Let's Talk About Loneliness

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

How is everyone holding up? I have to be real here — I’m struggling hourly.

I refuse to dignify Trump’s purported plan for the U.S. to take ownership of Gaza with either earnest, hand-wringing recriminations or excitement. It’s beyond ridiculous. Sure, he’s going to turn the Strip into Gaz-A-Lago, right after he annexes Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.

His hare-brained blathering actually bothers me far less than the reaction of many of my tribe members, who appear to believe the man who has never been a friend to anyone in his life is going to be a loyal and steadfast friend to the Jews.

It’s all coming back to me now. The way the never-Trumpers fell right into line after the election, drunk on power.

Our family had one Evangelical friend, now a former friend, a self-styled ultra-devout Christian who told us he wrote in “Mike Pence” instead of Trump during the election in 2016. Three weeks later he was pounding his chest on Facebook and roaring like a gorilla: “You want to know who voted for Trump? I DID!!!!”

The same thing is happening now.

First they say they don’t like him. Of course they don’t like him! They’re a punk/dyke/fill-in-the-blank-with-some-other-edgy-anti-establishment-identity, for Christ’s sake! But the terrible truth is that maybe, just maybe, the fact that he won isn’t such a bad thing.

Then they venture a confession that they secretly toasted his victory.

And so on, until two weeks in, they are FAWNING, gloating, creaming themselves with adoration over every ridiculous sociopathic thing he says and does.

And the worst thing is that many of these people are the ones I held onto the hardest throughout 2024.

I’m haunted by one aspect of the past year. I did not believe Trump would win again. I didn’t feel Trump fever vibrating in the air. I was heartened by the momentum and energy around Vice President Harris.

Her huge crowds, his empty seats: I allowed it to lull me as I focused on what felt like the far more immediate threat: the unhinged far left. I gave money to Democrats up and down the ballot — and likely I gave more out of my own pocket than I did over all the rest of the elections of my life combined, with the possible exception of the one directly before (when it was Biden vs. Trump). But I didn’t obsess. I wasn’t in fear. I was more afraid of the left.

I wasn’t ruled by that Jewish superstition that if you suffer to G-d’s satisfaction over an imagined terrible outcome, you might have the power to avert that outcome.

So just as, on some level, people believe their lucky t-shirts or OCD-driven rituals help their sports team prevail or keep their plane in the air, I can’t help feeling on some irrational level that it’s my fault he won.

But I digress. The point is that many of the people I felt were my closest allies against the far-leftist jihadists are now caping for Trump in a way I can’t even look at or listen to without wanting to hurl.

I’ve never deployed a cartoon avatar of myself, but if I had one, she would be shot through with arrows from throat to toe.

Nothing hurts more than Jewish community members aligning with him.

In the Jewish book I’ve reached for over and over when seeking perspective, more than any other in my life — The Chosen by Chaim Potok — the American Jewish community was bitterly divided even as the Holocaust raged.

My hero, Reuven’s father — the firebrand Zionist, David Malter — paid the highest price for his activism. It robbed him of his peace, his sleep, his health, vast swaths of the Jewish community, and it also robbed his own son of his closest friend. But it’s because of people like him that we have a Jewish nation today. And it’s because of people like him that I have a road map right now, of how to keep moving forward in the midst of so much division, heartbreak and rage.

Years ago, I watched some documentary, and I will never remember the specifics, but it involved a white judge ruling against the good ol’ boys who’d been his closest community since birth. The tragic drama of Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who doesn’t deserve the comparison because he couldn’t be further away from the integrity ultimately shown by this judge, called it to mind. Senator Cassidy knows RFK Jr. is a gravest threat imaginable to public health and science. He wavered over whether to vote against his nomination, because doing so would deprive him of the community that’s always been his. Ultimately he didn’t have the strength or integrity.

I know that holding onto my refusal to co-sign the excesses of either the right or the left is going to cost me. I can’t allow myself to worry about my readership. I can’t allow myself to worry about money. I can’t allow myself to mourn at length for relationships that will fall to the wayside.

One day, if America survives Trump, Americans will be as ashamed of their support for him, or their indifference in response to his rise, as the Germans are today of their support for Hitler. I believe that with every bone in my body. History will judge the complicit, as Anne Applebaum wrote after he won the first time.

I envy people who believe in God, who believe a divine intelligence is guiding events here and that everything is for the good.

I envy the people who have the comfort of knowing they answer to God first and foremost, and that fealty to Trump is the worst form of idolatry.

I envy people whose spiritual faith gives them superhuman strength — and this includes many of the awe-inspiring, astonishing hostages, whom I plan to make the focus of Friday’s newsletter.

In the absence of any such conviction, any God to answer to, this is what keeps me aligned with my own integrity: I expect to answer to my children.

When they were little, I imagined them asking me one day: what did you do to stand against evil? I’ve done my best to live my life so that they will never need to ask.

That’s what I have. Their judgment is the ultimate authority for me, in this life. It will have to be enough.

Okay, fam. I love you all, with all my heart. I’ll be back with you on Friday and I will bring you all the good I can scour from this time and place.

Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.