A couple of years ago, I started a quilt. It was supposed to be a Zaydie (Grandfather) Project with a beloved granddaughter in California. It had all the makings of a long-distance winner. We would do some things in Los Angeles, some things in Tulsa, and the result would be a reminder of my love: a soft, enfolding, flannel-backed quilt for chilly nights when we could not be together. It was so long ago, I can’t remember whether we started in on her birthday or in time for Chanukah.

Sara Jacobs, Jewish Democrat from California, has a perfectly beautiful Jewish nose. I don’t know whether it’s a “Jewish nose,” other than the fact that it is on her face. She also has a very beautiful face, with that vital, sparkly look of intelligence that some of us associate with Jewish “types.” She looks as if she knows the federal budget and also memorized her grandmother’s recipe for rugelach. That combination is irresistible to me, like sitting next to Einstein at your niece’s bat mitzvah.

The news is on for a couple of hours each day, whether or not I’m in the kitchen. Alice and I bounce back and forth between CNN and MSNBC. Since I can’t remember which is which, it’s either the Rachel Station or the Anderson Station. I actually prefer the Rachel Station, but the other will do just fine in a pinch.

Here We Are, by director Nir Bergman, is a film of almost suffocating intensity. The plot is a sequence of familiar elements: an isolated father, an autistic son, and the labor of love that sustains their lives. Aharon (Shai Avivi) knows his son’s wants as well as his own, from a fetishistic taste for little star-shaped pasta to the color of the shirts he puts on in the morning. One of the most touching aspects of this intimate relationship is that Aharon functions as a kind of encyclopedia for Uri (Noam Imber), who relies on him to confirm what he likes. “Do I like yellow,” Uri asks his father. “Yes, Uri, you like yellow.”

Would-be dictators love an emergency. It allows them to claim that in a state of chaos, only extraordinary measures will save us. Everything is suddenly on the table, including illegal force, the suspension of civil liberties, and the translation of democracy into unitary rule. Nothing is too extreme in such a moment. Everything is represented as an existential threat.

Yotam Vilk is now the name to remember.

Many people have written—some fiercely, some not—about the moral crisis of war in Gaza. I just read a sermon by a friend of mine intended for delivery over the holidays ahead. She’s a big ol’ Zionist from the Pleistocene era forward, who has always taken issue with my occasional crotchets. She is the real thing, a true believer, but her words were full of grief and alarm. Where is the Israel I thought I knew? Why has it descended into ethnic erasure? Are “we” really going to keep killing Palestinian children? I don’t think I’ve written anything as fierce, but he will not be alone this year in the pulpit. Many American rabbis will echo her thoughts, and I fault myself for having been tentative and measured.

He’s certainly no doctor, but he has doomed us all.

For those wondering whether Donald Trump has won, you might start by looking at RFK, Jr. The before and after make for a black-and-white comparison. Before Kennedy got its hands on the CDC, it was the premier source of medical expertise. It established the protocols for childhood vaccination, kept its eye on approaching pandemics, and led the research on dire illness. If you had a child with inoperable brain cancer, the CDC couldn’t save your family, but there was someone in its labs who was working on a cure.

I’m a big fan of YIVO, but who is not? Founded in Lithuania in the years between the wars, it named itself the “Jewish Scientific Institute.” Each letter in the acronym feels like a musical note, a prayer chanted across the generations. Think of it as the Smithsonian of the Jews, an attic storage room for history and culture that somehow captured the Jewish experience. The founders assumed that everything about the Jews was worthy of study, analysis, archiving, and publication, especially in the lands of Eastern Europe. It was an heroic enterprise of self-conscious nationalism. I wish that I had been present at the founding.

The most disorienting thing about our current politics is the failed link between behavior and its consequences. Sauron can say whatever he wants, and he wins his battles and stays in the White House. RFK, Jr. is a moronic extremist with no regard for truth or expertise, and he is permitted to run amok in health care policy making. Linda McMahon is a former wrestling promoter and she is busy dismantling American education. Whatever safeguards used to exist lie shattered on the terrazzo floors of Mar-a-Lago.

As the tide of public opinion turns, Israel is in the midst of a reputational catastrophe. Day by day, the criticism grows, and the slippage is noticeable in every sphere. I expect to see it in the left leaning press and what used to be called the Democratic Squad, but when Amy Klobuchar hints that the situation in Gaza is intolerable, we have crossed into a whole different universe of opinion. She has now allied herself with Bernie Sanders, arguing against the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. Senator Klobuchar is not some fire-breathing radical. She is the official Mom of the Democratic Party.

The jury’s still out on Governor Pritzker. Can he carry the fight to Donald Trump? Is he brutal enough to defeat Sauron, Jr.? Will there be an election in 2028 or will the Republicans run another insurrection in the Capital and simply install J.D. Vance by acclimation? Stranger things have happened in history. We are closer to a bloodless (or bloody )coup than I have ever allowed myself to believe

Anti-Semitism is a mysterious creature—present, surreptitious, always lurking. Jews may be hypersensitive to its expression, but history suggests that there is reason for vigilance. The optimistic text of the Passover seder assures us that we will celebrate “next year in Jerusalem,” but it also knows about the perils of our experience. “In every generation they have risen to destroy us.” On more than one occasion, “they” have nearly succeeded.

Omigod.

If you happen to be Jewish, you may already have one, but just in case you need a translation, a mezuzah is an ornament for a Jewish front door. It fulfills the demand of the Book of Deuteronomy that we affix God’s word to the door post of our homes. The mezuzah is actually a two-part situation. It includes the case, which is usually decorative, which in turn protects the scroll inside it. The text in question is the very citation that requires the affixing of a mezuzah in the first place, namely short excerpts from Deuteronomy, chapters 5 and 11.

I know what you’re thinking. This is a metaphor. It’s a meditation about the world, and it’s inevitable disappointments. It’s about life, the universe, dealing with defeat.

Nope. It’s about My Actual Garden, the patch of land in the back of the house and the little strip next to the driveway. I love to garden, and my summer planting is finished , but I can already glimpse the basic lineaments of failure.

For a while there was a debate in the local community about whether to talk about Ryan Walters. Everyone I know was already talking, either laughing bitterly or swearing at the TV screen. How was it possible that, with its abundance of maladies, Oklahoma ended up with the Dark Prince of MAGA? It felt like a punishment from the depths of the universe, a rain of anvils from a midnight sky.

Those of us who survived Trump 1.0 were ill-prepared for the second round. It’s as if the intervening years threw us off our game. The hyper-alertness that came with COVID slumped during the relief of the Biden presidency. All was well. Normalcy had prevailed. The country was intact and its institutions were sound. If Trump was a stress test, it ended well, and we returned to the routines of sane predictability.

Washington D.C. is a pretty big city, with many of the amenities and some of the deficits. I’ve probably visited ten times so far, and our daughter worked there for a couple of years. It’s a spectacular place for museums and theater, and Jewish community life is highly developed. I would put it on par with Boston or Chicago. More experienced travelers will have their own opinions.

I’ve also found it safe and secure. Our daughter’s first job in education was at Jefferson Middle School in the general vicinity of the Hirshhorn Museum. Like all schools in the Teach for America network, it was high poverty/low performance in a unlovely neighborhood. But that doesn’t mean it was a dangerous neighborhood.

Years ago, at the beginning of COVID, we created a film series called Blatt and Blue. This was a Synagogue project at our congregation in Tulsa, invented by me (?!) in an effort to become famous. Little did I know that it would confirm my obscurity. Sigh.

That aside, the series has endured forever. The principal reviewers are my wife, Alice Blue, and my friend, David Blatt, who have developed a pleasing rhythm of insightful commentary.

The first time I understood what we were up against was the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Antonin Scalia, the Court’s notorious “originalist” had just died in his bed at a ranch in Texas. Obama proposed a suitable replacement: Merrick Garland, a respected jurist who had friends and supporters on both sides of the aisle. Based on his performance as Attorney General (timid, punctilious, cautious to a fault), it’s hard to say how he might have functioned as a justice. But nobody argued that he was a marginal candidate, unsuitable to the demands of our highest court. Just in case the point needs making, we’re looking at you, Clarence Thomas.

Killing the messenger is an ancient trope; tyrants have been doing it since the beginning of time. David the King in the Books of Samuel occasionally shows signs of being driven by conscience, but even he succumbs to the impulse of the autocrat. When a nameless Amalakite reports the death of King Saul, David orders his men to kill the messenger. Admittedly, the young man is tainted by his origins; all Amalakites are supposed to be slain, but David does not have him killed for that. It is that his news is unbearable to the troubled David, who exorcises his demons in a spasm of violence. If you need the details, they’re in Samuel II.