One of the most stable areas of Jewish law is the framework of rituals surrounding burial. We always rush to bury our dead. We bury them in simple white garments. The casket is always a simple wooden box, pegged together with a little bit of glue. No metal nails or screws are used so as not to interfere with the decay of the dead, together with everything that is buried with them. Dust you are and to dust you will return.

On the chance that you’re not tracking my personal history, I opened for business a year ago today. On January 30, 2025, I posted an opinion piece on the estimable Adam Schiff, with praise for his politics and Jewish consciousness. It was, admittedly, a tiny bit esoteric. Schiff had taken his oath of office on a copy of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. That was—and remains—a highly idiosyncratic move. My guess is that no one had ever done it before and it represents a high-water mark of Jewish literacy. Who would have thunk such a thing were/was possible?

Exactly a minute ago, right before this writing, Donald Drumpf took his place on the lawn of the White House. He was apparently on his way to Iowa for campaigning. On behalf of the citizens of Minnesota, I offer my thanks to the Taunter-in-Chief. At least he wasn’t on the way to Minneapolis.

Execution may actually be too weak a word. Alex Pretti was slaughtered this weekend, turned from a man into a bloody, riddled carcass.

He was, of course, a very good man. Much like Renee Nicole Good, he was loved ferociously by his family and his friends. What they admired was a quality of fundamental kindness, gentle demeanor, and concern for his neighbors. At the first hint of a gas leak, he alerted the authorities. His former wife testified to his aversion to violence.

Why are we polarized? Social media. That’s the default, consensus judgment. Standard guarantors of truth and veracity have been broken in the onslaught of high emotion. Every form of authority is imperiled, from religion to medicine and, most especially, to journalism. We speak instead of alternative facts, of new realities constructed by influencers.

About this time each year, Black people and Jews sit down to wonder what happened to their coalition, their fruitful partnership in the era of Civil Rights. It’s the effect of the marches, the speechmaking, and remembrance. Unless you’re an unredeemed White supremacist, Martin Luther King remains irresistibly forceful, calling us to conscience and our better selves. It’s been fifty-eight years since his martyrdom in Memphis, but no one has yet risen to his stature, the combination of faith and politics and the timbre of his voice. Each year I listen to “I Have a Dream,” and it pierces the shell of my uncircumcised heart.

In case you’re wondering, Bari Weiss has failed. She is the new czarina of CBS News and she seems to have a gift for the wrong first move. It started last month with “Sixty Minutes,” the venerable voice of legacy journalism and the most trusted program across the old broadcast networks.

The issue was an expose of the prison in El Salvador that has become, for many, a successor to Guantanamo. The prisoners go in, but they don’t come out and, deep in its bowels, they suffer the tortures of the damned.

Did you know that Donald Trump was never impeached? Neither did I. But that’s the fable the Smithsonian is now telling us, a fairy tale of the new regime. It’s the triumphant return of George Freaking Orwell, the second coming of the Ministry of Truth, reaching into the detritus of the past to shape a convenient and opportune narrative. That would be “opportune,” as in congenial to our overlords who understand the power of a well-told tale.

I’ve never seen a movie by Bela Tarr. Part of it is that he is an acquired taste. His films are reportedly long and not for weaklings. Tarr frequently collaborated with Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian Jewish author who just won the Nobel Prize. Both of them addressed serious audiences, accustomed to avant garde experiments with chronology and narrative, and meditative scenes that break with convention. Tarr’s work resembles Claude Lanzman’s films, with their endless running times and blasted landscapes. If your idea of a movie is Meet the Fockers, Bela Tarr may not be for you.

We’ll know more about Jackson in the days ahead: the name of the suspect, estimates of the damage, what was captured on the security cameras, the layout of the building. It’s all the details that go with cataclysm, the granular postmortem of violence in America.

I regret to confess that this one leaves me shaken. Our daughter spent time in Jackson, Mississippi, a semester of study at Tougaloo College. After high school at Booker T. Washington in Tulsa, she wanted somehow to extend her experience, and she petitioned Tougaloo to spend time on campus. The sojourn was complicated in all the best ways, and continues to influence her career to this day. If I know Jackson at all, it’s through her months in Mississippi.

Renee Nicole Good is dead tonight, and the world is poorer, darker, and less whole. She was killed in an indefensible assault by ICE agents enforcing the will of Stephen Miller and driven by the zealotry of calculating ideologues. I almost said that the ideologues were demented, but that doesn’t address the nature of this program. It’s an ice-cold strategy of ethnic cleansing to rid the country of a docile minority and feed the beast of white supremacism. It’s a classic example of overzealous enforcement, powered by the savage politics of Christian nationalism.

In the crazy political headspace I now occupy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Watching Maduro hustled into court, I fantasized that he was part of some significant opposition, that he had been targeted by the evil machinery of Trumpismo and wrongly abducted to face persecution in New York. Such are the deformations of the Second Term: delusional imaginings and disordered emotion.

The most tedious issue I know is governance. I had no patience for it as a pulpit rabbi and it pushes none of my buttons as a private citizen. The idea of fretting over the composition of a Ritual Committee is as compelling as the dimples on a piece of matza. Voter I.D. laws are only a little bit better. I want fireworks, drama, last-minute rescue, color, light, and heroic deeds.

MTG is gone, at least temporarily, while she regroups for the next round of bizarre and crazy. It’s the kind of thing we have come to expect: floridly awful Republican officeholders who never really exit the stage. It took years for Sarah Palin to fade, rocking tight leather jackets all the way down. It was a bad decision on the part of her campaign, but the jackets communicated a certain mediagenic toughness. The hapless George Santos is already back, pardoned by his troll master and repositioned in the party. My guess is that he will succeed Cash Patel if for no other reason than he is a champion grifter. Would he ask an FBI agent to do an errand for his lover? There isn’t even the shadow of a doubt.

Is there anyone who actually likes J.D. Vance? If that’s the case, it would be news to me. I know the part about a heartbeat away, but you get the feeling that it’s all for show. From the very beginning Trump has telegraphed ambivalence. He spent months asking loudly if Vance was right for the job. The general consensus was that he was not, and that he added nothing to the Republican ticket. But by that time the ticket had already been punched.

The unsettling thing about the current Administration is that we have never encountered anything like it. That’s apart from discovering a language to describe it. We all know the pattern of disordered self-centeredness, Trump’s need to place himself in the bulls-eye of conversation. Generals aren’t generals; they are “my generals.” A course of action may be outlandish or repellant, but “if I wanted to do it, I certainly could.”

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a gorgeous film, with scenes of austere beauty and gore. No one does better with an isolated building about to be assaulted by either racists or vampires, who are, effectively, parallel perversions. Coogler clears the space around the structure, so that you can clearly see the advancing assault. Step by step. Inch by inch. Coogler is the genius who gave us Wakanda in the Black Panther movies of 2018 and 2022. He seems to have a gift for the penetrating image, the one that lodges like a stake in the heart. I learned about Afro-Futurism from Coogler, the techno-history that might have been.

Jews are notoriously tetchy about Christmas greetings. We don’t like it when people assume we’re Christians, thirsty to participate in the ambient celebration. That’s the way it is with minorities. Say the wrong thing and we’ll never forgive you. Kidding!

I know I’m going to get creamed for saying this, but too much is at stake for anyone to self-censor: Kamala Harris seems to be a wonderful human being who doesn’t offer anything as a strategist or a candidate. I could easily use more vituperative language, but I’m trying to audition a more moderate selfhood.

Where was security?

It’s very difficult to protect a crowd. Public gatherings are ragged at the edges, with excited people coming and going. Hardly anyone (with the exception of me) watches for signs of something amiss. I am always looking for suspicious objects, but this dates back to my first trip to Israel where I was sternly lectured about picking anything up. It was in the wake of a notorious Bic pen incident. Someone had been badly injured by an explosive ballpoint left in the street. That’s what they told us and I’ve stuck with it since.