Before I die (ten years, tops), I’d like to leave Tulsa better than I found it. Since I arrived in the oil slump of 1985, this may not be as difficult as it sounds. That was the year they closed Froug’s for good and the crepes at Magic Pan started tasting like Joplin.

My current plan is Shade Sails for Boston Avenue (SS+BA). From the last day of Passover until the first tornado, it’s actually pleasant to walk downtown. I like the stretch from Elote south. You can say hi to Johnny, the genius pizzaiola at Copaneazi’s, and then down to Libby Billings’ other restaurant, The Vault.

The last time I gave a thought to tariffs, it was in my middle school history class on European mercantilism. Our textbook gave it about half a paragraph in the middle of talking about the birth of capitalism. It feels as distant as the bubonic plague, although that’s probably more current after our experience with COVID. All epidemics have economic consequences, and the black death probably upended everything. If you’re still alive, I bet that sounds familiar.

It turns out that tariffs are really stupid (and the word itself is really hard to spell). If your goal is to export more than you import, then it might be tempting to slap a tax on imports. That was the deal with European mercantilism, in fact the entire goal of international trade.

You’d think we had cracked the code on inclusion, the idea that Jews can be LGBTQ+ and still be full members of our fractious tribe. Most of the Jewish world has voted yes, to our lasting credit as modern Jewish citizens. But there have always been holdouts on the retrograde right. Can a gay Charedi boy, living in B’nai Brak, study at a yeshiva in the Orthodox mold? Think ham and Gruyere. Think shopping on Shabbat. Think any forbidden combination you like.

Mix-up alert: This post is intended for Monday, March 24.

The last time I looked at a piece of political theory was freshman year at the University of Michigan. That was right before the Great Yucatan Meteor. Dinosaurs were dying all around me.

And I was dying of terminal boredom. There was nothing there that felt juicy and alive, and certainly nothing that satisfied my yen for frivolity. I wanted to read something with stilts and a wig, something that I had never seen before.

Days after the attack on the World Trade Center, I traveled from Tulsa to New York City. I had spoken about the assault over the High Holidays at our synagogue and remembered feeling a sense of foreboding. I had written a lament for those who were killed in the attack and the same for those who were murdered at the Pentagon. Our son had just set out for college in Boston and the world felt that it was turning backwards on its axis. It was impossible to reckon with the maelstrom of my fears.

It happened to me.

When Elon and his hench-fiends started dismembering the government, I imagined that I would not feel the consequences for a while. I’m a retired white guy with an abundance of privilege, and I thought that other people would feel the trouble. They would be the ones turned out into the cold in a company town like Washington, D.C. where everyone was being fired at once. This made me crazy, but not personally crazy. I figured the rest would come, but not in February or March.

My wake-up call came earlier today. I got an incoherent letter from the Social Security Administration that seemed to announce good news for our family: because of the economy, my benefit would increase.

Anyone who has lived in the world knows that there are rules about dealing with bullies. Never turn your back in a fight. Never back down because it will make things worse. The bully will keep poking until someone pushes back, and then the bully deflates like a tire with a nail.

I bet you thought you were the nail. Donald Trump’s screed against Judge James E. Boasberg on the unlawful deportation of Venezuelan immigrants was a scurrilous example of unprincipled conduct.

I swore when I started to write for “publication” that I wouldn’t hold back, not in theme or language. I’ve spent my life tempering my words, trying to moderate what I said in public. Imagine holding an electric grinder in your hands and buzzing off all the corners and the edges.

I took it seriously, because I took my position seriously. Clergy people who regularly go off the rails offend against one of the eternal standards. A congregation is made up of many kinds of people, not all of whom share the views of the rabbi.

There’s a song by Alan Sherman from the 60s all about the forgotten David Susskind. He was one of the leading talking heads of his day, much to the irritation of people like Sherman. The lyrics of the song were always funny to me, even if I didn’t know much about Susskind:

Shut up little David Susskind! / Shut up; please don’t talk! / Please don’t talk little David Susskind! / Think first, then you’ll talk!

One of the most powerful questions about Donald Trump’s first month is the thorny issue of public defiance. It’s part of the overhang from his State of the Union. Was it a good idea to stand up and shout, to head for the aisles, to wave those little placards? Or should Democrats have sat in sullen silence, stewing in the rage that many of us feel?

It might already be obvious where I come down. Clearly the Republicans came to party. They met every utterance of the Dear Leader at the podium with shouts of approval and pledges of allegiance. Nothing was too minor to roar in appreciation.

To the extent that Americans are familiar with Purim, it’s thanks to filmmaker Christopher Guest. He gave us a Purim for the ages in “For Your Consideration,” where it functions (hilariously) as the play within the play. When you cast Catherine O’Hara as a Southern Jewish matriarch with Parker Posey as her not-so-closeted lesbian daughter, you get a comic masterpiece that will survive the apocalypse.

Purim, of course, is more than that. It starts this evening on the Jewish calendar and it will be celebrated with masks and costumes and feasting, along with ritually sanctioned public drunkenness.

I’ve been to the mountain, and it’s called Nefesh L.A. It’s the synagogue-with-some-walls on the east side of the city where our son and daughter-in-law have settled their Jewish lives, and where they have initiated us in the mysteries of the next Jewish world.

It’s where our beloved granddaughters are likely to be bat-mitzvah-ed. It’s where we will all be celebrating the High Holidays together, even if I have to get on a plane to get there. This is no small deal for a travel-averse person, especially in an age of highly communicable viruses. Have you heard the one about the semi-elderly Jew and measles (and bird flu and that new thing from Wuhan)?

Dear Secretary Brainworm:

Whenever you go off the rails, I figure it’s those pesky parasites again. I really don’t know what all that wriggling feels like, but I can only imagine that it’s a red-hot mess. Parasites in the brain would be a deficit for anyone, but especially for someone with national responsibilities.

Take that ugly example of measles in Texas (and New Mexico and Georgia and New York and California) and—very soon—in a state near you. First you told us that it was a minor matter and part of a cyclical pattern of outbreaks.

Americans are losing sympathy for Israel. That’s the word from the latest Gallup poll, recently published in the columns of the Forward and in independent statements from the Gallup organization.

This has been going on for a long-ish time. Last year, the number was 51%, down from a high in 2018. Meanwhile the Palestinian number has risen. As you might expect, given the American animus toward Muslims, it is still much lower than the Israeli number. The figure this year is 33%, the highest ever recorded by Gallup.

I don’t really have any Orthodox friends. No one in my family, on either side, was raised in or adopted Orthodox Judaism. For someone who operates in the Jewish “space,” I am menutak—cut off—from the lived reality of Orthodoxy.

Part of this is a matter of location. I have lived my adult life in Tulsa, Oklahoma and there is no appreciable Orthodox presence here. The last mainstream Orthodox rabbi was my predecessor, the gentle and beloved Asher Dov Kahn. I was recruited to Tulsa to set a different course, and though I loved Rabbi Kahn, I was could not be part of his world.

Facism is the third rail of American politics. That’s especially true of the nazi variety, a word I try never to capitalize to express the full measure of my horror and contempt. As sure as God made little green apples, nazis are a really bad form of bad. If you stick out your arm in a nazi salute, you’ve offended half the people in the country. If you go to Germany and berate its government for standing in the way of a neo-fascist political party, there’s a good chance that you’ll offend the other half.

Shirley Littles Palmer was an essential person, one of those souls who hold the world together with gestures of kindness and natural nobility.

I regret to say that I knew her only by reputation. She was the mother of a man—himself a living saint—who has helped manage our Synagogue for over a decade. Keith Palmer, the son, enfolds all of us in his love, the strength of his loyalty, his skills and intelligence. We could not endure without Keith and his team. All of us would say that this is a deeply consequential relationship

If you’re the kind of person who watches films from Israel, you might bring a set of fixed expectations. Whatever film you see will deal with “ha-Matzav,” The Situation. That means the long and heartbreaking struggle for primacy between Palestinian nationalism and its Israeli counterpart. The film may complicate your established views, but inevitably it will focus on deadly conflict.

Either that, or another kind of struggle, between faith and modernity, between the religious and the secular. If there is something else in the mix, it’s the clash between Eastern and Western. On one side, the fading Ashkenazi elite, and on the other an ascendant Middle Eastern majority.

About halfway through “Dear Evan Hansen,” I realized that I had turned into a grumpy old man. Maybe not old (?!), but certainly grumpy. It was at the touring production in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In an auditorium filled from orchestra to second balcony, I was the only one who was not grooving on the performance. That’s 2,364 happy campers and one quarrelsome, disaffected patron in Row N.

I think “happy” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Speaking as the mean-spirited observer I am, half the audience felt aligned with Evan Hansen: people who had struggled with the violent, Darwinian world of high school and not done as well as they might have liked.

For many centuries, Israelite kings ruled in tandem. Rehoboam in Judah, Jeroboam the First in Israel. Ahaz in Judah, Jeroboam the Second in Israel. It nearly broke my brain in rabbinical school trying to keep the dynasties straight. Everything failed: little songs and rhymes and color-coded lists. Looking back, I wasn’t cut out for dynasties. It was pretty much the same for U.S. state capitals. After a while, I just started to fake it. The capital of Oregon is, of course, Oregon City.

Today, it’s much easier. No kings, but presidents. If you’re counting the Jews, it’s Netanyahu and Zelensky, with the recent ascension of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.