If I were a real professional, I would have experts on speed dial. There would be people in the know and reliable sources to talk me through the mechanics of Signal and what would prompt someone to use it for business. I would know if anyone in Pete Hegseth’s position had ever shared military secrets with his brother. It sounds absurd, but maybe I’m wrong.

Every Saturday at our synagogue in Tulsa, our community prays for the return of the hostages. Some 59 people remain in Gaza, 24 still living and the rest now dead. I have no doubt that the living are suffering terribly. That is the testimony of those who have returned. They have spoken about the brutality of their captors, starvation rations, sexual abuse, and prolonged immobility in the tunnels of Hamas. Some have spent months shackled in the dark.

One of the failures of the new administration is that it is heedlessly cruel in its treatment of the non-advantaged. It is about to haul Head Start to the dump, junking decades of meaningful gains for the poor. It has already cancelled funding for antiretrovirals, signing death warrants for millions of AIDS patients worldwide. Medicaid is on the chopping block and Social Security is next. Once again, we are threatened with the impoverishment of the aged.

I may just be ahead of the curve, but I’ve always detested the Tesla logo. First, it seemed a little on the nose. Using an upper-case T struck me as painfully witless, like a prostrate failure of imagination. If that’s the best Elon Musk and his predecessors could do, no one would ever trust him with the federal government. Uh oh. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.

Then I started seeing Fallopian tubes. The arms of the T sloped a little bit downwards, just like the curly tendrils where the eggs originate.

At the end of February, I wrote a few words about Francis. It felt like the Angel of Death had arrived and I wanted to valorize him while he was alive. I’m looking at these words on the morning of his death and seeing the hovering suggestion of my arrogance. I’m a Midwestern rabbi with a very modest career. What does it matter if I valorize anyone, least of all the leader of over a billion believers? Long after I am dead and gone, Francis’ life will continue to reverberate, held in memory as something precious and fine.

Tornadoes sometimes level whole neighborhoods. Volcanoes sometimes blow their summits, bringing extravagant destruction to unsuspecting lives. Avalanches destroy alpine villages. All are part of the network of chance that rules the darker parts of human life. We are right to call them horrible occurrences and wrong to imagine that there is much that we can do.

But that’s really not what happens in a shooting. Somebody takes a gun or three, marches into a gathering of human beings and begins to execute them one by one.

Just when you think that it’s safe to go in the water, the Pew Charitable Trust comes to tell us otherwise.

This time around the issue is Jews and prayer, namely that old time religion doesn’t work any more. The difference between then and now is statistically significant. In 2014, the number was 45%. That means that when American Jews were asked about frequency, a little under half said prayer was seldom or never.

Don’t get me wrong: I love foreign aid. I believe in the interconnectedness of nations and that we are one indivisible human family. Call me cosmopolitan, a Soros internationalist, but that’s the political faith that I was raised in, the idea that we are supposed to hold hands with one another and raise the condition of human beings everywhere.

Against that background, this administration is a disaster, a small-minded, inward-looking, fearful entity, terrified of contamination and the dilution of the race.

Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

This may be my last time to address you, at least as the chief of our highest court. The writing has been on the wall for months, but the moment I understood that your court was a dead man walking took place on the night of Trump’s State of the Union. It was that chilling moment where he thanked you for your favor.

I can only imagine that it was the public payback for giving him a pass on legal accountability.

The borderland between Yiddish and Hebrew is one of the Judaism’s most contentious battlegrounds. We have been arguing for a century about which language is better. Not in its ability to convey information, but how it expresses meaning and feeling, how it communicates the wrinkles of the Jewish psyche.

For a while, it looked like it would be Yiddish. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the vast majority of Jews on earth were citzens-by-birth of Yiddishland, the swath of geography between Russia and the Atlantic.

It’s now the umpteenth day of Maximum Crazy, the state we’ve been in since the Trump Inauguration, and tarriff fates are (temporarily) down. It means that the seals and penguins of McDonald Islands can finally stop mixing their herring slurry with Xanax. That’s the plan until the end of the week, when our orca of a president scares the hell out of them again.

I loved Barak Obama, until I didn’t.

The month after his election was a kind of political fantasyland. I hugged everyone I saw, and kissed a few of them. I laughed. I cried. I went a little crazy. The difficult, fractious country of my birth, contaminated at its point of origin by slavery and prone to eruptions of violent racism, had actually elected its first black president.

Next up on Blatt + Blue, the Synagogue’s ongoing film series, is The Shop on Main Street, one of the earliest Holocaust films from the post-war period. Blatt + Blue tries to sample the whole of Jewish filmdom, from early classics to current Jewish cinema. This film will be discussed on Thursday, April 10. Please join us on Zoom at 7:00 p.m. The access number is 918 583 7121.

I just re-read a post from last week and realized I didn’t go quite far enough. It was that one about April Fool’s Day successes, where Democrats wiped the floor in Wisconsin and gave the barbarians in Florida something to think about. I had special praise for the voters of Mississippi and the speech-making heroics of Corey Booker. A man who can hold his bladder for a day has quite a future in American politics. Speaking only for myself, I couldn’t have done it.

My Jewish summer camp in the Sixties and Seventies was a world apart, a secluded universe. Hidden among the lakes of Northern Wisconsin, it was intended as a gesture of recovery from the war, a place where Jews would resurrect themselves.

Full of vivid, brainy young Jewish leaders, it had the snap and promise of the winning team. Despite its commitment to Jewish traditionalism, it had the feel of a countercultural commune, an answer to the ethos of life in the suburbs.

April Fool’s Day was a good day for Democrats and anyone who has a mind to save the country. The results in Florida were just as expected: two wins in blood-red districts for Republicans. Those were can’t-win races in the wrong part of the country where Democrats are still facing tornadic headwinds.

An electorate that put Matt Gaetz in the House was hardly going to pivot to any kind of Democrat. Its enough that Republicans are devouring each other.

Mickey 17 is an odd little movie that has failed to find its intended audience. Brought to life by Bong Joon Ho, it’s got the very same mix of humor and horror that American audiences first saw in Parasite. It’s also fixated on the raw edges of capitalism, focused this time on empire and colonization.

In this film, as before, there’s a kind of visual binary. Which is more arresting: the offscreen dismemberment of a petty crook by chainsaw, or the radiant, capped teeth of actor Mark Ruffalo?

RFK Jr. can’t do it to save his life.

There’s a robust debate on the question of stupidity. Who is the dumbest member of the presidential cabinet? After last week’s debacle (Houthi-gate?), many smart people are voting for Hegseth. The idea that he did not register the fact that a journalist was part of a classified intelligence dialogue is one of those things that is never supposed to happen. He then denied that anything had gone wrong. Pity the military that is now led by a man for whom alertness and accountability do not exist.

Remember that post about Yeshiva University?

It’s the one I wrote in the middle of last week, all about Judaism, Orthodoxy, and sexuality. I valorized the leadership of Yeshiva University in New York City for credentialing an LGBTQ+ group on campus that has been working for years to make itself legit. Yeshiva resisted until it could resist no more. Rather than pressing its case before the Supreme Court, it decided to back down from the confrontation.

Just in time for the destruction of our government comes the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. It’s one of those ironies that you just can’t invent. Something brought to life exactly eight centuries ago is now being shredded in Washington, D.C.

The Magna Carta isn’t exactly a one-off. The first edition, signed by King John with a proverbial gun to his head, was drafted in 1215 and then revoked in a snit. You can imagine why the king wanted to shake it loose.