Happy Birthday to Me!
On the frontispiece: a picture of me and my wife, Alice Blue, at a joyful wedding in Healdsberg, California. Happy couple: you know who you are!
On the chance that you’re not tracking my personal history, I opened for business a year ago today. On January 30, 2025, I posted an opinion piece on the estimable Adam Schiff, with praise for his politics and Jewish consciousness. It was, admittedly, a tiny bit esoteric. Schiff had taken his oath of office on a copy of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. That was—and remains—a highly idiosyncratic move. My guess is that no one had ever done it before and it represents a high-water mark of Jewish literacy. Who would have thunk such a thing were/was possible?
Since then, I’ve produced exactly a hundred and ninety-nine posts. My original hope was to put out something every day. I still have the energy and the interest in doing that, but it occured to me that it would be a kind of waste. I’m a devoted reader of Frank Bruni and David French (and a bunch of other people along with), but I don’t want to read them every day. It would feel tedious and dutiful, like an hour on the treadmill, and I didn’t want to inflict myself that way on you.
So I settled into three times a week, with regular reminders on Friday and Sunday mornings. It took a while to get the feel of Squarespace, the platform I use to publish these posts, but I decide to make my official debut on my seventy-first birthday. Today is my official seventy-second birthday and, to my great surprise, I am still alive. I figure I have eight more years, tops.
What I’ve learned in the interim is that I like being liberated. It would be more accurate to say that I love being liberated. My life as a pulpit rabbi was full of satisfactions, but it would have been alienating to our congregation if I let loose every day. Nobody who studied with me or had any kind of real contact could have missed the screaming vituperativeness of my politics, but it would have been wrong to unleash the real me. Our congregation has treated me with great deference and respect. It would have been uncivilized to trap people in the seats of the Sanctuary and subject them to partisan harangues and screeds. I signed up to be a pulpit rabbi, not the education officer in my district re-education camp. Oklahoma, yes. North Korea, no.
At this point, however, I have more freedom to act, and I hope that I am no longer pulling my punches. This moment in our history is a full-fledged emergency. The assualt on our values is unfolding in real time, and Trump and his psycho-phants are trashing the country, everything from the air and water to the norms and standards that have sustained our civilization. I feel urgent and mobilized, and I hope you can feel it., too. There is still a half-hour to apocalypse, and I want to take full advantage.
My hope for this next year is to go louder and deeper, picking up readers along the way. For the first time in my life, I feel comfortable with self-promotion, and I hope that you will feel good about forwarding these posts to others, with a little note from you that says “You should subscribe!” It would make me feel that my life had meaning.
And if there’s someone out there who can tutor me in Substack, I would be delighted to hear from you before the end of the day. Squarespace is great, but I need a boatload more eyeballs. Forgive me if that image makes you sick to your stomach. What I really mean to say is that I want to get out there and persuade.