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.

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.