The president’s appetite for power and its trappings is a force of nature, a modern marvel.

The thing itself is irresistible. It’s the actual power to manipulate the economy. The enchanting authority to offer and withhold. But it also extends to the optics of Dear Leadership. He has tarted up the White House in brushstrokes of gilt, especially in the sanctuary of the Oval Office. It looks more like a wedding cake from some previous decade, with the plaster details foregrounded in gold.

Elon Musk is reportedly done. As of today he took his victory tour and is supposed to be returning to his shattered car company. It can’t be happening a moment too soon.

But before that happens, I have one final word. A hundred days in, I’m still obsessed with the salute. It was that thing he did on the night of the inauguration that felt somehow like Kristallnacht Reborn.

I just got a note from Kamala Harris. Not a real note, of course, but an engineered message from a low-level someone doing fundraising for the Dems. Low-level work is always the same: tepid language, small-bore ideas, nothing to stir the conscience or the soul.

I come from an old boycotting family. It makes it sound like I’ve got some kind of pedigree, like we’re old and important enough to have a tradition. Which is, if you know us, not the case. What I really mean is my mother, Ethel Fitzerman. Among many principled stands she took (kosher home, stand-up feminism, an aversion to Orthodoxy, especially the Jewish kind), she refused to buy German consumer goods. That included kitchen utensils, china, glassware, appliances, and pretty much everything down to pens and pencils. She believed that they were somehow contaminating, that the ashes of Jews clung to them like dust.

I’ve got no special beef with Chuck Grassley of Iowa. He’s been in the Senate since the Pleistocene period (mammoths, ground sloths, full-sized dire wolves), which makes him part of the geriatric caucus of the Republican Party. As part of the geriatric caucus of the American rabbinate, I rush to say that this is not disqualifying. Back off, millennials! America needs its elders! How else would you know about avocado shag?

It took me a long time to work out the question of Ukraine. Along with Poland, there was a lot to wrestle with: parallel Jewish histories of tension and release, enormous creativity and grotesque destruction. At the end of WW I, there was an orgy of pogroms that left a hundred thousand Jews slaughtered in the streets. By the end of the next war, it was nearly a million. Larger scale, greater efficiency. For decades, survivors offered the same grim testimony. The Nazis were bad, but the Ukrainians were worse.

If I were a real professional, I would have experts on speed dial. There would be people in the know and reliable sources to talk me through the mechanics of Signal and what would prompt someone to use it for business. I would know if anyone in Pete Hegseth’s position had ever shared military secrets with his brother. It sounds absurd, but maybe I’m wrong.

Every Saturday at our synagogue in Tulsa, our community prays for the return of the hostages. Some 59 people remain in Gaza, 24 still living and the rest now dead. I have no doubt that the living are suffering terribly. That is the testimony of those who have returned. They have spoken about the brutality of their captors, starvation rations, sexual abuse, and prolonged immobility in the tunnels of Hamas. Some have spent months shackled in the dark.

One of the failures of the new administration is that it is heedlessly cruel in its treatment of the non-advantaged. It is about to haul Head Start to the dump, junking decades of meaningful gains for the poor. It has already cancelled funding for antiretrovirals, signing death warrants for millions of AIDS patients worldwide. Medicaid is on the chopping block and Social Security is next. Once again, we are threatened with the impoverishment of the aged.

I may just be ahead of the curve, but I’ve always detested the Tesla logo. First, it seemed a little on the nose. Using an upper-case T struck me as painfully witless, like a prostrate failure of imagination. If that’s the best Elon Musk and his predecessors could do, no one would ever trust him with the federal government. Uh oh. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.

Then I started seeing Fallopian tubes. The arms of the T sloped a little bit downwards, just like the curly tendrils where the eggs originate.

At the end of February, I wrote a few words about Francis. It felt like the Angel of Death had arrived and I wanted to valorize him while he was alive. I’m looking at these words on the morning of his death and seeing the hovering suggestion of my arrogance. I’m a Midwestern rabbi with a very modest career. What does it matter if I valorize anyone, least of all the leader of over a billion believers? Long after I am dead and gone, Francis’ life will continue to reverberate, held in memory as something precious and fine.

Tornadoes sometimes level whole neighborhoods. Volcanoes sometimes blow their summits, bringing extravagant destruction to unsuspecting lives. Avalanches destroy alpine villages. All are part of the network of chance that rules the darker parts of human life. We are right to call them horrible occurrences and wrong to imagine that there is much that we can do.

But that’s really not what happens in a shooting. Somebody takes a gun or three, marches into a gathering of human beings and begins to execute them one by one.

Just when you think that it’s safe to go in the water, the Pew Charitable Trust comes to tell us otherwise.

This time around the issue is Jews and prayer, namely that old time religion doesn’t work any more. The difference between then and now is statistically significant. In 2014, the number was 45%. That means that when American Jews were asked about frequency, a little under half said prayer was seldom or never.

Don’t get me wrong: I love foreign aid. I believe in the interconnectedness of nations and that we are one indivisible human family. Call me cosmopolitan, a Soros internationalist, but that’s the political faith that I was raised in, the idea that we are supposed to hold hands with one another and raise the condition of human beings everywhere.

Against that background, this administration is a disaster, a small-minded, inward-looking, fearful entity, terrified of contamination and the dilution of the race.

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.