You’d figure it would be axiomatic by now. The richest country in the history of the world should not allow its citizens to starve. The oligarchs clustered around our billionaire president have all the Ozempic and Mounjaro they need. Shouldn’t a poor kid in the hinterlands get three meals a day and never worry about going hungry during winter vacation? There is something terribly wrong with this picture.

I’m not the first to say that we should be careful with our words. Ro Khanna, California congressman, said it just last week when he cautioned against condescension. His idea is that people react badly to denigration, especially when it comes from perceived elites. Sneering contempt is bad for the soul and it also makes for lost elections.

Nothing about writing this blog is a strain. I wouldn’t say that it writes itself, but I have dropped into a rhythm of planning and execution that feels like a longish-term, sustainable project.

At first, it was five times a week, but then I realized my limitations as a reader. I don’t read anyone five times a week. Once a week is plenty for Maureen Dowd. I actually wish that Frank Bruni wrote more, but his every-Monday effort is enough to sustain me.

For the past several months, I’ve been taking my pulse. What are the sins of the current Administration and which are the ones that spike my blood pressure. No doubt about it, it’s civil liberties, the selective prosecution of political enemies, and the wholesale assault against the Constitutional order. When you put that together with the brutal treatment of migrants, you have the current state of the American Experiment. It’s enough to put me in the ICU, a truth I write about at least three times a week.

My friend, Rabbi Liza Stern, tells a story each Thanksgiving that is as dear to our family as it is to hers.

It begins with the years before the First World War, with all the trappings of a tale told by firelight: the widow, the wagon, the five hungry children. The widow is her great-grandmother, trapped in the poverty and privation of Eastern Europe. But because she is the indomitable Mindel Weiss, she manages to book passage on a ship to America.

While we’re still in November, I offer up one more fact.

Kristallnacht is the event that marks the beginning of the end. In the first weeks of November 1938, German Jews took a blow to the head: riots, imprisonment, beatings, and vandalism. While the name assigned to the eruption is now controversial, it references one of the signal images of the episode: broken glass on the sidewalks and in the streets. Shop windows were smashed and looted on November 9 by anti-Semitic officials and citizens. In the course of a nighttime orgy of violence, a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground. By morning, German Jewish life had moved across the threshold. It was no longer simply constrained or untenable, but a full-blown catastrophe a final destination.

It’s been over a week since we commemorated Kristallnacht, but it left a deeper imprint than before. It came with all the traditional reminders that time is passing quickly for survivors, that many are in their late eighties and nineties, and first-hand testimony will soon be gone. My in-laws, Rose and Daniel Blue, live on in their stories, their photographs, and our memories, but it is no replacement for their living presence. My own death will likely coincide with the final disappearance of child survivors born immediately before or during the war. After that, it will all be over.

One of the ugly realities of the mid-nineteenth century was the detested figure of the Northern carpetbagger. In the years immediately following the Civil War, merchants and others roamed the ruined South looking for opportunities to make a financial killing. They had no interest in the hard task of rebuilding but focused on get-rich-quick exploitation. Some came to participate in political renewal, but most were predatory, opportunistic profit-seekers. They were reviled by Southerners and raised legitimate questions about the difference between commerce and unscrupulous mischief.

If I had known how much fun it would be to title these blog entries, I would have started this platform years ago. Four rhymes in a row? Not too shabby.

If you read this piece from another state, you may not know about Kevin Stitt. He’s our second-term governor and arch-conservative who regularly complicates civilized life in Oklahoma. He has taken positions against common-sense gun laws and seems to have a special animus toward transgendered citizens. Native communities view him as an antagonist, despite the fact that he is part of the Cherokee nation. That hasn’t stopped him from opposing tribal sovereignty.

It turns out that I’m quite the fanboy of recent popes. First it was Francis, now deceased, the patron saint of empathic understanding and non-judgmental acceptance of human difference. It would have been hard to predict from the perspective of history that a pope could have met the LGBTQ-plus community with a supernal level of humility and tenderness. Somebody asked him about gay Catholic men. Instead of driving people out of his church, he quietly announced an immortal generosity: “Who am I to judge?” he answered. That is the kind of response that opens the gates of Heaven.

Some of you may know about Hertzi Halevy. A taciturn Israeli in the old school mold, he was, until March, the army chief of staff. For seventeen months, he led the war in Gaza. His successor, Eyal Zamir, took office at his resignation.

I’m not sure he qualifies as an Israeli hero. My guess is that he will be ruthlessly critiqued, at least when the war itself is evaluated. He was the man in charge on October 7, meaning that the Great Failure of Intelligence happened on his watch.

For all the fuss about Zohran Mamdani, you wouldn’t know to worry about anything else. Like Republican politicos trashing Jews and Black people. Or rightwing firebrands using Jews as a cudgel to break the backs of elite universities.

I’m embarrassed to say what I do late at night. Half of it is watching videos of lionesses and water buffalo (or alligators and pythons, or adorable baby monkeys), and the other half is the Royal Family of England. I try to resist, but the pull is too powerful. I know what Elizabeth ate for lunch, and her grandmother’s habit of robbing her fellow royals when she came to visit their country estates.

I keep looking for the piece of coal in the stocking, but I’m as happy as a nine-year-old on Christmas morning. Abigail Spanberger triumphed in Pennsylvania. Mikie Sherrill won in New Jersey. And Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim immigrant who was a back-bench nobody in Nowheresville, New York, has become the face of the greatest city in the world. California decided that it is going to save the country by pumping up the number of Democratic reps. I went to bed feeling very good about the midterms.

Until very recently, the rabbis of our synagogue shared a common point of origin. My successor, Daniel Kaiman, is our first Belarussian, with a New World detour into the islands of the Caribbean. Most of the rest of us, and that means six or seven, are rooted in the Jewish lands north of Poland. We come from places like Latvia and Lithuania, and it turns out that we lived in a close-together cluster. My mother’s family is from a town called Zaresai, known by Jews as Ezherene. It’s right on the northern border of Lithuania. Rabbi Kahn, my predecessor originated in Utian, as far from Zaresai as Tulsa is from Atoka. You got on the main road in one town or another and a couple of hours later, you arrived where you were headed.

A friend of mine, a thoughtful Jew, asked me to talk to him about prayers of praise. We were both at the Synagogue, coming out of services, so his question was pertinent to the moment we had experienced. The Saturday service is a steamroller affair: two-and-a-half hours of communal singing, centered on a lection from the annual Torah reading cycle and punctuated by words of explication from the rabbi. A very small element consists of prayers of petition. A little bit more falls into the category of thanksgiving.

My good friend David has properly rebuked me for my obsessive critique of Barak Obama. There’s certainly a kernel of truth in the charge. I’m always talking about Obama’s failure to engage on the critical issues of the day. The fact that he is finally mobilized, talking about the gubernatorial race in Virginia, the use of the military in domestic settings, and our rapid descent into an authoritarian kakistocracy has taken some oxygen away from my screed. But perhaps my screed has saved Obama, himself (?!). At least that’s the way I’d like to imagine it.

As a permanent outsider, I should be circumspect about Christmas. Every Jew I know thinks that they could nail the holiday. We’ve all got opinions about lights and trees, and which forms and styles do honor to the season. That is, of course, a classic case of envy. We rehearse the Christmas we would want for ourselves if only we had gotten there first.

The improbable candidacy of Zohran Mamdani looks like it may achieve its goal. We won’t know the numbers for another couple of weeks, but he will likely be New York City’s next mayor. Anyone who saw the televised debates could see his gifts as a public figure. When Cuomo dismissed him as a political novice, he deftly responded that Cuomo’s experience was a useless encumbrance. The only purpose it served was to prove his incapacity. In the second debate Mamdani took harder hits, but defended his ground without a catastrophic mistake. That’s probably enough to win him this election.