My father-in-law once told me with the certainty of a survivor that he did not value my work as a rabbi. He was certain that I would end up victimized by my congregants and that I had set myself up for a life of suffering. There were certainly episodes that confirmed his judgment, but his disapproval eased with the passage of time. My life has been marked by a surfeitof blessings, and he eventually sensed that I was an exception to his rule.

Surely you’ve heard of the World Zionist Congress.

Joking!

One of the most interesting ideas generated by Theodor Herzl was that the Jewish world needed a representative body. He seemed to understand that many Jews would make aliya to Palestine.

When Joe Biden was interviewing candidates for vice president, I crossed my fingers for Karen Bass. She was everything I wanted a vice president to be: sturdy, reliable, competent, and upright. I knew very little about her except for basic demographics and that she was a well-liked California politician. Biden didn’t need to appeal to Californians, but I thought that Bass would appeal to the rest of us, and take Black women office-holders to the next level in the hierarchy.

Elon Musk was once a Democrat—as Democratic a voter as you or me. He thought that the party was the future of the country, and that it served his entrepreneurial purposes. Then he decided that Democrats were “unkind,” and he opted to take his business elsewhere. All of this happened in 2022 when President Biden supposedly disrespected his vehicles.

When I was a suburban Jewish child in the sixties, Zionism was a simple construct. It was my Uncle Shlomo, my grandmother’s brother, redeeming the land near the Sea of Galilee. He was among the founders of Degania Bet, the second kibbutz in the Land of Israel, an agricultural paradise and visionary experiment in communal living and Jewish collectivism. He married Chaika Shainvexler, my favorite great-aunt who was everything that my grandmother was not: kind, soft-spoken, generous, and enfolding. She seemed to live entirely without grievance.

I’ve been complaining this spring about Democratic politicians who have retreated into a kind of political quietism, choosing the wrong battles, or curling up like kittens. Senator Schumer is a perfect example. What remains of the Democratic leader of the Senate cannot cobble together a strategy of opposition.

A beloved friend, a leader in our community, is a committed servant of the Jewish people. She has worked in Jewish fundraising for decades and raised millions of dollars for every imaginable purpose. If you’ve got a job that needs doing yesterday, there is one person, at least, who can deliver the goods. Build an agency? Run a campaign? She is a sparkling combination of talent and will.

Every so often, I wonder who’s worse: Sauron or Voldemort? Trump or Vance?

Usually, it’s no contest at all. Our president has now humiliated two heads of state, exposing both to televised debasement. He has turned the White House into a cesspool of grift, using his office to cash in on bitcoin, handing out golden watches as rewards.

“Kidnapped” will be featured on Thursday, June 12 at the monthly Synagogue film discussion, Blatt + Blue. The film is easy to find on Amazon Prime. Please join us at 7:00 on Zoom. The access code is 918 583 7121. This review may be helpful in setting the stage.

New popes tend to be met with enthusiasm, but when Jews describe the history of the papacy, the story is vastly more complicated and problematic.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check if there are new signs of damage. Agencies dismantled. Treaties suspended. Colleges brought to their knees by defunding. Just today the Administration announced that it was taking another look at Biden-era offenses. It wants to know about that bag of cocaine that someone once planted in the Biden White House.

I keep writing to all of you about Yeshiva University, a place that you probably never heard of before. It’s my personal contribution to inside baseball, where you go to the place behind the plate and see how a certain Jewish game is played. Not the most important game in the world, but one that reveals the behavior of a team that may never have intruded on your consciousness before.

Wherever you live, you’ve probably been thinking about Oklahoma. That’s because we just dodged a bullet. After years of legal challenge and counter-challenge, the case of St. Isidore has finally been decided: there will be no state funds for Catholic charter schools. Not here in Oklahoma and, presumably, not anywhere. That sound you hear is a great sigh of relief.

Rose and Daniel Blue are our family heroes. They graduated from the Holocaust in 1945 and were liberated from Bergen Belsen on April 12. For several years, they waited in Germany for the ashes of millions of Jews to settle, while the Allies decided who would go where. My father-in-law traded on the postwar black market and honed a masterful talent for practicality and survival. My mother-in-law trained as a dental technician, fabricating bridges and full-blown dentures. She gave birth to their first-born child, Sima, in the explosion of baby-making that followed the war.

I’ve spent the morning along with many of you, thinking about last night’s assassination in Washington. The Lischinskys and the Milgrims are now mourning their children, and we have been cast into sorrow for them and their families, for the death of hope, for the death of possibility.

There’s something thrillingly concrete about the term.

Habeas corpus means “you should have the body.” Imagine a crowd of restive citizens. One of their number has been nabbed by the authorities and dumped into a spider hole by an unscrupulous ruler. No due process. No proceedings of the court. It’s the nightmare prospect of extrajudicial punishment, in this case permanent disappearance.

I was an English major, so I follow the royals. No, I really follow the British royals. That means I’m interested in everything about them, from the dynamics of the relationship between Princess Charlotte and Prince George, to the number of ceremonies on the Princess Royal’s calendar. I cared about the restoration of Windsor Castle and I certainly monitored the family photographs that Elizabeth displayed during her Christmas broadcast.

Along with many of you, I’ve been trying to think Big Thoughts, like democracy, freedom, and the American Way. That, and the cluster of awful alternatives: tyranny, authoritarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and the newly conceivable rule-by-junta. I have Timothy Snyder on a human tracker as he disengages from Yale and moves to Canada. Just in case, I want to know where to find him when the helicopters train their weapons on the crowd. Paranoid? Yes. Inconceivable? No.

Let me know if I’m getting on your nerves.

It’s probably OK that Kamala Harris made another appearance last week in Manhattan. She was in New York for the gala at the Met, celebrating an exhibit on Black Dandyism at the Costume Institute. It’s a fantastically interesting look at a culture that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, from zoot suits to kente cloth to jeweled grilles for rap stars. I’ve tried to follow it closely online and hope to see it this summer in person. I think It will bump out our shared sense of Black America and display a boldness I can’t even imagine.

My interest in typography predates my rabbinate. Long before I came to my first pulpit, I messed around with letterforms and typefaces, as if I were preparing for a career as a typesetter. Something tells me I would have been happy in that field. Some of my best experiences—the most stimulating and lively—have been in filling blank surfaces with the ant tracks of text, Many type nerds would say the same.

Parades have a way of going off course. The most famous episode took place in Philadelphia during the culminating months of WW I. The government still needed to sell bonds for the war effort, and somebody thought that a parade would be the ticket. Two hundred thousand hapless citizens gathered on Broad Street to watch the spectacle of newly minted biplanes, soldiers, and Sousa bands.