A beloved friend, a leader in our community, is a committed servant of the Jewish people. She has worked in Jewish fundraising for decades and raised millions of dollars for every imaginable purpose. If you’ve got a job that needs doing yesterday, there is one person, at least, who can deliver the goods. Build an agency? Run a campaign? She is a sparkling combination of talent and will.

Every so often, I wonder who’s worse: Sauron or Voldemort? Trump or Vance?

Usually, it’s no contest at all. Our president has now humiliated two heads of state, exposing both to televised debasement. He has turned the White House into a cesspool of grift, using his office to cash in on bitcoin, handing out golden watches as rewards. The sight of currency bros lining up at Mar-a-Lago, waiting to speak to the Great Man himself, was like watching a fraternity party in agonizing slo-mo. Donald Trump bullied his way to an immoral budget bill that trades the misery of the poor for the comfort of the oligarchs. A person could be sent to Hell for less.

New popes tend to be met with enthusiasm, but when Jews describe the history of the papacy, the story is vastly more complicated and problematic. Kidnapped by director Marco Bellocchio is not the work of a Jewish filmmaker, but the story it tells is deeply sympathetic.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check if there are new signs of damage. Agencies dismantled. Treaties suspended. Colleges brought to their knees by defunding. Just today the Administration announced that it was taking another look at Biden-era offenses. It wants to know about that bag of cocaine that someone once planted in the Biden White House. The hope, I imagine, is that Hunter is the culprit, and it will lead, retroactively, to the impeachment of his father. If you’re anything like me, you’re enraged all the time.

I keep writing to all of you about Yeshiva University, a place that you probably never heard of before. It’s my personal contribution to inside baseball, where you go to the place behind the plate and see how a certain Jewish game is played. Not the most important game in the world, but one that reveals the behavior of a team that may never have intruded on your consciousness before.

Wherever you live, you’ve probably been thinking about Oklahoma. That’s because we just dodged a bullet. After years of legal challenge and counter-challenge, the case of St. Isidore has finally been decided: there will be no state funds for Catholic charter schools. Not here in Oklahoma and, presumably, not anywhere. That sound you hear is a great sigh of relief.

Rose and Daniel Blue are our family heroes. They graduated from the Holocaust in 1945 and were liberated from Bergen Belsen on April 12. For several years, they waited in Germany for the ashes of millions of Jews to settle, while the Allies decided who would go where. My father-in-law traded on the postwar black market and honed a masterful talent for practicality and survival. My mother-in-law trained as a dental technician, fabricating bridges and full-blown dentures. She gave birth to their first-born child, Sima, in the explosion of baby-making that followed the war.

I’ve spent the morning along with many of you, thinking about last night’s assassination in Washington. The Lischinskys and the Milgrims are now mourning their children, and we have been cast into sorrow for them and their families, for the death of hope, for the death of possibility.

There’s something thrillingly concrete about the term.

Habeas corpus means “you should have the body.” Imagine a crowd of restive citizens. One of their number has been nabbed by the authorities and dumped into a spider hole by an unscrupulous ruler. No due process. No proceedings of the court. It’s the nightmare prospect of extrajudicial punishment, in this case permanent disappearance.

I was an English major, so I follow the royals. No, I really follow the British royals. That means I’m interested in everything about them, from the dynamics of the relationship between Princess Charlotte and Prince George, to the number of ceremonies on the Princess Royal’s calendar. I cared about the restoration of Windsor Castle and I certainly monitored the family photographs that Elizabeth displayed during her Christmas broadcast.

Along with many of you, I’ve been trying to think Big Thoughts, like democracy, freedom, and the American Way. That, and the cluster of awful alternatives: tyranny, authoritarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and the newly conceivable rule-by-junta. I have Timothy Snyder on a human tracker as he disengages from Yale and moves to Canada. Just in case, I want to know where to find him when the helicopters train their weapons on the crowd. Paranoid? Yes. Inconceivable? No.

Let me know if I’m getting on your nerves.

It’s probably OK that Kamala Harris made another appearance last week in Manhattan. She was in New York for the gala at the Met, celebrating an exhibit on Black Dandyism at the Costume Institute. It’s a fantastically interesting look at a culture that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, from zoot suits to kente cloth to jeweled grilles for rap stars. I’ve tried to follow it closely online and hope to see it this summer in person. I think It will bump out our shared sense of Black America and display a boldness I can’t even imagine.

My interest in typography predates my rabbinate. Long before I came to my first pulpit, I messed around with letterforms and typefaces, as if I were preparing for a career as a typesetter. Something tells me I would have been happy in that field. Some of my best experiences—the most stimulating and lively—have been in filling blank surfaces with the ant tracks of text, Many type nerds would say the same.

Parades have a way of going off course. The most famous episode took place in Philadelphia during the culminating months of WW I. The government still needed to sell bonds for the war effort, and somebody thought that a parade would be the ticket. Two hundred thousand hapless citizens gathered on Broad Street to watch the spectacle of newly minted biplanes, soldiers, and Sousa bands.

If you are free tonight, Tuesday, May 13, I urge you to join us at All Souls Unitarian Church at 29th and Peoria, at 7:00 p.m. Many members of the faith community of Tulsa will be gathering to stand against wholesale deportation and protesting the unjust acts of this administration, especially the threat to rescind habeas corpus. Many millions of lives would be affected by this planned horror. Please help us speak with force. I will be delivering the following as an official speaker:

I’m a little bit late for Mother’s Day weekend, but Ethel would have most certainly forgiven me. She forgave me everything, along with my brother. We did plenty of things that caused her irritation, but on the most basic level we could do no wrong. She had a gift for rapid processing and clean forigveness.. She was honest, direct, and named her disappointments. It meant that we always knew what irked her, but it was over the moment she said it.

Haley Joel Osment was an affecting child star. There was that nice performance in Forrest Gump and the his reputation-making role in The Sixth Sense. I think it had something to do with his mouth. It looked a little too small for his face, which inevitably has the effect of making you look young and innocent.

You wouldn’t know it from its gift for chaos, but the new administration has a thing for registries. Nice tidy lists. Rosters and inventories. A place for everything and everything in its place.

It would be one thing if the inventories were, say, proposed benefits for the poor. Or maybe things we could do for our aged parents. But Trump-era registries are all sinister and nefarious. They’re the kind of thing you’d be tempted to do if you were ready to round up the Jews of Heidelberg.

I know that I’m supposed to avoid insulting young people, but this Boomer has a bone to pick.

Alice and I just did what we do. When the Democratic Party gathers the clan, we try to make it, regardless of inconvenience. Last week was typical on the convenience front. There were a million things that had to be done by Shabbat, but we went out to hear our legislators speak.

On any given day, the Second Coming of Trump will be marked by words that should never be spoken. Either that, or they will be so shot through with lies, so perforated by stupidity, deceit, and vitriol that they leak human sewage all over the floor. You’ll need a white-suit-and-mask team to get it bagged as a biohazard.