Yehuda Kurtzer (0:00)

What if prayer doesn't work? This question strikes us as a distinctly modern one, an outgrowth of the slow disenchantment of the world. But in truth, the question is an old one and one given. Space to breathe.

Tessa Zitter (0:14)

Here from the Sholom Hartman Institute, Thoughts and Prayers is a new podcast that explores what Jewish prayer means and why it still matters. Join host Rabbi Jessica Fisher as she weaves together stories, classic texts and conversations with leading rabbis and thinkers like Yossi Klein.

Yehuda Kurtzer (0:30)

Halevi Judai is about the democratization of the spiritual of revelation.

Tessa Zitter (0:35)

Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt I was representing the second gentleman Emhoff as his rabbi on that stage.

Yehuda Kurtzer (0:41)

What you had in that moment was.

Tessa Zitter (0:43)

The pluralism of America and Rabbi Josh.

Yehuda Kurtzer (0:45)

Warshavsky Prayer helps me be the best version of myself.

Tessa Zitter (0:49)

It helps me figure out what do.

Yehuda Kurtzer (0:50)

I need in my spiritual backpack.

Tessa Zitter (0:52)

Thoughts and prayers inspiring new connections to Jewish prayer in a changing world. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Maital Friedman (1:07)

The rise in polarization, uncertainty and distrust among many North American Jews forces us to ask whether we can envision a shared future for the Jewish people. I'm Atel Friedman, the executive producer of Identity Crisis. This week we are bringing you a re release of a session recorded on November 19, 2024 at Congregation Rodef Shalom in New York. Yehuda reflects on the moment directly after the election of the second Trump presidency and offers a framework for how American Judaism might continue to thrive in the future. Now, just weeks after the landmark mayoral election in New York, is the perfect time to revive this episode from our archives as now more than ever, we need a unifying vision for a new era in American Jewish politics, one shaped by a culture of compromise and defined by an embrace of kindness.

Yehuda Kurtzer (1:56)

Enjoy the episode in general, when you describe someone or a phenomenon as breaking new ground in Jewish history, doing something that Jews have never seen before, or an event that seems different than the Jewish people have ever experienced in general. To describe something in those terms, it's not always clear whether it's a compliment or an insult. We're a people that thinks with our past as a means of understanding the present. Jonathan Safran Foer has a beautiful line to this effect in his book Everything Is Illuminated, where he says, when a Jew encounters an event, in this case it was a pinprick. He asks, what does it remember? Like we go in search of the texts of our tradition, our abundant historical memory, and we mine all of that to help figure out what's going on. If I recognize it, if this happened to my people before in history, that is an actual event or in memory in the stuff that we process out of history to make sense of it, then we can recognize it, we see it, we can explain it, we can figure out a way to move on our history. The length of it is an incredible gift that comes with being part of the Jewish people. And it's so loaded. I was teaching a group of students last week that I definitely know was last week. And at one point I made reference to a Jewish idea that only emerges in the Jewish canon in the 13th century. I hope you heard that only emerges in the canon in the 13th century. And I said to them, when you're studying Jewish intellectual history, if an idea only shows up in the 13th century, that's like last Tuesday. That is not. That's like, why is this such a new idea in Jewish tradition? And am I sure? Am I supposed to trust it? Is it serious? Or it's authentic? For the last several years, as we've been experiencing, as justice alluded to in its opening, so many of the conditions that defined the previous era of the American Jewish experience that could be characterized as the conditions in the period that made American Jews thrive. That period of social, economic, political mobility. The that period in which American Jews were succeeding at the project of the 20th century, which was assimilation, that was the project of 20th century American Jewry. So unimaginable by the beginning of the 20th century, that was unfathomable by the end of the 20th century, that it turns out assimilation to that degree may have been a problem. No one by the beginning of the 20th century would have thought that the act of trying to assimilate into. Into a diaspora civilization would yield the kind of problems that we create, which is that we might be erasing our own identities in order to belong somewhere else. But in the heyday of this story of the American Jewish experience, so many of the conditions that characterize that era of thriving, we've been watching as they have been eroding things like American trust in institutions. If you think about the three central institutions that were most essential for American Jews to process our relationship with America and that were secure enough, that would enable us to believe that we could flourish and be safe in this environment. Were bipartisan trust in some key institutions of government, like the Supreme Court, which could never be hijacked by partisan interests, or the belief that the media was a cherished institution somehow capable of being separate from partisan interests, never captive to the administration, and the third key institution critical to the kind of thriving of American Jews, essential to our social mobility and political mobility was the universities. Those are the three great institutions of the 20th century that help American Jews in our ascent. And we've been watching over the past several decades the distrust that's rising among the American people in the institutions that are supposed to capture our trust. We've seen erosion of the climate of bipartisanship which characterized the second half of the 20th century and which we're happy to talk about later on, was, by and large, very good for the Jews. We've seen the rise of polarization, of course, and the various pessimisms that have come to dominate conversation in American life, and particularly for young people. Climate, pessimism, economic pessimism. As the generation of young Americans confronts the likelihood that they will be the first generation in American history to be less wealthy than the previous generation, those pessimisms are deeply concerning. And if you view all of those stories as being so critical for the conditions that enabled American Jews to thrive, and when such a thing happens, one of the instincts that we have as Jews, one of the instincts that historians will have, is they will look at this phenomenon, the rise of polarization, for instance, which endangers all of us in a whole variety of ways. They will look at it and ask the question, where have I seen this before? Will some template out of history help me to understand the moment that I'm in? I think one of the most prominent ones, not necessarily among Jews, but among many scholars, historians in particular, is watching the rise of authoritarianism as a form of government all over the world, increasingly popular in America, increasingly popular in Europe, popular in the state of Israel as well, and asking, in what ways does this resemble the catastrophic rise of authoritarianism around the globe that we saw not 100 years ago, trying to seek analogy between this moment and that one, and then building a playbook, as, for instance, Timothy Snyder does in his book on tyranny, Here are the 20 things you could do to prevent this from overtaking us through a Jewish lens. We also see this in the post October 7th moment, when many, many Jews around the world watched the events on October 7, watched the follow up of what we learned of what had taken place on October 7, particularly the pornographic violence against women and against children, and said, what's the category that I can use to recognize this and make sense of it? And. And one of the texts that made a comeback was Chaim Nachman Bialik's epic poem IR Hahariga, the City of Slaughter, which he wrote in the wake of the Kishineff pogrom as A kind of trigger moment in shifting Jewish consciousness from accepting that that kind of violence against Jews was just a norm of European civilization for two millennia and arguing instead, we Jews are gonna have to change our attitudes and change who we are. But it's really complicated for Jews in both of these cases, the rise of authoritarianism and Hamas attacks to immediately try to latch on to history to claim we recognize this and therefore we know what to do when it comes to the rise of authoritarianism. For Jews, the story of the Holocaust was not merely a story of the rise of a form of tyrannical government that did bad things to the to the Jews. The Holocaust is also a story of systematic state sponsored antisemitism that bubbles up for 2,000 years until it attaches itself to a tyrannical form of government and then results in the massacre of European Jewry. It's not so easy or obvious for American Jews to say, oh yes, this is exactly the same playbook as the Holocaust, when the social position of Jews is so different than it was before and when Jews are not being litigated in public as the source of the primary concern that Americans are struggling with happens to be a different population of immigrants who are inhabiting that story. But that's why it should not surprise us that metaphors and appeals to the Holocaust are not actually unifying right now among American Jews who actually are divided about the story right now in America. And the failure of the analogy in October 7th for Israel to Chaim Nachman Bialik, is that no European Jewish community, certainly not the Jews of Kishinev, after experiencing something like their pogrom or our October 7th had the IDF, no European Jewish community had, as my colleague Yesi kleine Olivi just tries to describe October 8th. So the limits of the appeal to metaphor for history actually become very obvious when we realize how very different the conditions that modern Jews have both in America and Israel are. And that's a really big challenge. And what it suggests to us is that the harder thing for Jews to fathom about the present is not that something complicated is happening, but that something complicated may be happening that's actually something we've never quite seen before. Something is different about the project right now of Jews striving within the context of a failing American democracy. And not quite sure whether we have a template from history that's going to help us. The German Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem says about Zionism that it's never quite known about itself, whether it's a movement of continuity or revolt. Was it a story of continuing the story of Jewish people or rebelling against it? I want to suggest tonight that American Jews deal with the same issue. We try to think that our story is one of continuity. We picked up European jewelry and Diaspora jewelry and we planted it in America, and now it continues that story. But it may actually be that we are in the period of kind of revolt as American Jews against traditional patterns of how Diaspora Jews acted in history. And it's going to force us to think differently. Tonight, my argument is going to be that we're in the midst of a revolutionary political moment as American Jews. I want to talk about what feels hard about that right now and a case for what it will mean to make it work. If you want the abbreviated version so I can give you the ending and then you can zone out till we get to the Q and A. I don't think the work is about particular campaigns, political parties organizing, or about issues. It's actually about people, and it's about trying to repair our society. And it's going to require a lot of losing before we feel that we're winning. I don't know if you consider that bad news or good news. I think in the long run, it's good news. In the short term, bad news. I want to tell this story by sketching a kind of crude historical story. And I describe it as a crude historical story because once upon a time I was trained as a historian, and I know that trying to tell big stories about historical trends and moments is going to miss little windows of time that break out of those paradigms. But we're going to do our best to do 2,000 years of Jewish history in about four minutes. I want to suggest there were three essential political revolutions in how Diaspora Jews did politics, starting at the birthplace of Diaspora, following the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, when Jewish politics used to be connected to sovereignty and then they had to be connected to Diaspora. And I want to describe those three stories. And the third is the moment in which we're living the first story of Diaspora Jewish politics. Let's call the move from control politics to sideline politics. There's a big difference of going from being in charge of your own civilization, where you control the public square and politics are all Jewish one way or another, to having to live at the sidelines of the society in which you live, trying to exert some sort of influence to make sure that ultimately the society you're living in doesn't massacre you. Jews, for the majority of our Diaspora existence, were not Inside power structures. That meant, by the way, Jews as a collective were not inside power structures. And more importantly, Judaism never got locked inside of power structures or politics. Jews always had individuals, networks and relationships to try to infiltrate or penetrate, sometimes more welcomed than others, in order to navigate and negotiate our politics. We know stories like this as early as the template for old school diaspora politics, which is the character of Mordechai in the book of Esther, who collects favors, stores them up, sticks his niece into the palace to do all sorts of terrible things in order to be the agent on the inside, and then calls in that favor at the moment where he finally needs it. Most famous line, perhaps in the book, is when Mordechai says to Esther what is considered widely an inspiring line. Who knows whether it is for this moment that you've reached this place. As if this is an appeal to Esther's greater instincts, when in fact he has said to her earlier in that sentence, if you don't do it, revach v' hatzalah yamod la yudima komacher, salvation will come for the Jews from someone else. In other words, I got other people in the system. You're not going to survive this if you don't stay with us because we will ultimately win and probably kill you. And then Esther's like, okay, I'm in. This is an old model of diaspora politics. The rabbis describe in the Talmud that when they do politics, it's not the famous rabbis who you know, it's rabbis whose names are lost to history, who get Roman style haircuts and sit adjacent to the political structures, trying to shed their Jewishness in order to have influence in the public square. It's terms that are used by Jews and by anti Semites like the court Jew. The Jew who is not really of their people, represents them as a collective, but is working in our system to influence their politics. Now the terrible part of this story, of course, is that when you don't get to be a player in the political world, your fate and destiny are not in your hands. And that was the great fear through the majority of Jewish history about politics. When we're on the side of the people who are in charge, that's great. And then what happens when the nobles kill the king who likes the Jews? They may just turn on the Jews who are allies to the king. It's an enormously vulnerable way of being politically in the world. The only advantage that emerges is that Judaism remains a beautiful, pristine thing untainted by politics. If you would try to say in that period of diaspora history. In that era of diaspora politics, what are the essential Jewish values of the time? Well, they get to be Judaism itself. A magnificent flourishing discourse from which we get Talmuds and law codes, in which Judaism gets invested in the home and the synagogue, in interpersonal relationships. Judaism flourishes as a set of commitments and ideas that don't get sullied by having to be part of the political infrastructure. The second diaspora Jewish political story is basically the story that succeeded in America until, I would say, about 30 years ago. And the fact that it is succeeding less now doesn't mean it started now. I think most of the problems that we see in our political culture did not start now. That's always the case. We are just starting to see the residual effects of an erosion that's been underway for a little while. The second major diaspora Jewish political project was that we could become part of the system of the political infrastructure in such a way that our collective concerns as Jews could actually be part of the collective consideration of the society itself. Jews could be in a system and advocate on behalf of the Jews not as outsiders, but as insiders throughout the 20th century. The great evidence to this was that America began to understand in the middle to the end of the 20th century that antisemitism was not a concern for Jews, it was a concern for Americans. One of the high points of this is the success by American Jewish actors, together with non Jewish actors, at getting a Holocaust museum built on federal land with a congressional act in Washington D.C. adjacent to the other major monuments to American democracy. That means that America has internalized that the war against the Jews, the persecution of Jews. Antisemitism is an American problem and not a favor being done to the Jews. I think another high point of this was even just a few years ago, after the massacre at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, when the headline of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette the following day, anybody remember seeing it, the headline said Yitzchadal v Yitzchadash Shemei Raba in Aramaic, untranslated. Because Americans rightly understood that an attack on Jews in America was not an attack on a minority interest group. That is like bad for the Jews, that it represents something that is fundamentally bad for America. A second great indicator is that by the middle of the 20th century, and certainly by the end of the 20th century, Zionism, baseline support for Israel is considered an American concern. You might say in the 1950s, it's a favor being done for the Jews. Can't really make that argument. By the 80s and the 90s, in fact, American Interests become so entangled and intertwined with support for Israel that it's hard to know where that moves from being an ideological commitment to a strategic commitment. This is what Jews tried to do throughout the Enlightenment. America is the place where we were able to witness the most success in trying to make our collective concerns those of the general society. And if you had to ask during this period of this kind of politics, what are the essential Jewish values for American Jews throughout this time? When you get access to power, the essential Jewish values stop being concern for the synagogue, the home, faith, ethics. The essential Jewish values for American Judaism in this period of time are emancipation itself, normalizing the condition of Judaism surviving and thriving. The story of the Enlightenment, the third story, that's the one that we're living in right now, I want to call it values politics. American Jews have so successfully assimilated into America that that rather than thinking about our politics as something that we are navigating collectively through the American political story, we are by and large subordinating our Jewish identities to our American identities, building identities atomized around the self, where we narrate all of our particular commitments which make us not really members of a group. It's not that a Jew is a person who belongs to the Jews as you had described it for most of Jewish history. Now, a Jew is one adjective among many. Actually, Mark Oppenheimer wrote a piece on this a couple years ago where in the American public conversation, calling somebody a Jew sounds like a slur. Isn't that strange? I'm a Jew. I don't think that says anything bad about me. It means that I'm tied to something. But in order to attenuate that more comfortable word these days, and I think it's part of the style sheet of a lot of media institutions, is not to refer to someone as a Jew, but as a Jewish person. It's like a characteristic adjective. It doesn't tell you everything you need to know about them. It tells you a small feature of an otherwise complicated identity. In turn, the Jewish values that Jews bring into how we act politically are largely disconnected from communal interests. They're the things we think are good about Judaism that we want to see our politics play out in. Jews are a kind of Americans, and whatever Jewish values we want or we believe in will connect to larger value systems that we think manifest in our politics. Let me give you an obnoxious example in a Reform shul. I think the ideal that someone would talk about of what is your primary Jewish value that you bring into your political identity if you said that main Jewish value is justice, I think that is a terrible Jewish value to use. Justice doesn't brook compromise. It's not a particularly good political value. Politics are always about trade offs and compromises. Healthy democracies don't really push for justice. They push for as much justice as possible within a framework in which people are meant to live with one another. Justice has a kind of holiness attached to it. There is always something right to do and wrong to do. And the way most healthy democracies operate is with a much clearer commitment. Cultures of compromise and pluralism. But when you stomp out and claim our main objective is justice, you're not even talking about an activity. What's the verb the Bible uses about justice? Pursue it. That's not an activity. It's an outcome that you want to see present in a society in the long run. And any justice for focused outcome is oftentimes going to wind up generating a kind of totalitarian politics of coercion. You don't see that the thing I'm arguing for is justice. Well, you then it's not that you believe in something different. You're a monster. You can't negotiate with the unjust. You can't compromise with the unjust. In Jewish terms, when we talk about things that you do are mitzvot things, they're not outcomes, they're not ideal realities you create. They're activities that you do that in the long run are the right things to do and that build a society on the right side of the ledger. Having hit the left on the right side of the ledger, when the Orthodox community by and large embraces a social policy agenda of the right, which it is doing, it winds up aligning itself with this conservative worldview about a whole set of issues that they don't even agree on when it comes to Jewish law. You take something like abortion as a non controversial case. Virtually all Orthodox halakha makes exceptions around abortion, especially when it comes to the life of the mother, and does not tolerate the kind of ideological extremism that would be present in a conservative Christian worldview that would insist that you can never actually have an abortion. It just doesn't do it. In fact, it's so much so that my kid was studying this at school where he studied with his Orthodox rabbis in Orthodox day school, that even while the baby is being born, Orthodox tradition says if it's a question of the mother's health, you can abort a baby while it is being born. So what does it mean that Orthodox Judaism is Building a coalition around a set of issues like that which are so clearly not in the collective Jewish self understanding. What it means is that they are subordinating collective concerns for the Jews into a much more narrow ideological position which serves the polarized political framework in which we live. None of them are really talking about Jewish values anymore. We're really talking about Jewish values as curated to be effective members of the Democratic Party and Jewish values as effectively curated to become effective members of the Republican Party. The consequences of this should be very obvious to all of us because we're living it and we're feeling is totally impossible now as American Jews to, to speak with a clear voice about Jewish collective concerns. Because by the way, increasingly we don't feel like we share them, even though it's pretty obvious that we do. You would think in the scheme of things that the one thing that Jews should have to agree is bad is anti Semitism. Is anti Semitism. That's the bad thing. We all agree, right? If we took a poll, is anti Semitism bad? I'm not going to make you raise your hands, but I would shame you if you didn't raise your hands. That would have to be something we consider to be bad. But right now in America, by and large, Jews who vote for the Democratic Party focus as the version of antisemitism that is bad on its expression in the form of white nationalism and white supremacy. And by the way, those people tend to vote for the Republican Party. And on the Republican Party, if you want to talk about antisemitism where they focus all of their attention on the anti Israel activity, on pro Palestinian activism on the college campuses and those people who they're focusing on antisemites, vote for the Democratic Party. And if you are primarily focused on the version of antisemitism that doesn't align with your political interests, you are not actually trying to focus on fight antisemitism as a collective concern. What are you trying to do? Win elections, Persuade the other side, or maybe the ambivalent voters in the middle that they are complicit with Jew hatred? This is shown up, by the way, in the American Jewish community as complete lack of a coherent or shared strategy on antisemitism. There is none. The American administration tried to advance a strategy on antisemitism that's a very big deal in human history. I don't remember that ever happening where the Kingdom itself said we want to fight antisemitism. And the result was more Jews drifted from the Democratic Party because of one of the Issues being a perception that they weren't serious about fighting anti Semitism. There is no shared language or strategy for a community which tells us we're not thinking about collective concerns anymore in our politics as Jews. That was still there in the previous era of American Jewish history where we were negotiating our collective concerns through belonging to the political process. And now we have left those collective concerns behind. It's really clear that our own internal divisions around Israel are now being heavily manipulated by partisan actors in both parties to center a different conversation about Israel. So to say American Jews don't have a collective conversation or commitment about Israel is laughable. We haven't for a while. And now it's largely because Jewish commitments on Israel can be more effectively defined and described by non Jewish actors in America. Right leaning Jews don't need prominent Jews to make the case for Israel when they have Mike Huckabee. Left leaning Jews who are pro Israel don't need a compelling version of Israel that they have to argue for themselves if they have. Richie Torres Actually, that's why we want to elevate those voices, because they make it. Don't worry, it's not the Jews engaging in some sort of special pleading. Right. It's America itself involved in making these claims. I guess the only time when you actually do rely on a Jewish voice to amplify a particular political position on Israel is on the far left. And that's where Bernie Sanders becomes helpful. So we are shifting from thinking about this as a collective concern to what I described as a values concern. So if we don't want to look back at a particular story in Jewish history because nobody wants to turn back the clock on the American story. You did notice this a little bit, right? You did notice this around Zionism that more and more Jews said, oh, we're going back to the loneliness story of the Jews in Jewish history. The Jews are alone and nobody is with us. And at times I wanted to be like, America is with Israel. Israel's not actually alone in this moment. But you saw where I started that gravitation for an earlier story to recognize this. I don't want that to be the story. It's an implausible story for American Jews. The idea that we would retreat to a collective concern in American Jewry is very hard to sustain or imagine. And the idea that we would go back to pre American Jewish history and just be vulnerable Diaspora Jews again, nobody wants that. And it's utterly implausible when we live in the society where we have made such profound gains. But I do want to go back to a piece of the work that we did as Jews in the 20th century. I want to ask whether it's time for us to start doing that work again. That, to me, feels like the essential part of the project that's at play for us. Because one of the things that American Jews, I think, did most effectively in the 20th century, that we by and large have stopped doing, is that in addition to advocating for ourselves and in addition to assimilating American Jews played an outsized role in shaping the narrative of America for America itself. We redesigned America. If the anti Semites are listening, please don't take that out of context. We redesigned America to make it a place in which we could thrive and which other Americans could thrive. Take three extraordinary examples. Emma Lazarus poem is on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus told a story that wasn't really true, that America was a place that was welcoming to the vulnerable, others discarded and tempest tossed from all over the world. But she insisted that it should be. America embraced that idea about itself periodically, ignored it, like when it turned people away, but embraced that story as itself, as the story it wanted to tell. Authored by a Sephardic Jewish woman. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the author, in many ways, of much of the legal tradition around freedom of speech in this country, does so as an unapologetically liberal Jewish thinker, doesn't try to hide his Jewishness. Roosevelt referred to Brandeis as Old Isaiah. I love that his Jewishness was ambient in what he was doing in order to shape a version of America in which not only would Jews thrive, but Americans would thrive. Horace Callan, the author of the ideas that wind up defining and shaping the conversation on pluralism in America. Not the boring kind of Jewish pluralism like how do we write Run a Hillel. But pluralism itself as an essential tool of building out a version of democracy in which people could show up with their full selves, argue passionately for their commitments and convictions in public, and not kill each other. That's the novelty of pluralism as it coexists with democracy. We American Jews helped to do this for a long time. And for a long time it's become clear that American Jews don't do this project anymore. Jewish thinkers, I plead guilty to this focus on the particular Jewish interests of our community. Thinking and writing in general about America and American democracy has also oftentimes been partisanized. Who do we actually listen to, who we don't encode through a particular partisan lens and say, that person's helping us Think about this as an imaginative, shared project. Over the last 30 years, we've watched as optimism in the American project has diminished considerably as people are skeptical and pessimistic about America. In one version of it, the Trump version of it, claiming that there's some nostalgic past that we need to rehabilitate, that we say in rabbinic Hebrew, lohayev elo nivre never really existed, but it's a reactionary appeal to a particular story. And. And on the political left, we've watched as the arguments have been stronger and stronger that America was built on lies, that that mythic story that America told about itself, Winthrop's City on a Hill, a covenantal story. I'll come back to that. A covenantal story of a commitment to larger ideals was always a lie, and that the only way to bring about a change would be to recreate it from the beginning. The investment in the American project in the 20th century by Jews and by others required, and would continue to require the American idea itself. Investment in the idea that something transcendent and lofty that we are trying to build here, it doesn't matter whether it's not working. Actually, that's not how an idea gets evaluated. The idea gets evaluated by whether it's serious and noble and whether it inspires people to pursue it. And then, in addition to the idea, you would need to cultivate the habits and practices of democracy that would make that version of America possible. That's what we call in Jewish tradition the midrash, the set of ideas and the maase, the practices that Americans would have to operate with in order to bring it about. I said to you, with all of these diasporas, what are the essential Jewish values? I want to argue for four essential Jewish values, share a little bit about what it could look like, and then open up for your Questions and comments. 4 Foundational Jewish values that could characterize a new era of American Jews in America. One is covenant. This is an idea we created. You get the Torah in the wilderness before you go into the land of Israel, because it sets up a set of terms and. And conditions through which you hold yourself accountable. That's what it means in America to think in terms of constitutionalism, that we are committed to something bigger. There's a document, and that's what civics education should fundamentally be about. A culture of compromise. This is such a deep rabbinic idea. It is so fundamentally sad to me that we talk in Jewish education more about justice than we do about compromise. The rabbinic tradition is all about compromise and you know why? It's because after the destruction of the temple, the rabbis acknowledge that the only character who can bring about absolute justice in the world is God. Absent that, the way that you build social fabric in any society is to respect the fact of human difference, to recognize that most of the things we are most passionate about involve irreconcilable claim. And the best way to live together is through a culture of compromise. A corollary to that in democracies, healthy democracies, people lose a lot and are willing to take risks. Democracies fall apart when people stop risking the possibility of losing in order to live together with the opposing side. The thing that was most scary about the question of whether or not there would be a peaceful transition of power is because that's the one thing that makes it possible the next time around for people to be willing to throw their lot into an election advocating for sacrifice, a willingness to risk and lose. My colleague Tal Becker was speaking about this, about the ways in which the culture of sacrifice has shown up in profound ways in Israel post October, including by so many people who hate their government, who may be deep skeptics about the war. I hope it will not require war in America to invite Americans to think about what sacrifice on behalf of America would look like. But it's necessary. And the fourth and the final one, and I know it's going to sound banal and dumb, and I want to tell you why it's not is kindness. When you talk about kindness in American political conversations, you almost always invite this sensibility that your kindness is rooted in a kind of hypocrisy. You're kind to some but hostile to others. You can be characterized as naive, or you can be thought of as a quietist, simply trying to do some sort of good while Rome is burning. I think the roots of this are in 1989. Remember when George Bush used that phrase, an amazing phrase, about a kindler, gentler nation? Like, what was wrong with that? If you didn't like Bush, you probably didn't like it because you didn't like Bush. Maybe if you didn't like Bush, you thought, well, kindler, gentler nation. But you have a bad immigration policy and a bad tax policy. So you're a hypocrite and a liar. That's how Bush was received for the kindler, gentler nation. But listen to this line. One person in America said the following about George Bush's kindler, gentler nation. I'll give you one guess who said this in 1990. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it's literally going to cease to exist. Who in 1990 said the phrase about George W. Bush, if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it's literally going to cease to to exist? Donald J. Trump in an interview in Playboy magazine. Incredible, right? That was part of the 1000 points of light speech that Bush had given. Kindness is a tool for building a society. It actually is one of the most essential variables that shapes cultures of sacrifice and compromise and covenant. It actually is like the kind of thing that makes people willing to throw their lot in together with other people. It is the kind of culture, however, that in addition to making society better, I'm not talking about, like, the basics of how in 2016 so many Americans were like, I guess we don't understand people from the Midwest. Let's read this book by JD Vance, advance his political career, and then go back to business as usual. What would actually change in the habits of Americans if they recognized that something broken is taking place in our society and that it roots in ethical, problematic human behavior? When do we start noticing that it might not be a coincidence that in addition to having this violent and virulent political culture that endangers all of us, we are also living through an epidemic of loneliness, and that those two things might be fueling each other? That maybe this characteristic of our political culture is a symptom of something that largely underlies us as opposed to the driver of that phenomenon, but it might also be a political strategy. What would it look like for voters to start incentivizing a certain set of behavior in their politicians that they feel is not necessary? What would it look like if Americans were operating in ways that reflected their willingness to participate in civic and local culture with a culture of compromise that then pushed the system to adapt accordingly? What would it look like if a country was having a conversation about human decency and kindness in such a way that it was politically impossible for a president to get elected on a pledge in his campaign of ruthlessly expelling hundreds of thousands of people? Right now, those types of values are not considered to be valuable from the perspective of the electorate. When you are in a kind of death trap of oppositional politics, kindness is viewed as naivete. I want to imagine whether it's possible to believe in a better version of the society rather than a competition to win. And the piece I guess I want to leave you with for us to think about is could the American Jewish move not be a retreat to old versions of diaspora which made us powerless or a retreat to a version of collective identity that's going to be hard to simply retrieve. I've been trying to convince American Jews for 15 years now. And losing that Jewish peoplehood matters, that commitment to collectivity matters because American Jews see that the prize that's available to them is winning on their political issues more than they gain out of belonging to a collective that forces them periodically to lose. I wonder whether the countercultural move for American Jews is to precisely do that work of the 20th century of getting us back into the habit of building Jewish and and building America in concert with one another. And the most fascinating thing that actually could happen as a result of this is if we succeed at helping American Jews to recenter collective concerns for other Americans. If American Jews could be at the forefront of modeling something for other Americans where we're willing to lose a little bit more towards the gain of a version of a society that is better or different. Maybe a side effect of that is that we will see not only our relationship to other Americans being stronger, but value in staying in relationship with other Jews in that process. I opened this up with a review of a story of Diaspora Jewish history and our relationship to politics. I suggested that despite our instincts, I don't think we are served by trying to understand this fascinating and weird American Jewish political moment in reference to anything we've seen before. That maybe we have articulated a version of politics that actually is the result of success. We've assimilated so deeply between our American and our Jewish political identities that we can reduce Judaism to a set of values that lines up really well with one political party or another. But in turn, I want us to see that the consequence of that is that we will continue to have elections like this one in which we are not talking about a shared, better vision for the future of America with policy differences, but where we are engaged in a blood sport and where Jews are using our own Jewish values to help amplify that blood sport on both sides of the political aisle. The bad for America and bad for collective Jewish concerns. I want us to argue that it may not be that the history of this can be brought back to a previous era of our time, but maybe the practice can be an investment by American Jews in America itself. A willingness to think in a language of Jewish values that serves the larger project of America and the willingness to lose a little bit in order to one day win. Thank you very much.