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Open Letter to My Students 80: What I Believe About Israel

Posted on July 24, 2025 | 1 comment

After my latest Open Letter on the generation split among Jews, regarding Israel, I have been asked what I would say, were I to be in dialogue with those who do not think as I do. So here goes…

At stake are three questions:

1. Do Jews even have a right to a nation state? 

2. If so, where? 

3. Given that they have such a state, and conceding that a Jewish state (like all states) must guarantee their citizens’ safety, how should that state prosecute its current war?

Would-be Jewish critics must first concede that it is the Israelis, not Diaspora Jews, who were massacred on October 7; it is they, not we, whose lives depend on the war-time decisions that we discuss from the comfort of our studies and dinner tables. Still, the ripple effect is impacting Jews everywhere. We all have a stake not just in Israel’s survival, but in the kind of state that Israel is. It is painful watching it move implacably toward excommunication as a rogue state in the community of nations. Also, Israel’s policies impact anti-Semitism toward Jews in general. Finally, Israel came into being as a Jewish state, not just an Israeli state. Jews world-wide have the right to an opinion.

With that in mind, I begin with Question 3: Israel’s war in Gaza. 

If you read deeply about past Israel-Arab wars, you cannot but marvel at  the complexity of military decisions and how little we outsiders knew at the time. So too now: lacking military expertise ourselves, we must draw conclusions from a host of rival reports, some reliable and some not. I give greater credence to the free press in Israel than to reports from within Gaza that are subject to totalitarian Hamas propaganda. It matters, then, that many reliable Israeli voices, some of them in the military and security establishment itself, suggest that the war is no longer tactical but punitive, political, or driven by right-wing ideologues intent on driving the Arabs out altogether.

To complicate matters, Hamas leaders, sitting comfortably nowhere near the war zone, are happy to see the war continue. Even as I write this, international negotiators from Qatar itself are rejecting Hamas proposals as being unworthy of even bringing to the table. So peace may be impossible, no matter what Israel does, but more bombing and killing, more population displacements, and the non-stop demolition of infrastructure that provides food and medical care are looking increasingly suspect. 

So in Question 3, I am increasingly critical of Israel’s government and its right-wing coalition partners who sometimes admit outright that their goal is to make good their biblically based “right” to own it all. “From the river to the sea” is a despicable phrase no matter who says it, Arab or Jew. 

More troubling are Questions 1 and 2, where critics deny the very right to have a Jewish state; especially on the biblical land that was once Judea/Israel, and then renamed by Rome as Palaestina (Palestine).  

Their most strident objection is that Israel is the fruit of imperialistic colonialism. But just the reverse is the case. If anything, Jews are the indigenous people to the area. To be sure, the Amorites, Jebusites, and so on were there first, but that was in pre-antiquity, akin to the multiple tribes that preceded classical Rome. Jews are to Judea as Romans are to Rome. Dig deep enough in Israel’s soil and you get biblical cities, Maccabean homes, and ancient synagogues. The return of Jews to the biblical and rabbinic Jewish land is a lesson in anti-colonialism, even though their internationally approved right to return to part of it does not entitle them to claim it all.

True, the return was facilitated by colonial powers. But so too were the Arab states that came into being simultaneously: not just Israel, but Syria, Iraq, and Jordan too were colonial inventions, part of the 1916 pact whereby Francois Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for England unfurled a map of the Ottoman empire to carve a set of arbitrary states out of it. 

In the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, all these just-being-born states fought not only to defeat one another but to expand territory as well. Jordan hankered after the entire West Bank. Iraq sought parts of the Galilee all the way to Haifa. Egypt dreamed of owning the Negev and the Mediterranean coast. 

Yes, contrary to the angelic picture offered many of us in synagogue religious schools, we now know that Israel too sought territorial expansion. And yes too, Israel was born by an ethnic people (the Jews) seeking to return to its geographic roots, its legitimate home-land. To oppose Israel, however, but not all the other ethnically derived states that the twentieth century birthed (Rumania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and so on) is anti-Semitism. 

Still, all such states are properly held to moral standards – which I addressed above.

There is some hope – at least long-term. British foreign secretary and then prime minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) opined that nation states have interests, not friends. “Interests,” he averred, “are eternal and perpetual” but “we have no eternal allies, and no perpetual enemies.” In other words, even enemies can become allies – as we now see with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and maybe even Syria and Saudi Arabia in the near future. In time, we may see a Palestinian state as an ally – but only if both sides wish it to be so. Continued war and takeovers, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, are not the way to get to “Yes.”

Palestinians, like Israelis, want a home, but looking homeward can be good or bad, depending on where you train your vision. Neither side can look to what home once was, as if to restore some prior golden age when Muslim powers relegated Jews to subservience; or when biblical kings owned Israel/Judea, centuries before Islam was even born. We Jews cannot convince radical Islamists, but we can do the right thing ourselves. 

Israel is a proper and necessary Jewish state; it needs secure borders; it does not need more territory. 

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Open Letter to My Students 79: Mamdani Long-Term, and the Jewish Future

Posted on July 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

As intellectual Gertrude Stein lay dieing, her disciples are said to have pleaded with her, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” She responded, “What is the question?” Everything depends on the question. 

Hence, the Passover Haggadah’s “Four Children” narrative. What makes each questioner wise, evil, or naive is the question they ask.  

What question, then, should we ask about Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic party’s mayoral candidate in New York City? Wall Street wonders how a socialist mayor can run the city that is the epicenter of American capitalism. Jews agonize over an anti-Israel candidate who even advocates the “globalization” of the Intifada.  

 These are real issues, and immediate ones. But long-term, we might wonder whether the voting pattern that brought Momdani his victory spells something larger: the passing of one Jewish era and the birth of another. Trigger warning, first: if you are a baby boomer or older, you might not like the answer. 

Precincts populated by older and established Jews voted against Mamdani. Precincts where young Jews predominate voted for him. The explanations are several. Young people who suffer from New York’s high cost of living found Momdani’s populist socialism appealing. Momdani also mastered the social media by which young people follow the news. But many young Jews supported him not just despite his anti-Israel rhetoric, but because of it. 

This Jewish generational split may be temporary. But what if it is more? What if we are witnessing a genuinely historic moment: not just the end of the boomer generation’s influence but the end of the entire era. As boomers continue aging out of their influential years, the younger generations’ ambivalence about Israel may become the new norm.  

At stake is what has been called “Jewish Civil Religion,” an idea that goes back to a 1967 article (“American Civil Religion”) by sociologist Robert Bellah.[i] Bellah analyzed religion into its component parts: beliefs, sacred holidays,  sacred stories (or “myths”), a code of behavior, and so on. All of those, he said, are offered by just being American. “Americanism” is itself a sort of shadow religion to which all Americans can feel that they belong.

In 1987, Jonathan Woocher applied Bellah’s theory to American Jews.[ii] Side by side with their official Judaism, he said, Jews here are fiercely loyal to a civil Jewish religion, in which pride in Israel is central. Its sacred “myth” is the story of near destruction in the Shoah, but rebirth in the Jewish State. Its rituals include missions to Israel, or even (acting out the myth) travel first to Auschwitz and then to Israel to celebrate redemption there.

Israel in the 1980s, when Woocher wrote his book, was threatened as much as (and maybe even more than) it is today. Israelis were regularly being killed or maimed by terrorist attacks, to the point where Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But the attacks continued. A 1983 assault on an IDF base caused 60 Israeli casualties.1984 ended with the UN denouncing Israel as “not a peace loving nation.” In 1985, Israel had to down two Syrian MIGs; and sink a terrorist ship just off the coast in the Mediterranean; on October 7 of that year (yes, October 7) Palestinian terrorists hijacked a ship and then shot and dumped overboard the body of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghofer. 

But through it all, the sacred myth remained intact, because Israel still looked to be on the side of the angels. In the face of the crisis, Yitzchak Shamir (right-wing Likkud) and Shimon Peres (left-wing Labor) formed a unity government. We were shocked to hear that in Lebanon, Israeli officers looked away, while their allies, Christian militias, massacred the Muslim population in Sabra and Shatila. But almost immediately, the Knesset empowered a Supreme-court appointed commission of inquiry, which censured those involved and forced several resignations.[iii] In 1985, an Israeli court convicted west-bank settlers of terrorism and even murder. Can we imagine that happening today?

I will not address here the complex situation in Gaza, because debate over the extended war there hides more obvious and unforgivable travesties on the west bank. Israeli settlers, often aided by the IDF itself, are systematically taking over Arab land, while terrorizing and even killing its long-time owners. This wanton behavior hardly comports with our civil-religion tale of an Israel to be proud of. 

This Jewish civil religion animated the baby-boomers’ love affair with Israel. Their Gen X  children grew up with at least some familiarity with it. Not so, the millennials who supported Mamdani; they were born well after these glory years of a Jewish State with a conscience. They have probably never even heard of the Jewish civil religion from the 1980s; and if they have, they would find it laughable. 

Every generation has a window of influence, usually the period from about age 40 to 65 or 70. Boomers born in 1946 to 1964 are now 61 to 79 years old. Their Gen X children (born 1965–1980, now aged  45-60) are still a moderating bridge to what’s coming. But tomorrow will be written by generations who see Israel altogether differently. That is not just a generational turnover; it is a change of era. 

Some caveats apply. The current war may end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran so weakened, that Gaza can be rebuilt into a Palestinian partner with Israel. The Israeli electorate may at last drive out its current ruling coalition and the west-bank adventurists whom it is empowering. Maybe also, the absurdity of demanding the dismantling of a Jewish state because of so-called “colonial” beginnings will dawn on the American Jewish critics; who simultaneously may discover the vast majority of  their Israeli Jewish counterparts who supported this war because Hamas had to be destroyed, but who deplore the Jewish thugs as much as they, the American millennials, do.   

It may be too that the Jewish youth in New York are so utterly different from the rest of the country that my entire analysis is irrelevant. But I doubt it. The Mamdani phenomenon may repeat elsewhere, with other Mamdanis, and other Jews too who will attain their own era of influence while believing that Zionism is evil, and that the Israel of their parents was an illusion. That is what scares me. 

[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

[ii] Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kahan-commission-of-inquiry

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Open Letter to My Students 78: The Excellence of Excellence

Posted on May 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

I am by nature a liberal. But I read conservative authors to keep myself honest.

Anthony Kronman is such an author, whose recent book True Conservatism chides liberals for valuing equality at the expense of excellence.[i]  Surely, he reasons, we want excellence in doctors and carpenters. Why shouldn’t we expect similar excellence in simply being human? Everyone should have equal opportunity to develop human excellence, but as a matter of social policy, we should cultivate that excellence and expect it of people.

Do we have an obligation to foster a society where human excellence is the goal? Religions, certainly, would seem to say yes. The Jewish version is the adage by Hillel, “Where humanity is lacking, strive to be humane.”[ii]

The most immediate liberal objection is the cultural bias inherent in defining “humanly excellent.” We can more easily agree on what counts for excellence in doctors and carpenters (they themselves have criteria for what they do). But who is to say what counts as human excellence? 

We can reframe the question by asking how human beings are unique among animals. What is it that the evolution of human beings has uniquely outfitted us to do? 

I know of several impressive answers to that question.

The first is by Aristotle, who calls human beings rational animals. Only humans can reason their way through thick cobwebs of arguments to arrive at logical conclusions. It would follow that schools should teach the ability to reason wisely; that politicians should demonstrate the art of rational debate and deliberation; and that individuals should dedicate themselves to lives of thoughtfulness.  

Aristotle further believed in a uniquely human form of happiness, not momentary hedonism but “morally virtuous action guided by reason,”[iii] which he thought would produce the long-term sense of well-being that Greeks called eudaemonia. Human excellence lies in “the hunt for the life that is truly worth living”?[iv]

But there are other options. Human reason is an extension of our ability to manipulate language, which philosopher Ernst Cassirer saw as a complex system of symbols. For him, we humans are not so much rational, or even eudaemonia-seeking, animals, so much as we are symbol-appreciating animals. A society that values excellence would imbue its members with an appreciation of symbols — not just language, but mathematics and the various arts as well, for these too are symbolic systems that stretch our human imagination.  

But what about religion, a symbol system whose purpose is to seek the eternal, the transcendent, a “cosmic connection” in which we see the world as “shot through with joy, significance, inspiration.”[v] Hence a third view, represented most forcefully by Mircea Eliade, who pioneered the discipline called History of Religions: Human beings, he says, are religious animals. We should create societies where the search for transcendent meaning is foremost; and where the legitimate religious expression of that human urge for ultimacy can thrive. 

And finally, the view of Karl Marx, who brilliantly redefined human beings as the species that works.Marxism (untethered from Communism) is the commitment to guarantee everyone a form of work that satisfies because it is rewarded and fulfilling. The search for social excellence would transform work itself as part of that “life worth living.”

Liberals might still object that these definitions of human excellence are by white men who are part of the classic philosophical heritage which denied equality to women, condoned slavery, and colonized native peoples worldwide. And there is some truth to that. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great who “colonized” a good deal of the entire known world. Eliade once flirted with his native Rumania’s nationalist but anti-Semitic Iron Guard. Marxism was concretized in Communist states that suppressed everyone around them. As a Jew who fled Germany and denounced both hero-worship and racism, Cassirer seems the least implicated, but until Hitler came along, he certainly was part of the European intellectual establishment.  

Still, shouldn’t the claim for human excellence be judged on its own merit? 

A related charge is that advocating excellence as the ultimate human goal sounds elitist, especially in a society with chronic inequality and rampant poverty. But these human ills are heinous precisely because they run counter to the right of every person to aspire to the excellence for which being human is intended.   

What can possibly be wrong with a national agenda that demands 1. rational conversation as a path to ongoing happiness; 2. the right to be at home in the distinctively human symbol systems of language, mathematics and the arts; 3. access to religious systems that provide transcendence and religious meaning; and 4. work that is rewarded and rewarding? In fact, I see no reason why any of this need be a specifically “conservative” doctrine. Liberals too should claim as their own. 

Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher whose Jewish parents imbued her with the leftist doctrines that were commonplace among Jews who hailed from eastern Europe. Her recent book, The Left is Not Woke, attacks the woke doctrines that are currently popular on campuses and distinguishes them from true liberalism, the point of view that traces its roots to the Enlightenment, esteems rational discourse, and seeks to better the lives of human beings everywhere. 

Defining human excellence as I have may not be compatible with wokeness, but it is perfectly in keeping with Susan Neiman’s liberalism, which is my brand of liberalism too.

True liberals should demand this kind of excellence. We should insist on a national conversation on how to reframe our institutions, government, and culture to embody and to emphasize a life worth living — the virtuous, peaceful, and universal sense of human dignity toward which human equality of opportunity should aspire. 

[i] Anthony T. Kronman, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).

[ii]  Avot 2:6. Literally “Where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Avoiding the sexist “men” is difficult here. But I think I have captured the idea correctly.

[iii] A nice turn of phrase I borrow from Riin Sirkel, review of Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen (eds.), The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness(Oxford University Press, 2015). https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-quest-for-the-good-life-ancient-philosophers-on-happiness/.

[iv] Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Eds., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), Introduction, p. 14.

[v] Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge and London:  Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2024), p. xvi.

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Open Letter to My Students 77: Up or Down

Posted on May 7, 2025 | 10 comments

I think of Judaism as a tradition that prefers counting up, not down. Take the period in which we find ourselves now: s’firat ha’omer (“the counting of the omer).

Jewish history wonks who study this kind of thing know that it reflects the biblical commandment to count the days and weeks between the barley harvest (that matures on Passover) and the wheat harvest (that matures some seven weeks later at the festival of Shavuot). 

An omer is a biblical measure, one days’ worth of manna, the food dropped from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 16). But it is also the first sheaf of the barley harvest brought to the Temple (Leviticus 23:10). Josephus says it was dried, crushed, and ground up; some of it was then thrown on the altar as a sacrifice; the rest was baked and given to the priests.[i] It inaugurated the counting period that lasted until Shavuot. 

When the Temple fell in the war against Rome (70 CE) so too did the sacrifices, but the counting ritual remained and was eventually associated with certain mourning customs (a ban on weddings, for example). Medieval Jews connected the mourning with a Talmudic tale about 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiba who died during the omer as punishment for envying one another’s mastery of Torah. Other, midrashic, sources give the number as 12,000, or only 300, and do not necessarily connect it with the omer period or explain it as student envy. What came first, the mourning customs or the explanation for them, is a good question. But either way, counting of the omer has continued to this day, sometimes, in fact, called simply s’firah, “counting.”[ii]

And the point is, we count the omer by counting up, not down. 

The same is true of Hanukah candles. The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) discusses whether we should go from eight candles on day one to a single candle on day eight, or vice versa? Counting up won.

A third example is the Seder song, “Who knows One,” the point being the singularity of God. But the various verses count up: “Who knows two?” “Who knows three?” all the way to “Who knows Thirteen?”

By contrast, North American culture prefers counting down. Think of New Year’s Eve and a crowd of thousands in New York’s Times Square, waiting for the ball to descend. As midnight approaches, they count down: “10, 9, 8,” until finally “1” – and then a burst of apocalyptic joy: fireworks, applause, embraces, and kisses. It’s mania on Main Street in a million similar gatherings across the world. 

The launching of a NASA spacecraft too comes with a countdown. Who hasn’t watched TV coverage of the countless Apollos, Challengers, and Voyagers and heard “10, 9, 8…. 1 – We have liftoff.” 

Counting up or down matters. “Down” has a necessary ending: zero. Utter finality. “Up” ends arbitrarily at any number we want, but wherever we stop counting, there are more numbers waiting in the wings. “Down” delivers an absolute end, a vacuum of nothingness, the end of days, a new world aborning, the long-awaited Apocalypse, finally at hand. 

Yes, Apocalypse. Counting down is the way any number of devotees throughout history have measured off the years until a messiah was due to arrive (and then didn’t). New Year’s Eve is itself a secular version of messianic anticipation. Out with the old; in with the new. And what is our space program, if not the hyped-up hope of discovering new worlds, stretching our reach through the universe, “to go where no man has gone before,” in Star Trek lingo. 

And that, perhaps, is why Jews prefer counting up. We have been burned too many times by false messiahs. Our tradition warns against imagining we can hasten the messianic coming; the Talmud even curses anyone who thinks they know when that will be;[iii] and, frankly, given the Talmud’s bloodcurdling warnings about the period leading up to the messiah’s coming (devastation, suffering beyond measure),[iv] I’m not so sure we want even to be there. 

Mainstream Judaism’s messianism is not a single apocalyptic Armageddon. It is a cumulative piling up of good deeds; penitence for the wrongs we put out into the world; and acts of loving kindness, that whittle away at the corrosive cruelty around us. 

British Poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a sad soul, who virtually starved himself to death at age 63, despite becoming a favorite poet of his generation and receiving numerous awards for his work. He spent his last thirty years as a librarian, had a few lovers off and on, but died wifeless, childless, and friendless, with a reputation for being parsimonious, misanthropic, misogynistic, and even racist. But I read his poetry anyway – were I to measure art by the character of the artists who produce it, I’d have to forego the music of Wagner, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the stories of Roald Dahl (anti-Semites); the literature of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens (colonialists); and the writings of Flannery O’Connor (racist). So I read Philip Larkin, who had this to say:

“Always too eager for the future/ we pick up bad habits of expectancy.” And in the end, we are left “holding wretched stalks of disappointment.”[v]

So I restrain my eagerness for a revolutionary end to all that ails us; I don’t count down; I count up, postponing whatever final victory there may be some distant tomorrow. Especially in moments of despair, when it seems beyond me to effect revolutionary change, I remember how Judaism has never liked revolutions anyway, and how it prefers the strategy of regularized drops of human kindness, that can offset  an entire sea of human ugliness. 

Tonight is Wednesday May 7; 25 days, which are 3 weeks and 4 days of the omer.” Onward and upward, still counting!     

[i] Josephus, Antiquities 3:250-251.

[ii] Cf. Talmud Babli, Yebamot 62b (24,000); Ecclesiastes Rabba 11:6 and Genesis Rabba 61:3, Tanchuma Chayei Sarah 6 (300).  For the history of the omer, see Efrat Zarren-Zohar, “From Passover to Shavuot,” in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, Two Liturgical Tradition,” Vol. 6, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 71-93.

[iii] Sanhedrin 97b

[iv] Sotah 49b.

[v] Philip Larkin, “Next Please,” in Philip Larkin Poems: Selected and With an Introduction By Martin Avis(London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 24/25.

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Open Letter to My Students 75: Do I Believe in God?

Posted on April 9, 2025 | 3 comments

Google “Song, ‘I Believe’” and you get some sixty entries. The most famous dates to 1953, and has been sung repeatedly by the likes of Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Glen Campbell and Barbra Streisand. “I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard; I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word.”

Conclusion: Americans may believe in different things, but they all believe in believing. 

I am never surprised, therefore, when people ask me if I believe in God. When I pose that question at congregations where I teach or consult, most people hesitantly raise their hand, but only when given a choice of “Yes, but….” Mostly, Jews avoid the question.

And for good reason: it isn’t a Jewish question altogether.

To be sure, the entire rabbinic tradition just assumes the existence of God. But belief is less central for Jews than for Christians. That is because, from their very inception, Judaism and Christianity went different ways. 

Christianity was popularized by Paul, a first-century Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor; so was influenced heavily by the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition that asked questions of belief. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, remained true to the biblical focus on behavior: what we should do, not what we should believe. Classical Christian literature is theological; the Jewish equivalent is legal. 

 To be sure, Jews are not uninterested in matters of faith. But we are quicker to doubt tenets of belief and slower to adopt them officially. 

The church father Tertullian (160-240) is usually credited with saying, credo quia absurdum, which religious sceptic Voltaire (1694-1778) translated as “I believe because it is absurd.” Although Tertullian may not actually have said it[i] (let alone meant it that way), it is sometimes cited as a justification for believing in what science and reason doubts. Isn’t that the point of faith after all? 

Not necessarily. When I say I believe in my son, I may have all kinds of evidence to back up my statement. And in any case, I certainly don’t mean that I believe in his existence. Similarly, when I say that I believe in myself, I have in mind trusting my ability to make good decisions, not deciding after some serious doubt that I exist. Does “I believe in God” affirm God’s existence? I don’t usually use the expression “believe in” that way.

We might, of course, ask, “Do you believe in Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster?” There we do question actual existence. But is God like that? 

If you press me, I’d say I do believe in God, but the way  William James did: not because the evidence supports it; and certainly not because it is absurd; but because there is no evidence either way — if God is beyond time and space, what kind of evidence could there even be? And where there is no evidence, James declared, we should choose to believe whatever will help us live a better life. It’s like the question we ask of a new acquaintance, “Does he like me?” If we wait for certain evidence, we will never trust enough even to begin establishing a friendship.[ii] So we assume the best and see what happens. 

So too with God. I don’t assume (for example) that God inevitably heals the sick; I have evidence against that. But believing in “God,” as some supportive presence beyond me that explains the order in the universe while affirming the good and the just within it is something that I find helpful. As I said in an earlier letter, faith is a strategy we employ more than a thing that we “have.”

But we need not go that far. For over a century now, we have known that to get at what words mean we need to watch how they are used.[iii] Instead of asking if we believe in God, we should ask how we use the word God in the first place. 

If my cancer test comes back negative, I may say, “Thank God.” If I promise to attend your wedding next year, I may add “God willing.” I do not believe that an entity named God saved me from cancer or cares whether I attend your wedding. God is not an entity altogether. When I say these things I am simply testifying to the extreme importance of “escaping cancer” and “getting to the wedding.” I use the word God to name those things that are of inestimable importance to me. My life is richer for elevating them that way – a whole lot better than “Gee whiz, I’m cancer free,” or “Yeah, I’ll try to get to your wedding.”

God is not a piece of furniture in my life; not some thing that I feel obliged to describe and refurbish on occasion, to make God fit nicely with other things in which I believe. God need not be a thing to still be a reality: something like loyalty, love, beauty and harmony. I experience all of these and have words for them.

When it comes to God, I start at the wonder that the human condition entails. At hand right now are a return of spring and life and color and joy; a family Passover seder; a newborn baby cousin; a multitude of new ideas that even at my age I find exhilarating. At hand too are daily headlines that testify to the loss of honesty, integrity, love and compassion — attributes that I consider essential. I invoke “God,” as the best means I have to do these things justice. 

[i] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/i-believe-because-it-is-absurd-the-enlightenment-invention-of-tertullians-credo/69340C3AF8366E79BCF3BDD804DED82E

[ii] William James, The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1897) pp. 23–4.

[iii] Cf., e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953: 4th ed. London: Blackwell, 2009); J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For a nice summary of this school of thought at Oxford, see Nikhil Krishman, A Terribly Serious Adventure (New York: Random House, 2023).

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Open Letter to My Students 74: Will the Real Jews Please Stand Up?

Posted on March 9, 2025 | 2 comments

Some 70 years ago, a rabbi (Morris Kertzer) described inviting a visiting Japanese army officer to attend a Shabbat service. When it was over, the officer surprised the rabbi by asking, “What kind of Christian are you?” Upon being informed that he was a Jew, the officer inquired, “Jews? What are they?”

Yes, what are Jews? That question arises again today, not because some visiting army officer from Japan, Jakarta or Johannesburg has never heard of us, but because we ourselves need to decide what we are. There are different kinds of answers. 

Halachah: The usual answer is halachic, the way Jewish jurisprudence sets boundaries to Jewish Peoplehood: to decide who is in and who is out.

Race: The Nazis used a racial definition:  to decide who to murder. 

Secular: Israel, a secular state with an admixture of halachah, has struggled with the issue – as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who hid from Hitler in a convent; then was baptized, became a Carmelite Friar, and took the name Father Daniel. In 1959, he sought entry to Israel under the Law of Return. Israel, he claimed, admits born Jews who identify as ethnically Jewish even though they are atheists and practice no Judaism whatever. Then why is he any different? He too was a born Jew who identified as ethnically Jewish. At least one of the supreme court justices who heard the case was inclined to accept his petition, on the halachic grounds that even Jewish sinners remain Jews. But the court rejected a halachic solution. The Law of Return, it said, “does not refer to the ‘Jew’ of Jewish religious law, but to the ‘Jew’ of secular law.”[i] 

Gender egalitarian: In 1983, American Reform Judaism decided to honor patrilineal (not just matrilineal) claims of Jewish descent. 

Were the Japanese army officer to ask today, “What  are Jews?” we would have to answer, “Regarding what? It all depends,” for there are other definitions too, including a moral one. Consider convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, clearly Jewish by any halachic definition. But when the case came to light, several people said, “Well, he’s not very Jewish in my book!” Yes, Jeffery Epstein was legally Jewish but morally, he was not “very Jewish in my book.”  

I want to build on that moral answer using the Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.”  An ideal type is a hypothetical model, an abstract ideal (positive or negative) against which examples of real life can be measured. Each culture has its own ideal type. 

From about the 5th century to the 13th, the ideal type for classical Christianity was the monk, who exchanged the real world for the monastery, a place to work, meditate, and pray. The American ideal type is the capitalist entrepreneur who goes from rags to riches by dint of hard work and business acumen. 

Traditionally, ideal types were gendered. The ideal Victorian man succeeded at business, but was also titular master of his home and family; like Mr. Banks (appropriately named) from Mary Poppins. The ideal Victorian woman was a home maker, mother, and moral exemplar for her children.  

The classical Jewish ideal type is 1. a Torah scholar, who, however, 2. uses Torah learning to be a good person in the world. It’s not unlike Plato’s ideal of 1. a philosopher, who 2. pursues wisdom to achieve virtue. Yiddish eventually provided a word for the second half of the Jewish ideal: mensch. 

With secularization, that ideal was generalized to scholarship in general. Stories abound about immigrant Jewish mothers giving library cards to their little children. To this day, Jews attend college and even graduate school in record numbers. But the Jewish ideal type must also use all this education for good:  the “mensch  factor,” that is, which shows up in the percentage of educated Jews who are honored for accomplishments that benefit humanity.  Between 1901 and 2023, of the 965 winners of Nobel Prizes, at least 216 (22%) have been Jewish.  

It is not enough to be highly educated and financially successful. The Jewish ideal must strive publicly for the general good of humanity. We will never know the intimate details of people’s private lives: their messy divorces, their failures as parents, and such. But we expect them to try to live good lives at home; and if their private failures degenerate into moral disasters, they lose all claim to ideal status: The Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins, for example, are out.  So too are the Bugsy Siegels and Meyer Lanskys, mob bosses in what has been called the Kosher Nostra.[ii]

I’m willing to bet that Bugsy and Meyer, at least, never claimed to be ideal Jews. But some Jews do claim the mantle of Jewish respectability, even though their actual lives defy the very notion of the historic Jewish type. I think, particularly, of the West Bank settlers bent on violently displacing Arab landowners, to fulfil a dubious biblical promise of a Greater Jewish Land of Israel.

So like the Japanese officer, I ask, “What is a Jew?” – not halachically, racially or ethnicly, but morally. What is the age-old ideal type that Jews for centuries have pursued as the right and proper way to realize their Jewish identity. It is not the west-bank thuggery but scholar mensch who betters the human condition. 

[i] Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior [Father Daniel Case] Israel Supreme Court, HC 72/62 PD 16 2428 (1962). Here in the United States, Commentary (the most prestigious Jewish journal at the time) published a dissent, charging that Father Daniel’s commitment to Jewish history and even peoplehood was clear; the court should have admitted that it was specifically Father Daniel’s Christianity that decided the case (https://www.commentary.org/articles/marc-galanter/a-dissent-on-brother-daniel/). Indeed, a Jew who practices Yoga and accepts the dictates of Buddhism would doubtless be admitted today. 

[ii] https://mjhnyc.org/events/kosher-nostra-the-life-and-times-of-jewish-gangsters-in-the-united-states/

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Open Letter to My Students 73: October 7, Revisited

Posted on February 6, 2025 | 1 comment

Last week, while lecturing in Miami, I went to see Nova, a traveling art installation described as “an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7…. the largest massacre in music history.”

I say I went to “see” it, but “see” doesn’t do the experience justice. I was totally immersed in it; and through it, immersed also in Israel’s trauma and (by extension) in the Jewish condition through time. I am congenitally an optimist, so I loved Nova’s insistence that,despite it all, “we will dance again.” That said, the exhibit hammered home what some of my long-time liberal friends who are not Jews – and even some who are – do not, I fear, fully comprehend. 

I don’t mean just the all-out protesters on college campuses. I mean good solid friends who support a Jewish state and who phoned me in solidarity on October 8 or 9; but who, later, as the war ground on, became fixated on the need for an immediate peace, because war is inherently bad and Israel had done too much damage already.

I too question much about the policies of Israel’s right-wing government; I too watched the Gazan suffering in horror. Neither my friends nor I have the benefit of military intelligence, but were we to know all the facts, we would probably agree on a great deal. So I am not arguing policy here. I am not arguing anything at all. I mean only to say that something very deep within me was confirmed by the Nova visit, something that I find hard to convey to even these lifelong friends: the realization that the October 7 victims were my people, that my people were being slaughtered once again.

I visited the Nova exhibit from a sense of Jewish obligation – the way one visits a Holocaust Memorial, hardly out of curiosity, much less to be entertained, or even just to learn something that we don’t already know. Not a day goes by without my thinking about the butchery that felled so many Jewish innocents. Some victims were not Jewish, mind you. But they were collateral damage, caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. October 7 was the underbelly of the human race unleashed upon Jews, first, last, and foremost.

The exhibit consists largely of some warehouse space, filled with detritus from the actual Nova campsite: tents, camping gear, skeletons of burned out cars, clothes scattered everywhere. Visitors shuffle along in the semi-darkness, stopping every few yards to watch videos recorded during and immediately after the attack.

I watched each video at least twice over, the scenes of Jews who came to dance through the night and greet the morning sun, only to be murdered wholesale by Hamas attackers who shout over and over, ”Allah is great” and (at one point) “We are heading for Paradise now, guys.” A Jewish survivor describes the scene afterward: “Kids tied to a tree, naked girls tied up everywhere you look.” As I took it all in, I recited what I could remember of El Malei Rachamim, the signature Jewish burial prayer composed after similar slaughters by Ukrainian Cossacks in 1648. I thought back to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s epic poem that memorializes the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. “Get up and head for the city of slaughter…. See for yourself the trees, stones, and fences laden with spattered blood and dried out brain matter.” 

I shed Jewish tears left over from 1648 and 1903 and so many other times as well. There must be a chamber of the heart where old tears get saved up like a bank account, and then accrue with time, to be withdrawn and spent on the likes of October 7.   

It goes deeper than the heart, however. We properly differentiate head from heart: the cold rational intellect that thinks versus the warm, emotional sentiment that feels. We either believe something strongly or feel something deeply. I both felt and thought my way through the Nova exhibit; but my tears came from somewhere deeper.

They came from what the Yiddish calls kishkes; in English, “the gut.” A “gut punch” is a surprise blow to the stomach that stops you in your tracks, takes everything out of you, and leaves you reeling, shocked, dazed, enraged, and afraid for your life. 

This is more than just metaphor. Scientific research posits an actual brain-gut connection. There is clearly a well of commitment, devotion, and faithfulness that transcends both head and heart, both thinking and feeling. We do not even know it is there, until we feel threatened to the very core of our being. 

It is, I think, the personalized outrage that comes when one’s family is threatened; and what I cannot adequately convey to others is that Jews like me do somehow sense that Jews everywhere and through all time are an extended family. I don’t mean rank tribalism, because anyone can become Jewish by choice. But in so doing they do not so much convert as they join the family. I am proud of that family, of its heritage and its commitment to a wise and compassionate world. I particularly deplore other Jews whose immoral behavior defiles everything Judaism hold dear: Bernie Madoff and Harvey Weinstein in America; the right-wing Settler Movement in Israel. I applaud responsa that insist on the rightness of informing on our own wayward family members whose behavior is evil.[i]

By the same token, I am happy to engage critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. I am critical myself. But those critics need to know that Israel is my family. They can take issue with me but only if they also make a shiva call to offer their condolence. People who celebrated October 7 celebrate also my own imminent demise, for I am a Jew.

Edmond Fleg (1874-1963) was a French Jew, totally assimilated, until 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge of treason. The episode awoke in Fleg his all-but-completely suppressed Jewish identity. “I am a Jew,” he wrote, “because born of Israel and having found it again, I would have it live after me.” By Israel, he meant the People, not the state, which didn’t yet exist. But the Dreyfus case convinced him, as it did Theodor Herzl, that only a Jewish state could be counted on to shelter Jews unwanted elsewhere and to protect them, come what may. I would say, “I am a Jew, because having been born of it and never lost it, I know not just in my mind and heart but in my very gut how right Herzl was, and how Jewish I really am.

[i] See, e.g., https://www.jewishideas.org/article/reporting-and-prosecuting-jewish-criminals-halakhic-concerns

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Open Letter to My Students 72: War and the Murky Middle

Posted on January 10, 2025 | 1 comment

“No one likes middles: reaching middle age, for example, or watching our own body middle expand.” So said the late (and great) Rabbi Dr. Michael Signer, bemoaning the unpopularity of his own area of expertise: the Middle Ages. 

In ethical quandaries too, rather than occupy the uncomfortable middle, we prefer doubling down at one extreme, and then demonizing the opposition, which is doing its own double-down on the other. But by definition,  a quandary contains some truth on both sides. It helps, sometimes, to temper our certainty (on either side) with a viewpoint from the murky middle. 

The war in Gaza is such a quandary. I am a rabbi for whom Jewish Peoplehood is a theological, moral, and spiritual reality; I feel called upon to sustain Jewish peoplehood for the benefit of the world — to be (in biblical terms) a blessing to humanity. In addition, I have lived through enough history to know the necessity of a Jewish State. 

But equally, I know the excesses that ethnic states are capable of; and I am an Enlightenment universalist who seeks that elusive (and probably illusive) quality we call world peace. 

As to the war, the precipitating factor, the October 7 Hamas butchery, has indelibly seared my soul. I know too that if they could, Hamas, Hezbollah and a host of fellow travelers would slaughter every Jew in sight. How, then, can I not support military attempts to eradicate this ongoing threat to the Jewish People? But equally, I cringe at the killing of innocent civilians, so how can I not support moderating the military on humanitarian grounds? 

That is the Jewish quandary of our time. Desperate to avoid the troubling middle, people plunk for one side or the other with every ounce of moral certitude they can muster. And Jews, as they say, are news; so unlike ongoing wars elsewhere, “Israel at war” generates daily headlines that both sides read to confirm or deny their respective position.

Take, for example, the New York Times analysis of December 26, 2024.  

Whether true or false, the Times has often been perceived as biased against Israel. But whatever its editorial policy, Times reporters are exceptional journalists who cannot easily be discounted. What, then do we make of this extensive background piece with the headline, “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy”?

To be sure, the report suffers from limitations imposed by the question it seeks to answer: whether Israel has been bombing civilians excessively. It doesn’t inquire about the war generally: the hostages, for example.  

But even so, its findings are troubling in the extreme. The Times reports a “severe” weakening of Israel’s “system of safeguards” meant to protect civilians, by expanding “the circle of accepted casualties.” In addition, instead of limiting attacks to those plotted by Israel’s central command, Israel, this time round, empowered field officers to determine bombing targets; and not all such officers operated with the same moral scruples as their superiors. At times too, Israel used heavy tonnage bombs that guaranteed the destruction of entire apartment blocks. In the past, Israel had warned apartment dwellers by “roof knocks,” exploding small charges on the roof before leveling the building, and in this war, such warnings were not always given. So yes, the bombing in this war has been particularly devastating.

But there is another side to things. The report substantiates the carnage of the October 7 attack that Israel understandably saw as “unprecedented,” in scale. It confirms also the fact that Hamas “militants hide among civilians in Gaza” with an “extensive tunnel network” underneath heavily populated areas.

Traumatized by what Hamas had done and promised to do again, Israel felt obliged to uproot Hamas entirely. It therefore widened its military targets to include not just the  Hamas chief planners, but ordinary Hamas fighters and even financial operators who move money back and forth to obtain war materiel. But that required overcoming the Hamas use of human shields. As the report puts it, “The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.” Israel bombed particularly heavily at the beginning, because it wanted to neutralize Hamas before Hezbollah opened up a second front from the north. 

As to roof knocks, consider Shaldan al-Najjar, an Islamic Jihad commander who had orchestrated many attacks on Israel. Israel had tried to kill him in 2014, but failed, because when it warned innocent neighbors to leave beforehand, al-Najjar escaped as well. This time, they issued no warning and succeeded – but with collateral damage.

In sum, the bombing, though not indiscriminate, was horrific. It did not target civilians deliberately, but enormous civilian casualties resulted. It expanded the circle of acceptable collateral damage but there was at least an ongoing existence of such a circle. Israel’s war was understandably severe but the severity took its toll. 

So back to the murky middle. Those like myself, who accept the attempt to dismantle Hamas must also reckon with Israel’s policies that increased civilian casualties.  

Those who champion the Palestinians should meet me in the middle, by at least acknowledging that if Israel has killed citizens who happened to be in harm’s way, it is the Hamas policy of using human shields that put them there in the first place. Hamas bears the blame for beginning the war in a particularly heinous manner, and then waging it in such a way that Israel would have to kill civilians in order to defend itself.

If the reporting is honest, however, the accompanying headline is not. Instead of “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy,” it might equally have been, “Hamas Fighters Embed War Machine among Civilians, Causing Israel to Expand Casualties.” 

But perhaps that is misleading on the other side. Newspapers of the Times’s stature should avoid headlines that lure either side away from the middle. Imagine the same story introduced by the heading, “Complexity of War Revealed: Civilians Suffer From Hamas Human Shield Strategy and from Israeli Expansion of Bombing Regulations.” 

I have other misgivings as well. If Hamas has been virtually destroyed by now, why is Israel still bombing in the Gazan north? And even if the Gaza strategy is not a case of ethnic cleansing, the West Bank settler movement is; if the settlers have their way, they will transport their ideology to Gaza as well. 

But equally, how is it that Hamas still retains Jewish hostages (truly civilian innocents)? And as to the Times, I would love to see other background pieces of the quality of this one: not just the Israeli failures but the cruelty and genocidal rationale of Hamas as well. 

Meanwhile, I am left with occupying the murky middle. Taking sides with certainty might feel good, but it does not do moral justice to reality. 

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Open Letter to My Students 71:  Why We Celebrate a New Year

Posted on December 31, 2024 | Leave a comment

I no longer stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The Times Square ball can drop without me. But I watch with amazement as so much of the world descends into a sort of drunkenfest – and at inflated prices that can put you into debt. Most cultures have some sort of new year’s bash: The Chinese new year, for instance, with fireworks, dragon dances, and literally painting the town red. We Jews direct our energies into eating and praying – but we make loud noises on the shofar, and we consume enough honey to keep dentists busy for the rest of the year. 

The rationale behind it all is unclear. History of Religion expert Mircea Eliade considered it an outgrowth of ancient peoples’ desire to take refuge in a primeval moment when the connection between ourselves and the gods was patent. Well, maybe. Traditional cultures may revert to God-intoxicated founding moments, but the Times Square crowd is just plain intoxicated.

So perhaps New Year celebrations fortify us as we face the uncertainty of a new year. Judaism famously warns that “All beginnings are difficult” (Mekhilta to Exodus 19:5). And there may be something to that. Google “Beginnings are hard,” and you find a ton of people in agreement. All sorts of examples come to mind: moving to a new school; starting a new job; embarking on a new relationship; undertaking a new project; writing that first line of a school essay.

But I tend to think the opposite. Hard as beginnings may be, endings are usually harder. Making new friends, though difficult, is easier than saying goodbye to old ones. Starting your first job is easier than retiring. Declaring a war is nothing compared to ending it. Moving in with (you hope) the love of your life may have its uncertainties, but the pain is in moving out. I know nothing about what it feels like to be born into the world, but I suspect that dying is harder.

We might conclude that New Year merriment anesthetizes us against the pain of closing the book on the year gone by. But that doesn’t seem right either. I, for one, cannot wait to reclassify 2024 under “Files, Old (Good Riddance).” So the problem with endings is not so much making them happen, but making them happen the right way. Divorces are hard but they can sometimes be amicable; there are even such things as good deaths rather than bad ones. 

A more likely theory, then, is that endings can be positive – if we have reason to believe that they will be followed by a beautiful new beginning. Losing a job is okay if you have a better one lined up. Falling out of love is acceptable if you’ve met the next new flame who will be lovelier. Even dying is less painful if you think you are slated for some heavenly afterlife. 

Endings and beginnings are apparently intertwined. The metaphor of life as a journey works rather nicely. We don’t mind being ever on the move as we age, so long as our leaving one place portends our finding another one. What we dread is the flat earth phenomenon: coming to an end with nothing left to do but fall off the cliff into nothingness. 

Noisy New Year celebrations convince us that the earth isn’t flat; that we can step boldly into a new unknown with assurance that we will land on solid ground; say goodbye to the old because the new will be better. Mind you, there is little evidence to support that hypothesis. Coming off a bad old year and anticipating a new and better one is like suffering some chronic illness for 365 days, but having well-wishers assure you that tomorrow you will be cured. It doesn’t always work out that way. But we cannot long subsist without hope. And, come to think of it, who knows?

The old doesn’t actually die with the new; more likely it persists, like a ghost who visits us nightly no matter how much we try to shake it off. When toxic relationships expire, the toxicity can still linger. We are still dealing with the aftereffects of Covid lockdowns. We yearn for the certainty that painful endings will at least end, so that we can launch a new beginning, unsullied by the past.

That may be what the madness of New Year’s Eve is intended to convey. Out with the old and in with the new. As 2024 becomes 2025, we want so much to have the pain of the past dispelled; and the hope for the future confirmed.

This year, particularly, so much is at stake. Will the Israel-Gaza war finally come to an end – a real end, that provides Israelis with security; and also sows the seeds of betterment both for Israel and its neighbors? And what of Ukraine? The new administration seems bent on ending the war there. But how, and at what cost? Will democracy survive here at home? Will anti-Semitism increase or decline?

The more terrible things are, the more we wish they would end. But what makes those things so terrible is precisely their immunity to solutions. Declaring a “New Year” may be fun for a day, but the day after, we all go back to work; January 2 won’t look all that different from December 31; which suggests that the Jewish idea of making New Year a day for prayer is not all that wrong. At the very least, it is a healthy reminder of reality’s persistent intransigence.  

So here’s to 2025: a prayer. May it arrive with more wisdom than folly. May the suffering of 2024 come finally to an end. May freedom, health and happiness be abundant, and for everyone. May our worst nightmares find no footing, while our happy dreams take root and become reality. Amen.

Will things really work out that way? Probably not, but maybe just a little, and maybe more than we think possible. The start of a new year is at least the time to imagine them. 

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Open Letter to My Students 70: In a Time of Despair

Posted on November 7, 2024 | 3 comments

What keeps us going in times of despair; when (to cite Deuteronomy 28:67), “In the morning we say, ‘If only it were night’, and in the evening we say, ‘If only it were morning.” 

 Or as the Talmud puts it (Sotah  49a), In times of such despair,  “How does the world itself keep going?” 

 For liberals like me, the results of the 2024 election is such a time. We fear the worst. How will we keep going?

Start with brutal honesty. We Jews have reason to fear a revival of right-wing anti-Semitism, such as what occurred in Charlottesville during the first Trump administration. Then too, along with other Americans, we fear that our democracy itself is endangered; that we will devolve into a dictatorship, where even basic rights are threatened. And we worry about the poor, the climate, and the very survival of a world that is democratic and free. Vigilance, then, is the first order of the day, lest the unthinkable become not just thinkable but probable.

But even as we fear the worst, we should remember the Talmud’s caution against jumping to conclusions. For any given set of circumstances, it asks, b’ma’I k’askinan? “What are we actually dealing with?” So: What, really, are we dealing with? We may see something short of virulent anti-Semitism, something short of democracy’s demise, in which case, we survive through patience and persistence: living with what we must (patience) but doing what we can to make a bad situation better, fighting as we always have (persistence) in matters of conscience.

The commitment to honesty along with the question “What are we actually dealing with?” apply also to ourselves. We will have to admit our own foibles, question whether we have fully appreciated the other side of things — the reason, for example, that most Americans, not just the crazies, voted against us. We will need new allies if we are to move the needle on America’s newfound persona. And that will require admitting that not every Trump voter is our enemy. Not every Christian evangelical is also a racist white nationalist. People who disagree with us need not be moral reprobates. 

The “other side” in politics is not the same thing as the “other side” in Jewish mysticism – not all conservatives, that is, are evil incarnate, just as, frankly, not all liberals are the good guys. We can be principled without being doctrinaire, open-hearted but not closed-minded.

Honesty, patience and persistence should be augmented by humility. We should ask not just about “them” but also about “us”:  “What are we actually dealing with,” here in our own camp?

The Talmud offers yet another answer: its own response to the question of how the world is sustained in times of dread. It survives, we are told, because of the Kaddish! Yes, the Kaddish, but not because times are so bad that we should say a mourner’s prayer in advance. In Talmudic times, the Kaddish wasn’t yet a mourning prayer at all. Why then does the Kaddish sustain the world?

Start with a fresh interpretation of the word “world,” derivable from the oft quoted Talmudic precept (Sanhedrin 37,a): “To save a single person is to save the entire world.” The entire world? Really? Surely the Talmud does not imagine that if I save someone I thereby save everyone! More likely it recognizes that individual people are each a world unto themselves, as in the English expression, “My entire world was turned upside down.”

We know how the external world (the cosmos) keeps going. The earth spins on its axis no matter who is president. It is our internal world that that prompts the question, “How does the world keep going.” How do we sustain our internal world when everything we hold dear is on life support — when things are so bad that every morning we yearn for night to fall; and every night we yearn for morning to dawn? 

In terrible times then, it is our internal world that is sustained by the Kaddish – not the Kaddish alone mind you (we also need honesty, vigilance, patience, persistence  and humility). But the Kaddish is its own antidote to despair, and this is why.

The Kaddish is above all an affirmation of hope, and not just hope for tomorrow or next week or even next year, but hope over the long haul. It is the bold contention that however much our efforts are stymied in the short run, however severe our setbacks in any given moment (or even any given lifetime), it is the long view of things that will prevail. The Kaddish images a God of history, an ultimate dominion of goodness, a momentous vision of a distant tomorrow beyond the momentary setbacks of our individual lives. 

The idea of such a “moreness” (the best word I can muster) is the very essence of religious consciousness. It seems also to be indelibly engraved on human consciousness, generally; we are a species that pictures “forever”; wonders about life after death; and recognizes, as Hamlet put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Religious metaphors like a messianic era, the Kingdom of God and the eschaton are attempts to capture this insistence that our life’s projects do not ignobly die when we do. So too are all those eulogies about the good we do continuing on beyond us. Why have liberals chosen instead to imagine that our every effort to ameliorate the world’s evils will succeed without setbacks? 

To be religious is to know that we belong to an order of things that is more than our earthly lives can contain; to know, or at last to suspect, that we are in league with God and part of eternity. 

How will I manage the new era that has begun? Through honesty, vigilance, perseverance, patience, and humility.

And when I tire of the effort that such struggle demands; when I run up against the powers that be; when I wonder whether I am making any sizable difference; I will take refuge in the Kaddish and its promise of moreness, making commutations back and forth from the world of the here and now to the place of forever. 

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