“You know we live in light and shadow.That’s what we live in – a world of light and shadow – and it’s confusing.” (ascribed to Tennessee Williams)
At this season every year, I think of Tennessee William’s simple truth, and I’m drawn to it especially this year because of the stark confusion and suffering experienced by so many across the planet in these days.
For our Christian brothers and sisters, Christmas comes to rekindle the light of faith and hope. For the Jewish people, Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, reminds us of our capacity for hope despite the bitter reality that we’ve endured time and again.
These two winter holidays coincide this year, and I’ve asked myself what might this coincidence suggest. Perhaps it is this, that in kindling light, a disarmingly simple act, we transform our homes, holy places and lives with sparks of eternity that illuminate a vision of the world redeemed of its horror and pain.
Chag Orim Sameach to my Jewish friends, and Merry Christmas to my Christian friends.
This blog was posted by J Street on Friday, December 6
By Rabbi John Rosove and Sam Berkman
We wish we weren’t here. We wish October 7 had never happened. We wish all the hostages were home and that all had survived. We wish thousands of Palestinians had not fallen victim in this terrible war. We wish the fighting would stop and Israelis and Palestinians could know freedom and security–peace. But that’s not where we are today.
As this devastating war rages on, it’s time to confront a hard truth: Supporting Israel doesn’t always mean unquestioning endorsement of its government’s actions or the automatic provision of foreign aid. True support sometimes requires breaking from convention. Simply supplying military assistance – without tackling the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – may temporarily mask the symptoms for Israelis, but it won’t deliver lasting peace and security.
Ignoring those deeper issues undermines the US-Israel relationship and risks the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike—a reality we’ve seen tragically play out over the past year.
This was the context for the US Senate’s vote last month on a series of resolutions to disapprove certain arms sales to Israel—measures that were largely symbolic, as the deadline to block the sales had already passed. While the resolutions failed, as expected, the vote sent a clear message of dissent of how the Netanyahu government has conducted the war in Gaza, its disregard for US laws, and the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict.
Nearly 14 months into this war, over 100 hostages remain in Gaza. Israeli security experts – including Israel’s recently ousted Defense Minister – have said that continuing the war in Gaza serves no strategic purpose. Meanwhile, President Biden’s repeated appeals for Netanyahu to take stronger action on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza have largely gone unanswered.
Israel has had no greater friend over the last year than President Joe Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist. From visiting Israel during wartime to providing critical military aid and even moving US military personnel and equipment into the region, Biden has consistently demonstrated America’s unwavering support for Israel.
And what has this loyalty yielded? Reportssuggest that Netanyahu’s government is closer to advancing plans for rebuilding Israeli settlements in Gaza than securing the return of the hostages. Even most Israelis believe it is more important to secure a hostage deal now than continue the war.
So what more can be done? How do we help those Israelis who desperately want to break the stalemate and end the war, bring home the hostages, stop the suffering in Gaza, and set forth on a path toward regional peace and stability?
The answers do not lie in the empty rhetoric offered by those who opposed the Senate resolutions. Paying lip service to platitudes of peace while giving Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing government carte blanche hardly seems like the course of action a good friend to Israel should take.
Last month’s vote revealed something important: Leveraging US law to promote a shift toward policies that benefit Israel’s long-term security is not anti-Israel—it is profoundly pro-Israel.
Nineteen senators, all pro-Israel, stood up for US law and for their principles in the face of the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Among those who voted a symbolic ‘yes’ to disapprove the sales were the second-highest ranking Democrat–the Senate Majority Whip, four Democratic leaders, the incoming ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential running mate. Notably, three of these senators are Jewish.
All 19 senators have long condemned Hamas and the horrific October 7 attack and reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself. They have called for the release of all hostages. They have voted for tens of billions of dollars of security aid to Israel throughout their careers. None of them are calling for anything approaching an arms embargo, and all of them endorse continued support for Iron Dome and other defensive systems.
Such resumes do not reflect an anti-Israel fringe. These are serious lawmakers who represent mainstream positions, including those within the American Jewish community– a recent poll of Jewish American voters found that 62 percent support withholding certain offensive arms to press for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
The positions taken by these courageous senators, which were couched in the spirit of supporting Israel, challenge traditional thinking in American politics and within the American Jewish community. But it is precisely this strategy we must embrace if we are committed to a future where Israel remains secure, vibrant, democratic, and Jewish, living in peace with its neighbors.
We applaud these legislators, and we will continue to push for an Israel that reflects our highest Jewish and democratic values—and for US policies that champion this vision.
Doing this is many things: It’s American. It’s democratic. It’s Jewish. It’s pro-Palestinian. It’s pro-peace. It’s pro-Israel.
I have spent the last month licking my wounds, steering clear of having to listen to Donald Trump’s voice, reading only headlines in the NYTimes and Washington Post about what he’s doing to populate the American government and malign our democracy, and listening to a few well-chosen podcasts that focus on what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the election and what we who are supporters must do going forward towards the mid-terms. I have avoided watching the news on Cable TV (CNN and MSNBC) for my sanity’s sake.
On my early morning walks, I listen for a while to the podcasts noted above (e.g. Pod Save America, the War Room with Al Hunt and James Carville, Hacks-on-Tap, and The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller) until I’ve had enough. I also listen to podcasts out of Israel (e.g. The Times of Israel Daily Briefing, The Promised Podcast, and Haaretz Weekly), and then I listen to classical music mostly. I also walk quietly, watch the squirrels and birds and listen to their songs, and commune with the coyotes who seem to have grown more numerous in our neighborhood in Sherman Oaks. I mostly just try and “be” or I spend time “thinking” about God knows what? (family mostly and ideas I’m mulling around).
And I photograph some of the extraordinarily beautiful images of first light as I see it is emerging into day above me. I’m attaching below a few of those images.
I find myself signing off emails these days since the election saying simply “Stay safe and sane!” and I wish that for all of you.
Apologies for former blog in which Ruth Messinger’s Op-Ed was not accessible. Here is the entire article.
Despair is not a strategy. Here are 4 things those mourning the election results can do right now.
By Ruth Messinger, The Daily Forward – Op-Ed – November 25, 2024
This essay was adapted from remarks the author delivered at her synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, and at a conference of the Jewish women’s group Elluminate.
Three weeks after the disastrous election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, I am, first and foremost, grieving. Grieving the failure of the second female candidate of a major party to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling, grieving the continuing and ongoing series of threats to our democracy, grieving the inadequacy of our organizing efforts, grieving the vast chasms among our citizenry that so desperately need healing they are unlikely to receive in this administration.
Our Jewish traditions that guide us through the loss of loved ones can help us with this kind of grief as well. The ritual of shiva, the seven-day period of intense mourning after a funeral, is well known. When it ends, the mourners are meant to get up and walk around the block, a cathartic reentry into the world, into their new normal, accompanied by members of their community.
So instead of playing the blame game about what went wrong, we must get up and focus instead on where we go from here.
Bottom of Form
First, in the spirit of this week’s holiday of Thanksgiving, we can start with some gratitude.
We held a free and fair election, without evident scandal or corruption. Boards of elections, poll workers, and various state and local bodies did their jobs. There was open debate, and there will soon be a peaceful and lawful transition of power.
This is not something that we should take for granted, in a world full of despots and coups. It is something that should be treasured and defended.
The result of the election is terrifying to me. Trump made clear in the campaign and has confirmed through his appalling cabinet appointments that he is determined to reshape our world through his own brand of racism, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia. He intends to target and tear apart immigrant communities and is committed to launching mass deportations. He continues to profess a denial of the climate crisis. He will attack Jews, Muslims, trans people and protesters of all kinds.
Despite our best field outreach and organizing efforts, his party will control both houses of Congress, and he will expand the conservative majority on our Supreme Court, leaving little hope for the checks and balances the Constitution is supposed to provide against the abuse of power.
There is plenty to mourn, but after the grieving must come strategic thinking that leads to action. And as I first said in a synagogue speech after Trump’s first victory in 2016, “despair is not a strategy.”
People in the most vulnerable situations in our society and around the world cannot afford for us to wallow in despair, and the teachings of our tradition won’t let us do that either.
So here are four first steps that can start to shape a path forward:
Drill down on a single issue. Whatever moves you most: trans rights, the environment, Israel. Get focused, and get involved. And don’t go out and create a new nonprofit to address your cause. Find the right group and be ready to work with others on the issue you’re passionate about wherever and however it arises. Be an ambassador, an educator and a lobbyist for the issue.
Focus on the midterms. We cannot afford to wait until the 2028 presidential cycle to turn the tide. The entire House and a third of the Senate will be on the ballot in 2026, and history suggests the opposition party will have major opportunities to flip seats. Find a candidate you care about and start giving and canvassing. There are even elections in 2025: the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, and open seats for governor in both Virginia and New Jersey. Each and every ballot in this divided country is essential.
Invest in education for a democracy. One lesson from this campaign is the curse of misinformation and disinformation in a fractured, filter-bubbled media landscape. We have endless new ways of communicating, and we must ensure that reliable, trustworthy, fact-based content reaches broad audiences. Support nonprofit and local journalism, invest in the teaching of civics and media literacy, share reliable information on candidates and issues across social media and other channels.
Engage in/with the resistance. Maybe you are not the type or no longer in the mood to march on Washington. Fine. But when Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportation — when he deploys the National Guard to remove the newest New Yorkers from the hotels where they have been sheltering, or to empty the synagogues and churches and mosques that have provided sanctuary — we will each have to decide whether to stand in the way or stand silently and watch. Think now about how much you are willing to risk, how much you would sacrifice, for the lives and rights of people more vulnerable than you are.
It may sound daunting. It may feel easier to stay in mourning; it may seem too hard to walk around the block. But we have faced crises before and survived, both as Jews and as Americans.
As Jews, we know that for millennia our ancestors lived under governments that ranged from friendly to hostile, welcoming to brutal. We have not only learned how to survive, but developed the tools to thrive, to be there for each other’s safety, and to experience the joys of life under any circumstance. We know that our responsibility to continue to work for justice is central to our tradition.
So get up we must. If your steps are unsteady, be guided by the teaching of the Chinese philosopher Lu Xun. “Hope is like a path in the countryside,” he wrote more than a century ago. “Originally, there was no path, yet as people walked all the time in the same direction, a way appeared.”
Ruth Messinger is right – read her op-ed in the Forward (November 25, 2024) in which she describes a path on which we dispel our despair after a period of mourning (as in the Shiva process) after the election and on which we then rise up and commit ourselves to do all we can as we anticipate the mid-term elections in 2026.
“America has split, and flipped, by education levels. Democrats have largely lost the working-class voters who elected Barack Obama, and college-educated professionals are shifting away from the Republican Party.”
So reports Axios (by Erica Pandey – November 11, 2024) on the percentage of Americans who voted for Donald Trump who do not have college degrees and the percentage of Americans for Kamala Harris who do.
By the numbers: College graduates made up 43% of the electorate, and 55% voted for Vice President Harris, per exit polls.
56% of voters without degrees voted for President-elect Trump.
The states below that level are almost all reliably red, and the states above it are almost all reliably blue.
And several of the states that hover right around the middle are closely watched battlegrounds.
As Trump prepares to eliminate the Department of Education, it becomes clear what his and the right wing’s attempt to dumb-down America mean generally and specifically on matters of race and gender – namely, to keep America divided between red and blue states and to sway swing states into red states in order to create a permanent right-wing red state dominated federal government.
Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, explains in her “Letters to an American” the history, purpose and specifics of funding that the Department of Education provides for K-12 students. Controlling what and how students learn and don’t learn by allowing states alone to set the standards for public education serves the extreme right wing of the MAGA Republican Party that relies on voters with less education to elect its state and federal leadership.
I can only hope that after 4 years of the Trump presidency that the next president (should he/she be a Democrat) will reestablish the Department of Education, federal funding of K-12 schools for a variety of important purposes, and the open and inclusive values that are the mission of thhe the Department.
Here is Dr. Richardson’s piece from yesterday (November 16, 2024):
“One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states.
In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do.
The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.
It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.
The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.
A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science.
But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values.
When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the Covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.
Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault.
In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination.
After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.
When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”
During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.
But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars.
There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.
In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
Many Jews tell me they are unbelievers because religion causes war and enmity between religious groups and peoples. I say, bad religion causes war and enmity, but good religion does the opposite – it promotes unity, love and kindness.
For me, my Jewish faith in God isn’t based in the super-nationalist, misogynist, homophobic, intolerant, reward-and-punishment God of ancient Biblical tradition, but rather in the mystic’s God, the creative and life-affirming God of quiet “inwardness” that affirms the unity of humankind and the infinite worth and dignity of every woman, man, and child. And my ethics grow from the ethics of the ancient biblical prophets.
Jewish religious and ethical tradition does many things, and two of the most important are that it feeds the mind and inspires the soul. I write in my recently published book “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” about Jewish faith and ethics in this way and about the core Jewish values that have enabled me to address the greatest challenges facing Americans, Israelis, the Jewish people, and humankind in the modern era. I tell many consequential stories in my life and how my values and faith have buttressed me as I have sought to make sense of them all. I tell of 3 prominent mentor guides whose voices live within me and my conscience and are often in conflict with one another.
I’m beginning my book tour this coming Friday evening on Shabbat in Seattle, WA, and next Tuesday evening in NYC. If you live in either of those places, I’d love to see you. Here is my schedule in the next several months:
-Friday Shabbat, November 15, 6 PM – Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle, WA
-Tuesday, November 19, 6:30 PM – Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue, NY
-Friday Shabbat, December 6, 6 PM – Congregation Sherith Israel, San Francisco
-Friday Shabbat, January 3, 6:15 PM – Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles
-Sunday, February 23, 10:15 AM – Washington Hebrew Congregation, Washington, DC
I hope you will consider acquiring a copy of my Memoir and learn more about how my Jewish faith and ethics have buttressed and helped me to clarify my Jewish moral compass in what I’ve done as a rabbinic leader over many decades of service to the Jewish people.
If you already acquired a copy, thank you. If you found it meaningful, please consider writing a brief review and posting it on Amazon. If you’d like to reach out, I’d love the chance to speak in person or virtually with your community about my Memoir and the ideas and activism that have filled my life and been so meaningful.
The following letter was sent by Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, to Reform Jewish Leadership with a sign-on opportunity. If you are inclined, please hit the link below and add your name.
Dear Friends,
This morning, the nation woke up to news that will shape us for the next four years and beyond. Like everyone else, I am experiencing a range of strong emotions. I also awoke believing in the same core Jewish commitments that have called generations of our people to use our God-given gifts to shape a world of holiness, dignity, justice, and love, even as we face this challenging new day.
These are the deeply held Jewish values that undergird our movement’s commitment to civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ equality, caring for the health of our environment, every individual’s right to reproductive and other forms of health care, and more.
Across the country, Reform Jews, communities, and congregations are experiencing the pain of the demonization of difference that has become normative in our contentious political culture. This pain may be accompanied by fear, anxiety, sadness, confusion and even anger. We must remain steadfast in our dedication to supporting one another in fostering compassion, resilience, and understanding within our communities. Together, we will confront these challenges by promoting dialogue, embracing diversity, and advocating for a society rooted in justice and respect for all.
There will be opportunities to advance our vision of justice, based on the knowledge that we are all made more whole when we treat others with the respect every human being deserves.
The strength of our movement has always been in the community that we are, standing alongside each other in moments of joy and moments of challenge. We will care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. We will remain firm in our values and bring them to bear in the public square. We will speak truth to power.SIGN THE LETTER
Join us in adding your name to this letter to President Trump amplifying this expression of our values and commitments.
In solidarity, Rabbi Rick Jacobs (he/him) President, URJ
The polls are making me crazy. I know I’m not alone. I’ve written in this blog about my incredulity that so many millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump and that current Republican office holders who can’t stand Trump refuse out of cowardice to say so publicly.
Many have sought to explain Trump’s appeal, including Ezra Klein most recently in a thoughtful verbal essay a week ago on his podcast and, following that, by an in-depth interview with NYT’s journalist Maggie Haberman who, among journalists, knows Trump better than most. It ought to be clear to everyone by now who he is, the danger he poses to our democratic institutions, and who Kamala Harris is too.
Understanding that no candidate for public office is without his/her flaws and weaknesses, Kamala Harris has hers as well, though for middle-left Democrats she has shown herself to be a strong, honest, empathic, smart, pragmatic, experienced, competent, and charismatic leader based in broad liberal democratic values, supportive of the US Constitution and rule of law, and of America’s traditional place in the international order.
Given Donald Trump’s enormous weaknesses as a candidate and as a man and his utter lack of empathy, I’ve struggled to understand why he remains so competitive in the polls. In any former election before the so-called “Trump Era,” his behavior and character would have been disqualifying for the presidency.
David Plouffe, Kamala Harris’ Senior Advisor, explained that since September, nothing substantial has changed in the polls. Harris and Trump are historically close and Harris’ lead in the key swing states is within the margins of error. Plouffe and others say, however, that we would rather be us than Trump, that Kamala is a far better candidate with better policies that positively will impact the economy and the lives of more Americans, and will preserve the United States’ role internationally. Harris also has a far better ground-game and has more money than Trump to make her case.
James Carville wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times last week in which he argued why he is certain that Kamala Harris will win the election just as the historian Allan Lichtman has argued since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in July.
This past week on the MSNBC Podcast How to Win 2024 with former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Steele sought to allay the anxiety that so many of us Democrats feel (we are a nervous bunch, to be sure). He explained that the polls are being skewed by the deliberate infusion of hundreds of MAGA leaning polls to jack up the confidence of Trump supporters that can drive his base to the polls and lay the groundwork for Trump’s denial of the results if/when he loses the election.
Steele’s argument calmed me down a bit, as well as the recent revelations of General John Kelly in his NYT’s interview with Mike Schmidt, and the news that 200 former Republican office holders and members of past Republican administrations are voting for Kamala Harris. And then there are all the celebrity endorsers such as Beyoncé’s appearance with Kamala in Houston, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Michelle and Barak Obama’s barnstorming in swing states, a plethora of strong cutting-edge Harris ads flooding social media, and Harris and Walz appearing everywhere in interviews and rallies.
It’s difficult, nevertheless, not knowing how this election will turn out given the enormous stakes. That’s the source of my anxiety and fear. I’ve tried to contain my anxiety by distracting myself with other things, in remembering that turn-out and only the final poll (i.e. the vote) matters, and that the advantages are with the Harris-Walz campaign.
Here are a few thoughts by others that have helped me address my fear and anxiety in these final days. I hope they might help those of you who feel as I do as November 5th approaches:
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie, no relation to Andrew Carnegie, (1888-1955)
“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.” -Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
“Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.” -Mary Doria Russell, science-fiction writer (b. 1950)
“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.”-Jodi Picoult, American novelist (b. 1966)
“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Remember to vote and be sure everyone you know votes – hopefully, for the Harris-Walz ticket. If you are willing and able to volunteer to get out the vote, go to Pod Save America’s non-partisan “Vote Save America PAC” at https://votesaveamerica.com/
When my father died at the age of 53 from a heart attack in 1959, the last image I had of him was him saying good night to my brother and me as he stood in the doorway between our darkened bedroom and his backlit bathroom in naked silhouette. Early the next morning, long before my brother and I awakened, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital, and 24 hours later my mother informed me of his death using these words: “Daddy is no more!” I cried as I’d never cried before and rarely since. I’ll never forget that moment.
Since his passing, I’ve lived a long life of study, reflection, spirituality, Jewish learning, liberal Zionist and human rights activism. My Dad’s lasting image in that doorway will never go away, and through my memoir “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” I sought to crystallize images of my life for my sons and grandchildren as I discussed many issues of concern in my own life and in the life of the communities I served as a rabbi in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood.
I’ll be traveling on a book tour this fall and winter, and if I am in your city, I would love to meet you at one of the following:
-Friday Evening Shabbat, November 15, 6 PM – Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle, WA
-Tuesday Evening, November 19, 6 PM – Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue, Manhattan, NY
-Friday Evening Shabbat, December 6, 6 PM – Congregation Sherith Israel, San Francisco
-Friday Evening Shabbat, January 3, 6:15 PM – Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles
-Sunday, February 23, 10:15 AM – Washington Hebrew Congregation, Washington, DC
As we approach election day and whatever happens following November 5, your reading my Memoir may offer an opportunity to reflect on the essential values and experiences that have enabled me to cope with and address the greatest challenges facing Americans, Israelis, the Jewish people, and the world over the past 7 decades.
Thank you if you acquired already a copy of my Memoir. If not, I invite you to do so on Amazon or on the publisher’s link below (I will have books available at each of my book-talks above). Please leave a review of the book on Amazon, if you find it meaningful. If you’d like to reach out, I’d love the chance to speak in person or virtually with your community about my Memoir.
Rabbi John Rosove's Blog 