Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

This may be my last time to address you, at least as the chief of our highest court. The writing has been on the wall for months, but the moment I understood that your court was a dead man walking took place on the night of Trump’s State of the Union. It was that chilling moment where he thanked you for your favor.

I can only imagine that it was the public payback for giving him a pass on legal accountability.

The borderland between Yiddish and Hebrew is one of the Judaism’s most contentious battlegrounds. We have been arguing for a century about which language is better. Not in its ability to convey information, but how it expresses meaning and feeling, how it communicates the wrinkles of the Jewish psyche.

For a while, it looked like it would be Yiddish. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the vast majority of Jews on earth were citzens-by-birth of Yiddishland, the swath of geography between Russia and the Atlantic.

It’s now the umpteenth day of Maximum Crazy, the state we’ve been in since the Trump Inauguration, and tarriff fates are (temporarily) down. It means that the seals and penguins of McDonald Islands can finally stop mixing their herring slurry with Xanax. That’s the plan until the end of the week, when our orca of a president scares the hell out of them again.

I loved Barak Obama, until I didn’t.

The month after his election was a kind of political fantasyland. I hugged everyone I saw, and kissed a few of them. I laughed. I cried. I went a little crazy. The difficult, fractious country of my birth, contaminated at its point of origin by slavery and prone to eruptions of violent racism, had actually elected its first black president.

Next up on Blatt + Blue, the Synagogue’s ongoing film series, is The Shop on Main Street, one of the earliest Holocaust films from the post-war period. Blatt + Blue tries to sample the whole of Jewish filmdom, from early classics to current Jewish cinema. This film will be discussed on Thursday, April 10. Please join us on Zoom at 7:00 p.m. The access number is 918 583 7121.

I just re-read a post from last week and realized I didn’t go quite far enough. It was that one about April Fool’s Day successes, where Democrats wiped the floor in Wisconsin and gave the barbarians in Florida something to think about. I had special praise for the voters of Mississippi and the speech-making heroics of Corey Booker. A man who can hold his bladder for a day has quite a future in American politics. Speaking only for myself, I couldn’t have done it.

My Jewish summer camp in the Sixties and Seventies was a world apart, a secluded universe. Hidden among the lakes of Northern Wisconsin, it was intended as a gesture of recovery from the war, a place where Jews would resurrect themselves.

Full of vivid, brainy young Jewish leaders, it had the snap and promise of the winning team. Despite its commitment to Jewish traditionalism, it had the feel of a countercultural commune, an answer to the ethos of life in the suburbs.

April Fool’s Day was a good day for Democrats and anyone who has a mind to save the country. The results in Florida were just as expected: two wins in blood-red districts for Republicans. Those were can’t-win races in the wrong part of the country where Democrats are still facing tornadic headwinds.

An electorate that put Matt Gaetz in the House was hardly going to pivot to any kind of Democrat. Its enough that Republicans are devouring each other.

Mickey 17 is an odd little movie that has failed to find its intended audience. Brought to life by Bong Joon Ho, it’s got the very same mix of humor and horror that American audiences first saw in Parasite. It’s also fixated on the raw edges of capitalism, focused this time on empire and colonization.

In this film, as before, there’s a kind of visual binary. Which is more arresting: the offscreen dismemberment of a petty crook by chainsaw, or the radiant, capped teeth of actor Mark Ruffalo?

RFK Jr. can’t do it to save his life.

There’s a robust debate on the question of stupidity. Who is the dumbest member of the presidential cabinet? After last week’s debacle (Houthi-gate?), many smart people are voting for Hegseth. The idea that he did not register the fact that a journalist was part of a classified intelligence dialogue is one of those things that is never supposed to happen. He then denied that anything had gone wrong. Pity the military that is now led by a man for whom alertness and accountability do not exist.

Remember that post about Yeshiva University?

It’s the one I wrote in the middle of last week, all about Judaism, Orthodoxy, and sexuality. I valorized the leadership of Yeshiva University in New York City for credentialing an LGBTQ+ group on campus that has been working for years to make itself legit. Yeshiva resisted until it could resist no more. Rather than pressing its case before the Supreme Court, it decided to back down from the confrontation.

Just in time for the destruction of our government comes the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. It’s one of those ironies that you just can’t invent. Something brought to life exactly eight centuries ago is now being shredded in Washington, D.C.

The Magna Carta isn’t exactly a one-off. The first edition, signed by King John with a proverbial gun to his head, was drafted in 1215 and then revoked in a snit. You can imagine why the king wanted to shake it loose.

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.