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 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)? And it’s where our beloved granddaughters are likely to be bat-mitzvah-ed.

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.

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.