institutional Judaism, the Judaism of “the mainstream”, sprouted wings. He, along with others, wrote that it had become bland. Disencumbered of its original profound teachings, it offered little more than a rubber stamp to liberal American ideas of progress. Since that time, as the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, and after that, founding dean of Hebrew College’s Rabbinical School, his blending of scholarship and radical spiritual relevancy has influenced many.

As a historian, he writes that “Eastern European Hasidism represents one of the great success stories in the world history of religious movements.” What propels his critique about Israel right now is what he understands as the repudiation of a longstanding dry rabbinic authoritarianism. The Hasidic inspirational model was to locate God within human consciousness and the common person’s joyfulness.

Green’s circle is exploring questions about how it is that esoteric mystical practices can appear to lie dormant for many years and then spring up generations later? And how do ethnic and geographic boundaries impact, for better or for worse, spiritual adepts in one tradition or in another? Are those boundaries so impermeable that thinkers cannot learn from outside traditions, or can we ascertain that certain ideas seep in from elsewhere?

Specifically, in the case of Judaism, what internal influences direct the discourse about the role of place for a people burdened for centuries by placelessness? Can “having a place” force us to shape a society that’s more caring, instead of the opposite?

Green confronts the problem about the substitution in the modern period of (what was) a temporal redemption by the kind of redemption imagined by living on a land and with the apparatus of a state. After all, for hundreds of years leading rabbis adamantly opposed any human (and thereby secular) attempt to effectuate something that only God’s messiah could make happen.

As many themselves ask, are we as Jews Zionists, and if so, how did that identifier come to supersede so much else in Jewish life? Or, perhaps, many of us are more comfortable thinking of ourselves as diasporic, increasingly in fashion, and in tension with the Jewish world that reduces itself to political loyalties. Either you’re pro-Israel or you are not.

Or, as Philip Roth once wrote, “The group whose embrace had offered me so much security was itself fanatically insecure.”

As a Jewish master teacher, Green centers the devotional life. He draws on two biblical facets of human attachment to The Holy. The first is the Genesis story of the Creation of all people, preceding everything else. All beings are made in God’s image, no exception. The other stream, the one that best describes the Jewish people, portrays us as am segulah - best translated as a precious nation. In the verses from Exodus, at Sinai, we are described as a kingdom of priests. (Exodus 19:5-6) In other words, our primary mission, says Green, is to serve others.

Later on, throughout the Middle Ages, it’s the oppression we experienced at the hands of outsiders who were in the majority in combination with our own defensive conceptual maneuvers, that would allow us to think of ourselves as chosen. (The gluttons for punishment, according to Jewish humorists, were also chosen.) But Green sticks with this idea, above others, of Jews serving others, outsiders (strangers) specifically included.

It’s also for this reason that he does not identify with anti-Zionists, and he pleads with his Jewish audience to stop the violence perpetrated against innocent Palestinians on the West Bank. He sounds the alarm for the sake of Jewish life itself, that we should speak out forcefully against Israeli state terror in Gaza, as documented in +972 Magazine, “The Genocide Through Their Eyes”, the narrative from the perspective of the victims.

He admits a pervasive truth: “The sense of being an am segulah, a people with a special character and mission, is so deeply ingrained within us that it does not depart, even in our attempt to secularize. Instead, as we have seen, it can turn into something ugly.”

Can Judaism Be Saved: Its Future After Gaza is a deeply enigmatic volume for all that is not said. This week I had a phone conversation with a long-time friend, one of Green’s students, who founded Jerusalem’s first progressive synagogue forty-five years ago. I had put off calling him, because, as a Jewish leader who made his home in the diaspora, I couldn’t imagine what I could say to him across an ocean that would be comforting. That so many had been wantonly killed, and that his society was now thrown into convulsion and so avowedly in denial of the pain dealt to people whose lands were being stolen and whose lives trampled upon, made it impossible for me to find the right words. He knew all this. What made it worse was that he immediately bemoaned that all his children had permanently left the country and taken his grandchildren to live elsewhere. Still, his Jewish community, his shul, was a source of strength.

At this point, the stage set remains the same, whether we live in Israel or in the diaspora. We Jews are living here and there, struggling in the womb. We’re excruciatingly unformed. Some of us lurch backward, in a revanchist attempt to move the props in a way that’s shallow or ill-conceived. The audience is filing in, they’ve paid for the show, and they have expectations. It’s about a Judaism that makes sense, as much as it is about Israel. What comes next, how the characters will recite their lines or break character, is yet to unfold. Can we build a drama that’s rich and compelling? Can Jewish conversations go on?

There must be freedom to choose a path of holiness. We are all responsible.

An intermediary personality can play a important role in a story. The literary critic György Lukács once wrote that a fiction writer “must elevate chance to the inevitable”. In a certain way, the same holds for the work of journalists who cover stories we otherwise wouldn’t have known about or imagined. Larger forces at work are lent clarity.

In the Torah portion Chayei Sarah, Abraham’s servant Eliezer is sent out to find a wife for Isaac. It’s a request that is brokered unilaterally, and Eliezer is immediately confronted with a predicament: what happens if he fails? How should he find the beloved, and what about her would signal something fortuitous? He’s never done anything like this before.

Two facets of the story jump to the attention of the commentators. First, Eliezer nearly predicts a miracle, and it charges the pace of the narrative. He prays weirdly: Ha-k’ray na lifanay hayom. Roughly, it means: “Please let things happen accidentally on my behalf today”. (Genesis 24:12)

Included in his magical wish are the “coincidental” criteria and signs by which he’ll know that the right woman is she.

And, if that were not enough, the Torah twice lays out the stages that lead up to the miracle’s consummation, including Eliezer’s worries, his prayer, and his, would you have guessed it, coming upon Rebecca. Eliezer takes notes. He’s like the driver who strategizes the trip to the barbecue with extended family, anticipates the route numbers and exits from the freeways in advance, considers traffic snarls, makes it a quarter of an hour faster than everyone else. . . and then, when he arrives, he spends yet another fifteen or twenty minutes in the driveway recapturing for a (male) audience (it’s males who gather with their beers) how he did it. Each shortcut is pure genius, they agree, and in the meantime it’s gotten much later.

The Torah, usually laconic, tight-lipped to a fault, gives the reader two repetitious accounts of the mission. To the commentator Chizukuni, the Genesis storyteller’s elevated self-consciousness about what otherwise might have been read as a contingent series of events, in fact, demonstrates that Eliezer’s coming upon Rebecca was nothing short of a divine marvel all along. (on Genesis 24:42 and 50)

Things work out. . . Or contrariwise, there’s a longer storyline that can explain why they often don’t.

November 2nd was the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. I didn’t know about it, it may be because reporters don’t like to make themselves the story. Nevertheless, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) does heroic work. Supporting the work of unfettered journalism goes hand in hand with the protection of human rights, because the more we hear the stories, the less likely we’ll dismiss the people and the difficulties brought to light as bad luck. And powerful reporting not only puts us in touch with others, it heightens our respect for their uncommon decency in the face of suffering. We marvel, when we recognize a bit of ourselves in them.

Just watch the 2024 documentary “State of Silence” about four Mexican journalists who describe the embedded corruption in a narco-state, the disappearances of citizens who speak out or refuse to go along with misrule. Despite risking their own lives, the storytellers won’t succumb to omnipresent fear.

One of them responds to the kind of disingenuous gripes we’re used to from the Trump administration about media bias against the government. He says, “We give people the microphone so their voices echo everywhere and travel outside the borders and the corners where they’re being affected. That way they can be noticed, a solution can be found, and people can make their own judgments to demand action from the authorities.”

And there’s always danger: “While everyone else runs away from the fire, we run straight to it to see what’s happening.”

As El-Fasher in western Sudan has recently fallen to the Rapid Support Forces, backed by the United Arab Emirates, citizen journalists have gone silent. Thirteen journalists have gone missing. Three female journalists were raped, and a number of male journalists are being held hostage or are no longer being heard from.

We are now familiar with the horrible murder of Shireen Abu Aklah, a household name and a prominent Palestinian American reporter for Al-Jazeera Arabic. In May 2022, she was shot in the head, as she covered an Israeli army action in the West Bank town of Jenin. Just two weeks ago, the New York Times reported the likelihood of a coverup by the Biden administration, and that an internal US military examination indicated that a sniper whose bullet casing was located and examined had to know he was shooting directly at a journalist. Nothing was in the way. According to a now retired, high-ranking American military reviewer, it was deliberate.

The list goes on. Bangladesh, Syria, Serbia, Iran, Georgia and Azerbaijan threaten journalists and hold them under arrest. And let’s not, for a minute, minimize the peril in our own country for trans journalists who attempt to set the record straight on abysmal medical care for this specific demographic. Without their reporting, no one else will persevere to get the truth in an environment that has erased even the nonbinary gender designation on passports. With 40.1% of 120,400 youth between the ages of thirteen and seventeen living in twenty-seven states that ban gender-affirming care, it would be a travesty exponentially more horrible if no one reported on the deprivation of care.

CPJ understands that good journalists connect the dots, which is easier said than done. And, when the safety of journalists is compromised, it’s an indication that we dwell within an authoritarian context.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise, though it’s urgently reported by Nicole Foy In the October 16th issue of ProPublica, that more than 170 American citizens have been detained by immigration agents - and “dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot.” A preponderant number of these were alleged by our own administration to have assaulted the agents, but whose cases were thrown out. This weekend the New York Times in conjunction with the Independent Forensic Expert Group has detailed the torture that Venezuelan deportees alleged by the Trump administration to be terrorists received upon their arrival in the notorious Salvadoran CECOT prison. They were made pawns by our own autocrats, but their stories along with poignant photographs can change hearts and minds.

Consistent with the political discourse on the right, it has become de rigeur for advanced militaries to close war zones to the media, to shape a prevailing narrative and to keep the truth at a distance. Israel works this to a charm, and much of Israeli society has consequently divested itself from knowing what is happening to half its population. The Trump administration is shielding its own preparations for war or misleading the public with regard to its intentions in Venezuela.

Keeping things under wraps helps dictators achieve what they want, and it helps them dispense with a human rights agenda entirely.

Who knew this better than the Russian Jewish journalist Vasily Grossman, whose own work was censored during Stalin’s and Krushchev’s periods? He nevertheless recorded a merciless account of the Soviet system, a harbinger for our own dismantling of American democracy today. Having witnessed the great famine in Ukraine, a state instituted catastrophe during the 1930s, and Stalin’s paranoiac decimation of the first Bolshevik generation leaders, he together with one or two other ethnic Jews managed to continue reporting for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star).

Grossman had attained considerable stature as part of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee during the Second World War. As one of many writers and artists who were primarily dedicated communists first and only Jews afterward, he was still among the earliest reporters to see Treblinka and he collected eyewitness accounts for the Nuremberg Trials. And yet he also watched, as Stalin subsequently murdered his fellow Jewish writers and artists once he deemed them extraneous. Grossman wrote scathingly, in painstaking stages, about the substitution of political insanity for revolution.

He was unable to get his works published in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. He died of stomach cancer in 1964, and his part-novel, part-journalistic account entitled Everything Flows, written only three years earlier, was finally smuggled out to the West in microfilm in the mid-1980s.

In the account, Grossman’s fictionalized character travels in a railway carriage to Siberia, and is removed physically, although not spiritually, from his home village and his family for twenty-nine years. In it he writes: “Sometimes he tried to remember the face of his mother, and his heart would ache. . . and there would be tears in his tightly closed eyes - just as in childhood, when you try to look at the sun.” In real life, the writer’s mother, having remained behind in her Berdichev home (in Ukraine), was murdered by the Germans. His excruciating story, replete with ironies, demands to be told.

In every case, journalists who stay with the truth, however painful it may be, “run straight to the fire”.

Eliezer, in trekking on a journey to discover Rebecca, can’t know what will happen. He’s nervous, insufficiently tested, and he’s at the mercy of powers larger than himself. His assignment is comparatively benign, but that’s in large part because all goes well in the end.

For the moment, all he can do, in the words of Lukács, is “elevate what’s chance to the inevitable.” He asks to connect the dots. The problem is that it’s often the case that what’s inevitable is not at all what we want to learn.

But it’s also true that in finding the young woman he looks for at the well, and then later on meeting her family and retelling how it happened, Eliezer discovers something else more important. It happens for us too. We readers get a richer and more vibrant picture of Rebecca, formerly unknown. She is powerful and dignified, and our hearts are glowing. What more can we ask for from the people who tell us the stories we need to hear?

Senator Jeff Merkley stood at the rostrum, spoke for twenty-two hours and thirty-seven minutes on the Senate floor. Then he nearly keeled over. “I didn’t want the momentum of that to die down,” he said, in reference to the millions of people who protested nationwide at the No Kings demonstrations.

But who paid attention? And why didn’t his moral eloquence evoke a response?

Speaker Johnson rejects calls to reopen the House, and the president has gone on another golf trip, while forty-two million Americans can’t get food.

It’s reported that one Supreme Court justice on the left may be foregoing her hesitancy to write as acerbically as her two other more forthright colleagues in her own dissents. Elena Kagan joins with their opinions, but she uses more careful language. But in the view of Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, as reported in the October 31st New York Times, her moderation ultimately amounts to a process of normalizing the way things are happening. Kagan awaits the “cataclysmic case” to speak out, but “it may be too late,” the professor worries.

Legal scholar Duncan Hosie, interviewed in The New York Review of Books, writes that “Trump has enthralled the Court’s conservative justices, and their derelictions have emboldened him.” He adds that “Equity in the Anglo-American legal tradition arose to create flexible remedies that could be responsive to evolving circumstances and challenges,” but that these justices have failed by “circumscribing equity” solely to the period of the nation’s founding. Not just a contradiction in terms, but, in effect, an ideational disruption.

In this week’s Torah portion Vayera, Abraham argues with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. God had proposed to destroy the cities, and Abraham presented his case in the name of justice. “What if there are fifty righteous people in the mix?” he asked. “Would you still decimate them?” Abraham was not just persuasive, but relentless. He whittled it down to forty, and from there all the way to ten. But then, he left it at that.

Why did he quit at ten?

The Torah offers a clue: Va-yelech Adonai ka’asher keelah l’daber el Avraham, v’Avraham shav lim’komo. “God departed as Abraham was finishing speaking, and Abraham returned to his (own) place.” (Genesis 18:33)

The rabbis elaborate: “An advocate, as long as the judge shows him a receptive look, will plead his case. When the judge gets up to leave, the advocate goes silent.” So does political speech get shut down, or to say the least, its possibilities are significantly narrowed. (Genesis Rabba 49:14)

As in Vayera, there’s a dearth of faith in humanity’s future that’s reflected right now in our government’s path and predetermined by a compromised justice system.

In his novel Herscht 07769, the Nobel Prize for Literature winner László Krasznahorkai brings his main character, a savant with no known kin or provenance, into a provincial town in the former East Germany. As becomes apparent, the place is adjacent to Weimar, where fascists were once prominent, and in this postmodern setting, neo-Nazi cells haunt cash-strapped municipalities. The people who live there get their glimpses of excitement from gossip at the lunch counter or they fall asleep during a mediocre local symphony concert, but there are violent incidents after dark that intrude.

It’s disturbing, “it all seemed very suspect to them how no one seemed to be in control, they weren’t used to this and never thought it possible: no hands holding the reins, but of course, someone is holding them, they reassured themselves. . .”

Although the main character is exceedingly vulnerable, we can see a bit of ourselves in him, in that he’s a novice with common elementary technology, and he’s gullible and even available to people with questionable motives. The townsfolk mind their own business, a postmaster complains to his wife who works alongside him that she tries to make the tasks more entertaining than necessary, “the post office is no cabaret”. The men routinely throw back a whisky or several beers and go to sleep early, but no one sleeps well.

It’s Germany - everyone appreciates timeliness and predictability, but increasingly, there are these beatings and deaths, and people are locking their doors. The world is coming undone, and it leaves them feeling morose. They bicker and they occasionally pour themselves out to the savant, the lone soul who, without a clue about the trust he’s placed in someone suspicious, is beloved and generous with his labors on everyone’s behalf. Because he’s credulous, he’s pitied for his simplicity, and he’s inoculated against the brutal people who have recruited him at night. His physical strength is at odds with the crippling insecurity of a forgotten hamlet.

“The fear was so strong that it would have only been disturbed by the truth,” one of the characters says.

Krasznahorkai wrote the story, a run-on sentence, translated from the original Hungarian, during the pandemic, but it’s about a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah. What’s left of us, when we begin to feel as if there are no remedies, or that the people in charge no longer care?

There’s one more commentary on Abraham’s standoff with God over the destruction of the cities that may shine a light on a path forward. It belongs to Ovadia Sforno, who lived in Italy during the first part of the sixteenth century. He observes that (in the verse above) it wasn’t until the Supreme Judge left his company that Abraham himself went home. V’lo his’peek kavanato li’n’vuah, Sforno writes. Abraham had not yet satisfied his own desire for prophetic insight.

It bears mentioning that Sforno contrasts Abraham with Cain, in the tale of the first murder, where the Torah says: “Cain left God’s presence.” In other words, it was the world’s prototype sociopath who left the conversation about the world’s fate first. (Genesis 4:16)

What comes next for us, and who will save this world in which corrupt leaders throw justice to the wind?

It’s prophetic: Like Abraham, we’ll hang in there as long as possible. Even if there are less than ten righteous people, among the thousands being detained, deported, harassed and neglected by our current leaders, they certainly deserve justice. In fact, each and every one of the people who awaits justice in this world should have their day in court. And only then will the world go on, and the conversation about how to make things right resumes.

You say you’d like to get some distance from what’s going down, get away from it. Oh, to be clear, you’re not interested in breaking things in the process, shattering norms. I know, for sure, we’re in need of new paradigms, and you’re wondering how we’re up to the task of embracing them, thinking clearly.

Old thinking gets shoved aside, and some people will offer substitutes, nutty ideas, overnight. Jarringly.

Something about a ballroom?

Abraham made a break, he left the people in the beltway he came into contact with all the time. According to the midrash, he broke his father’s idols, knocked them off their pedestals. You could say that he crashed their systems.

But did he offer a critique that arose in haste?

The Ba’al Shem Tov thinks that some introspection was involved. It would take years and require him to peel away his own defenses. Or, possibly, it would come about more quickly, but with quiet consideration. Being a product of a bad culture leaves us more susceptible to corrosive influences, the crassness, the “husks”, as the kabbalists called them, or what we come to think of these days as negativity. So there’s upside to leaving, putting obsolete ideas to bed. (Keter Shem Tov 1:15)

The rabbis see in the fact that in the leadup to Lech Lecha, which gets read this week, Abraham is actually already on the road, and he’s not all alone, as we might have thought. Wonder of wonders, his whole family had packed up, his father Terach, the idol-maker, included. They’re taking a trip with him.

So there’s momentum, ancestral precursors to the famous story. Think about it - where did each of us learn to topple lousy ideas? Did our gumption arise by itself? Without help?

Still, it’s in this new location, (he’s moved from the Bronx out to Queens) that the child gets up in the middle of the night and shatters these insensate figurines, and he even has a conversation with his dad who manufactures idols for a living. He’s up in the old man’s face.

Full of exasperation, Terach says to Abraham, “Hey, did you really have to do that? We all knew, it was obvious after all, that these trophies don’t signify anything. What got into your head?” (Genesis Rabba 38:13)

The rabbis provide no response and the conversation dies. Leave it at that. Or. . .

Perhaps it wasn’t a full bore attack on the talismans of the dominant culture. In fact, a polemic did arise within the biblical and subsequent rabbinic texts, it threw shade at the patrons that erected bloated monuments, but it was discreet. In many cases, the writers satirized worship objects created in a woodshed or an artist’s studio. They conveyed the underlying message that a true deity wouldn’t need the help of a blast furnace or a chisel.

It was an elaborate dialectic that was far-reaching, in terms of what the Jewish political culture could vocalize, especially as Rome came to power and was everywhere. Smashing idols is one thing, but structuring social habits and temperaments in the face of quixotic emperors and their invading forces is another. The tax collectors had watchful eyes.

How do you reject a system that’s prone, already, to breaking everything? Iconoclasm’s only half the story.

The Columbia historian Seth Schwartz, in his book Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism, examines rabbinic attitudes towards the shamelessness and adulation of Roman potentates. What did the benefactors of cities across the empire hope to achieve by force? Why did they build large ornate edifices and have flattering epigrams carved into their cornices? What did the rabbis have to say about their grandiosity, and how did they contrast their own Torah-based veneration of respected teachers? When gladiators fought in a large arena, did these Jews cower - or did they themselves join in the spectacle?

Did they break the idols? Did they make fun of the show? And, for us, are there lessons to be learned, in terms of this imperial moment we’re living through? So many aspects of Jewish political culture are seen through the prism of Rome, and we can identify with the way they lampooned the blatherers of the day.

Schwartz treats texts specifically from the ancient Palestinian (as opposed to the Babylonian) Jewish period that were edited and redacted in what’s known as the Talmud Yerushalmi. Teasing out some of the critical perspectives, he recognizes that rabbinic attitudes were largely circumscribed by the dominant public context. It’s not to say that third and fourth century rabbinic voices acquiesced to egotistical bombast, but their response was careful and sharp at the same time. (Yerushalmi Mo’ed Katan 3:7)

Even more importantly, the Jewish response was to borrow from the Roman system of patronage and to redirect it. The rabbis stood apart, even while they knew they’d need to grapple with models of government that posed difficulties, and the non-rabbinic Jewish masses that were complicit. They’d reconfigure themselves.

Schwartz writes: “. . . [S]everal stories indicate that [the rabbis] regarded the construction of massive synagogues by individuals with disdain: far from demonstrating the piety or securing the memorialization of the donors, they were a waste of money that might otherwise have been used to support Torah study.” He adds, however, that the rabbis emulated Roman social etiquette vis à vis the deference given master teachers, and the memorialization of their sayings and insights.

The new political paradigms evolved subtly.

Today, the East Wing is bulldozed overnight, the interior designer-in-chief reveals his palatial objectives, there will be more gold, and he tinkers with various schemes about how to pay for it. He’ll put up a $300 million ballroom, and without a doubt envisions butlers and servants rushing about, while his truckling lords of industry and congress will go along with it. While he’s at it, he’ll start a war on another continent, to offset overheated domestic consternation. Even worse, Jews in finance will help to fund it. (Can we talk about it?)

Back to his well-documented fascination with gold. . . Freud compared this particular infatuation with a child’s adoration for feces. “They refuse to empty their bowels,” he wrote. As Simon Van Zuylen-Wood reflected in The New Republic (back in August 2012), “Freud had an idea that in the unconscious mind, that money and perhaps gold in particular, was equivalent to some kind of shit.”

We can see this tendency, given the vulgar A.I.-generated video our president disseminated in response to No Kings Day. His scatological obsessions show his parsimoniousness with respect to good faith civil deliberation. His predilection is, instead, to dump his pique, a veritable diarrhea of scorn on his enemies. SNAP benefits can wait for the estimated one in eight Americans who need them. He sets the gold standard.

Back to Abraham. . . The rabbis say that he’s a “new creation”, someone with an imagination. He fully understands that the narcissist’s gold filigree, his orange tumescence, clay or cellulite, doesn’t feel, see, or digest what people are saying.

Things won’t be the same as they were once this narcissist and the others are out of the way. The world order will be changed, technology will hypercharge fraudulence, but wisdom will be in demand. We’ll go to a place that we cannot yet imagine, not all bad. The story will move forward. . . and so will the next generation find a way to “be a blessing”.

The rain comes down harder. No end to it. The grifters. The cruelty.

There’ll be no tunnel, after all, into Manhattan. The trains will have to use the one hundred fifteen year old ones to get into the city, an ungrateful Democratic city. Kristi Noem will have two new jets at the cost of $172 million. The president will travel to Hungary to meet with his old friend Putin, to deal for (and cut up) Ukraine. He’s sending the CIA into Venezuela, good for Chevron. Who cares about Sudan, and don’t bother me with the Palestinians. Adam Schiff’s a target, and Letitia James will get what’s coming to her. A live-fire missile show at Camp Pendleton near San Diego during the nationwide No Kings demonstrations kept the busy Interstate 5 closed. “I would not be the man I am today,” JD Vance said, were it not for his time in the Marines. He spoke to fellow service members, passing on the message that “Donald Trump loves you” and he would get them paid “despite the Schumer shutdown.” Donald Trump was at Mar-a-Lago playing golf.

Portland sure is a hellhole. Lions and tigers and bears, 40-50,000 of them. Chicago remains “the most dangerous city in the world”. Oregon Public Radio reports that “the phone has been ringing off the hook” between last Monday and Thursday at the rapid hotline where reports come in sighting ICE agents in the streets. George Santos, a liar and a fraud, gets out of jail, but, hey, it’s a matter of principle.

We’re drenched. But the storm moves away for millions of marchers across the country, (the New York Times downplays it, makes you wonder), who were civil and polite and resignedly opposed to an authoritarian. And the weather doesn’t make a difference in locations where there was rain, we shrug it off.

M. Gessen has written, in the October 16th edition of the same New York Times, about the work of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It’s a long column, but what’s important to note is that Gessen is usually the last person to give a cheery account of how things are, but in this case there’s cause, if not for optimism, then perhaps to register an inflection point.

True, the United States, once a leader in the global arena when it came to advocating for the most vulnerable people in the world, has in the Trump era, for all intents and purposes, abandoned them. Our government has defunded programs overnight for which Congress allocated money and which the State Department has bet over decades would make a difference for the world’s most vulnerable.

But Albanese, a career human rights advocate, is picking up on signs that change is in the wind.

No question, in terms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, she sees a “carceral continuum”, with regard to how people who reside in the West Bank live in a militarized zone, where their movement is restricted and frequent home invasions and detentions without due process destroy families. It’s common knowledge that settlers brazenly attack farmers and shepherds with impunity. Trump presses Netanyahu, doesn’t like him, but there’s no money in it, as long as his friends in the Gulf states look away. And there’s continual obliteration in Gaza.

But in the article, Gessen zeroes in on one specific aspect of diplomacy by kleptocrats. It has caught the eye of the champions for the disenfranchised. It should come as little surprise that in every case, the world’s wealthiest are seeking to pilfer from others, but these local constituencies are no longer taking the assaults lying down, and battles in court may be turning the tide.

The weather’s been harsh these last months, but meteorology is unpredictable.

While our president is in office, corporate executives are making out like bandits. It happens in the Congo, with an Anglo-French oil company that extracts the goods while damaging an Atlantic coast sensitive ecosystem. Or there’s the $20 billion that all of a sudden gets sent to Argentina’s Milei, about whom Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!, in an interview with the journalist Pablo Calvi, covers the defunding of his country’s universities and the wholesale rejection of workers’ rights. Calvi also observes that Sam Altman is preparing to sink $25 billion into an A.I. center in Patagonia. And The US is enmeshed in the Congo, as well, where it is mining cobalt, lithium and gold.

But Albanese believes that a new resistance is building. Certainly, the crowds out across the country on No Kings Day indicate that Trump’s thin masquerade as a people’s leader is fraying. The universities are rejecting his proposed “compacts”. And if he’s going to embrace Putin, and if he says that Turkey’s Erdoğan “has been a friend of mine for a long time”, people will pay attention. And when he opens the gates to cryptocurrency deals with the United Arab Emirates, as reported in the September 15th New York Times, he’s bound to watch his credibility as a red state no-nonsense friend of the little man decline.

It takes a while to connect the dots, but Albanese’s own experience growing up outside of Naples and watching the Mafia murder two judges, and then having witnessed the mob brought down, leaves her more sanguine about the weather up ahead. She sees a case in Sweden as a pivotal example, in which corporate executives are facing prosecution for aiding and abetting war crimes in another country. The crimes are ongoing in Sudan, but the principle of holding international corporate players responsible for human rights abuses is very important.(https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2023/12/18/unprecedented-corporate-executives-of-anbsp-company-face-prosecution-for-aiding-and-abetting-war-crimes)

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, a warming trend nonetheless. . .

Six weeks ago, the White House Deputy Press Secretary, Abigail Jackson, was asked about a string of court losses for Trump, but she had this to say: “Here’s the reality: with almost twenty Supreme Court victories, the Trump administration’s policies have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court as lawful despite an unprecedented number of legal challenges and unlawful lower court rulings. And the winning will continue.”

Maybe. Or maybe not. When the rain comes down in sheets so thick that even the news outlets drown out anything that resembles a more measured, even sane, approach to politics, people will look for cloud breaks for themselves. The Guardian had no problem at all reporting that “millions across all 50 states” marched on Saturday. The people in the streets have had it.

A cartoon in the October 20th New Yorker features two businessmen walking in stride, dressed alike in drab suits, with identical square jaws and rectangular briefcases held at the same angle. One says to the other: “I need more structure in my life than just being told what to do and what to say by the people who control me.” We’re overdue for a barometric change.

This week, in parashat Noach, it’s Noah and the Flood. The Ark rides the waves above a world that’s become corrupt, run by kleptocrats. Things have gotten so bad that it’s caused God to have second thoughts about Creation. Letting human beings run their own affairs has not turned out well, and with the exception of the species floating inside the boat, the Holy One is ready to call it a day.

But after the endless deluge, the story takes a turn. God has a change of heart, and things get interesting,

In certain ways, this story is framed by ambivalence. There’s a fickle deity, of course, but there’s a wager about how the cosmos can endure significant moral lapses. In fact, Noah himself is a questionable candidate to bring the world back together again, but so would you or I be! His name itself is a linchpin in the narrative.

Umberto Cassuto, a wonderful twentieth century Italian commentator, was extraordinarily sensitive to the Torah’s poetics, and his focus on the first moments after the floodwaters have abated may be prescient. In Genesis 8:21, God relents from punishing humanity. In a play on words Va-yarach Adonai et rey-ach ha-nichoach, “God smelled the pleasing/fragrant odor (of Noah’s sacrificial gift)”, Noah’s name (Noach) is a homonym. He smells good!

And, when God reconsiders humanity’s possibilities, says Cassuto, the portion of the phrase that the Torah employs is identical to the wording earlier on, when God regretted Creation. In each circumstance, before and after the flood, there’s el leebo: a reckoning or an appeal reaching inside to “God’s heart”. There’s an internal conversation. What first comes undone within can be mended. (Genesis 6:6 and 8:21)

Another commentary by the Netziv, Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, mentions a subtlety about the change of weather. V’haya b’an’anee anan al ha-aretz v’nir’a-ta ha-keshet be-anan. “And when I clouded the earth with a cloud, the rainbow would appear.” (Genesis 9:14)

The Netziv says that the general rule on a cloudy day is that the cloud cover persists, and it’s, relatively speaking, only for a brief interlude that a rainbow will appear and people can miss it.

Let’s watch for the breaks in the clouds, and celebrate the full spectrum of humanity. No Kings. No Kleptocracy.

Heaven and earth. They’re in the first line of Bereshit. It’s what’s called a hendiadys. It’s like soup to nuts, the whole works. Everything. It’s right now.

In Psalm 115, part of the Hallel we daven these eight days of Sukkot, however, it says ha-shamayim shamayim l’Adonai v’haaretz natan liv’ney adam. The heavens belong to God, and the earth is given to human beings.

God’s up above and far away, and leaves the chaos of the earth to us. Whether or not there’s a residual divine concern in what we do depends on one’s brand of theology.

Scenes of families being reunited, desperately, with their loved ones, pale and gaunt, are being flashed on screens as I write this. No doubt, similar scenes of jubilation will flash on screens, when Palestinians bring home their own loved ones. And then there will be extraordinary mourning, as coffins are lifted up and brought out of Gaza. These scenes, of course, release the pain and relief of two years of bloodshed. The terrain of destroyed homes and cities is a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

Heaven and earth.

A couple of days ago, Jared stood at a podium like a stick puppet. Steve Witkoff stumbled, giggled nervously, he’s no public speaker. When he mentioned Trump’s name, the crowd roared its applause, but then he said Netanyahu, and was caught off-guard when the crowd booed. There was sustained booing, nothing the real estate magnate could have imagined, and it threw him. Trump yes, Netanyahu no. Was this heaven and earth?

And let’s not forget Ivanka, she’s Jewish too, married to one of these deal-makers who are heirs to Holocaust survivors, who embraced the crowd’s lavish greetings, the likes of which they have never been accustomed to from overwhelmingly liberal people.

Jared, wooden and unsure of himself, stood in for his father-in-law, the aspiring Nobel Peace Prize winner, a felon. Growing up, he attended a self-described modern Orthodox “religious Zionist” yeshiva. Later on, his father, also a felon, was convicted for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Both Jared and Witkoff have made their fortunes in commercial real estate, Witkoff purchasing mortgages on properties headed for foreclosure. They’re no strangers to cutting things up, walking away with a haul. Nor is the man of the hour, he’ll ramble on at the Knesset very soon. Blessed are the peacemakers, spread over us your tent of peace.

But two years of destruction of human life and property and hopes comes down like a thud. While the deal has been brokered, heaven looks down on earth, chagrined. International players come in for credit, they’ll clean up, walk away, but human beings with shaky hands, shattered dreams, will quiver and writhe with fear and rage. Ivanka may pose for pictures, but the earth will groan and heaven will seethe. Can we leave things the way they are?

The Haaretz columnist Nir Hasson writes that two disasters have taken place. “The first disaster fomented a trauma whose reverberations will be felt for decades to come. But the second disaster destroyed the foundations on which the State of Israel was built: the international legitimacy, the diplomatic and economic relations with the Arab world and the solidarity within Israeli society.”

For some of our grandparents, it was heaven and earth at one point, all mixed up, but it was still possible. I don’t buy the settler colonialism tag. That’s for historians to argue about, but poets, for all their grandiloquence, do count. A concession: the hendiadys is in tough shape these days.

On Simchat Torah, two nights from now, this evening in Israel, the Torah gets rewound. Things are in chaos, though the rabbis in the midrash have a different take about heaven and earth. You see, they pointed out that the descriptive language of the Mishkan, this strange tabernacle conceptualized as God’s abode on earth, was identical to the biblical language used for Creation. In other words, they staked a claim on the possibility that God does at times dwell here, within us. At first, in fact, it was a downright frightening idea, to have divinity living so close. But long ago, before Jews got involved in lucrative commercial real estate deals, we began to celebrate our political imagination. Who would have thought: heaven and earth in this tumult together? (Midrash Tanchuma Pekudei 2)

What Witkoff and the Kushner dolls didn’t yet understand is what that means. It’s not just that the work is only in its infancy, and that “the players” will come in and put up their hotels and convention centers, they’ll send in the engineers and security guards, the armed troops, the cement mixers, of course. No, it’s not just that they’ll roll out the maps and blueprints. Sure, they’ll handle the bidding process, there will be money to be made.

No, it’s not about that. If the project is to succeed, it’s going to require much more. And when they stood there looking dazed in Hostage Square, they probably hadn’t given much consideration to heaven and earth.

We need to bensch gomel and thank God right now. We need to let out a collective sigh, shed our tears. We need to heave and cry for the loss of life, pour out our deep grief.

But keep in mind that the next lines of the psalm read: Lo ha-meytim y’hal’luyah v’lo kol yordei du’mah. The dead cannot praise God, not the ones who descend into silence. Va’anachnu n’varech Yah, mey’atah v’ad olam. We are the ones to make blessings, from now until forever. . .

It’s up to us. It will take forever, well beyond the first stage blueprints. If we are to understand anything about the holiday on the calendar, it’s that Bereshit means in the beginning. It will take writing a new story, a different kind of creation myth, otherwise the pain will recycle itself. Arising out of tohu va-vohu, if a world in which two peoples are to get along with one another, if they are to dispossess themselves of weapons and air out distrust and grievances, if they are to broker the agreements for a livable future, they’ll need to move heaven and earth. They’ll need to agree to the freedom of mobility and the recognition that refugees can come home, and that checkpoints and righteous fundamentalists on either side can no longer have a monopoly.

It will require a new Torah. Not the old one that sends God off to a faraway destination, while chieftains make off with the goods below.

Our hostages finally go free, Baruch Ha-Shem. And thousands of Palestinians imprisoned, many for no reason other than that they were rounded up, uncharged with any crime, will come home. In the meantime, the land is still held hostage. The real work might begin, but not with the people who pull the strings still in power.

People wonder all the time what should come next? Is there any solution to the conflict? Yes, if people share the land. Yes, if there’s a democracy. And, needless to say, if our president is involved, he’ll have precious little to do with any of that. If there’s justice in the world, people can dance on Simchat Torah.

The Izbitzer Rebbe said that heaven stood for Machshava, the Mind. And earth, for our deeds. When heaven and earth work together, there’s no telling what we can do. But when they work separately, well, we’re not much better than commercial real estate agents.

Dance for heaven and earth.

Not just for Israel. Not just for Palestine. But One Land for All. A pipedream, yes. The only dream. Not up and down. Again, we’ll begin to tell the story.