I don’t really like what I wrote last week. It was the piece about immigration called “Take a Number,” and I’m afraid that it might have struck the wrong note. I talked about a job we had done at our house, and described my shame at my own mono-culturalism. One of the men who came to us spoke beautiful English and was deeply at home in the Spanish of his origins. Meanwhile I sputtered to make myself understood and to properly greet the crew that arrived. Not even Google Translate was enough to rescue me.

A year ago today I stepped down from my rabbinate, entering the realm of Life 2.0.

It was supposed to happen much earlier than that, closer to the date of my 65th birthday. It got extended a smidge and then we hit COVID. At that point, I felt a rush of protectiveness and didn’t want to abandon my post. I worked with my successor to help stabilize our program and hold hands with our leadership through the worst of the pandemic.

Jewish denominationalism is a mystery to outsiders, for the same reason that I am personally confused by the Amish. I don’t really live in the center of Amish-ism, and its gradations of practice play out at a distance. I can never remember if Old Order believers allow the use of vehicles in family emergencies. This is no small matter, and I apologize for my ignorance.

It probably won’t matter to anyone but me, but I am breaking with James Carville. Once and for all.

I got tired of the shtik a long time ago. The jambalaya vowels. The athleisure broadcast outfit. The baseball cap that said, “Screw all of you to Hell.” I’m a big fan of performative, down-market exoticism, but there’s a limit to what a man can take.

I admire Pope Francis for many reasons, the same that have alienated some conservative Catholics. He seems to have a special care for the tired and the poor. If you’re a huddled mass, you have a friend in Pope Francis. He speaks with appealing frankness about queer people and the Church. Who am I, he asked, to judge? While he could not credential homosexual behavior, he had no trouble reaching toward gay men and lesbians and enfolding them in the robes of his regalia.

Everything about Donald Trump feels sick to me, especially his pretensions to be an American king. He is sticky with arrogance, greed, and stupidity.

Not so with the estimable Rachel Maddow. I shouldn’t say this, but she is a kind of queen: the best educated, most articulate broadcaster ever, who fills me with a combination of admiration and delight. I feel proud and privileged to be part of her viewing audience. My wonder at her talents is sincere and boundless.

Saturday was the anniversary of my bar mitzvah weekend, the first extravaganza of my (then) young life. This was 1967 in the rapid run up to the style that became ascendant in Jewish America: a cluster of events played out over days, rivalling a wedding in its ambition and complexity. There were out-of-town guests, Hungarian tortes, a live band and hors d’oeuvres, and sparkly ball gowns.

We just had a little work done at the house. Nothing major. Pretty much routine. After 15 years of living lightly in our home, it was finally time to freshen things up. Even an older couple with kids on their own knicks the baseboards and smudges the walls. It was time to attend to some minor repairs and make the walls and the floors look great again (WAFLAGA).

I’m a rabbi. I believe in atonement, especially the arduous kind where you really work at it, expose your vulnerabilities, and accept the consequences. It isn’t really supposed to be a deathbed performance, even though our tradition makes room for late-breaking developments.

Just in case you’re nearing the end, I’d be glad to help you with the formula for confession. And just in case, I keep it by my bedside. I said that I believe in real, midlife atonement, but I didn’t say that I’ve got my act together.

The faces of the hostages have pierced my heart. They look down from the walls of many synagogues I know, reminding us that October 7 isn’t over, that none of the “issues” have been resolved, least of all their own liberation or retrieval. Their faces are relaxed and happy, fully occupied by civilian concerns, as familiar to me as the members of my family. Alon and Itzik. Matan and Ziv.

I do not know a single one of them, although I know plenty of people who do. I wonder if I have run into them at a bar mitzvah, some celebration in Boston or New York. The faces of the dead are the most painful of all.

At this point it all feels after the fact. During Trump/Sauron’s first term I wrote you incessantly, imploring you to do the right thing. I figured that your dithering, your promise to “consider” was all part of the theater of your politics. In order to get to moral fundamentals, you had to reassure your party that you would give the Devil his due. If that meant a couple/few months of wavering, I thought it might be worth the wait. When it was clear that that would rarely happen, I began to hope (loudly) that Maine would kick you to the curb. I will never understand why that didn’t happen. I thought that Maine was a better class of state.

Decades ago, Elie Weisel unloaded on the practitioners of Holocaust filmmaking. He felt that their efforts were juvenile and disgusting, a disgrace to the enormity of the event itself.

It would be better, he felt, not to speak at all than to somehow diminish the horror of the Sho’ah. Its impenetrable evil was beyond depiction, at least by most artists (Weisel excepted?) who embraced the task.

A smart man I know recently asked about Tulsa. “If you had to take a guess, what’s our moon shot? What’s the next big project that will put us on the map?”

There’s a lot of valuable talk going around, all on the subject of the next big thing. Austin did it. Nashville did it. The accelorationists among us figure that it’s now our turn, suggesting everything from drones to dirt bikes to data farms. All we need is for the holes in the cheese to align, which generally means big philanthropic support.

Two names for the same place? Not a problem. It took centuries to stabilize “Istanbul” and displace the name that came before it. I’d still be happy with Constantinople and use either name on alternate days.

My guess is that there are some people who continue to slip, in much the same way that they never made it from “Prince” to the unpronounceable hieroglyphic we were supposed to adopt. The two continued to be used interchageably.

Kevin Stitt, Governor of Oklahoma, has been a ramrod Republican from the very start. Hardcore progressives (like me!) have been frustrated by his program of kneejerk fealty to MAGA orthodoxy. Imagine the love child of Cruz and DeSantis throwing back his head to sing about the wind on the plains.

He has several peeves that endear him to conservatives, including taxes, public schools, and native Americans. The fact that the state is at the bottom of every list that measures health, education, and fundamental welfare, doesn’t seem to faze either Stitt or his allies.

There’s a gorgeous scene in the Book of Exodus that should be photocopied and distributed to Congressional Democrats.

It’s arguably the climax of the whole ancient narrative. Moses and the People Israel have reached the Sea of Reeds with the officers of Pharaoh in white hot pursuit. Another moment and the bloodbath will begin. I imagine it right out of the Colosseum scenes in “Gladiator,” with big swords affixed to the spokes of the chariot wheels.

Ryan Walters is the mole of Oklahoma politics. Whack him when he buys curricular materials from a sketchy conservative blowhard, and the next thing you know he’s snapping up Bibles for classrooms. Whack him for the Bible thing and he’s threatening to take over your schools.

He already demanded the head of Tulsa’s superintendent on a platter and extracted compliance in a show of brute force. The result was a sorry episode of scrambling disruption and pointless pilgrimages to appease a petty tyrant.

Montgomery, Alabama has the feel of an idea struggling to take shape. Despite the fact that it is the capital of the state, it has too many empty buildings to signal energy and initiative. We went looking for something between Charleston and Atlanta, but kept bumping into the wall of stalled renewal.

You could be forgiven for thinking that its day is done, except for the fact that it has achieved something miraculous: a cluster of institutions focused on slavery and its aftermath that are vivid, sophisticated, and deeply moving.

The stench of the new administration is now seeping through the floor boards. But before we have to evacuate the house, I’d like to take us back to 1938, the point of origin for so much of what we are now experiencing. In that year, another authoritarian regime, reacting to its own nativist fears of contamination, decided to remove foreign-born Jews, and shove them across the border into neighboring Poland.

I have enormous affection for my fellow Oklahomans, even when we disagree about the basics. It’s one of the many reasons I live in this state. I don’t want to suffocate in any kind of bubble, least of all a religious or social monoculture. It’s better for all of us when we rub shoulders with one another and learn to speak across the barrier of upbringing. That’s right at the center of the American Dream.