Rising In Darkness

Children of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

There are times when I have no idea what to say. Sometimes these letters to you come hard and fast and urgent — much of the time, there is too much to say and I have to decide which content makes the newsletter too unwieldy and save it for another day.

But sometimes, especially on the days that I’m sitting at my desk feeling as if I’ve just been bashed in the face with a frying pan, I’m at a total loss. There’s a part of me that wants to rant and vent, though I’m aware that this impulse — while satisfying — is seldom helpful. There’s a part of me that just wants to openly weep with grief, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t fulfill my aim of offering you something you can use.

There’s a part of me that wants to say that somehow, everything will be okay, but I can’t tell you anything that isn’t true. There’s a part of me that wants to make committing to resistance a daily mantra, as we did eight years ago, but our world looks very different today.

The surreal truth is that I don’t know if political dissidents will be imprisoned or disappeared under this new regime. I don’t know if freedom of expression will be in place under a Trump dictatorship. There are times and places in life where we might be willing to pay an impossible price for speaking out, and there are other times when we have children or other dependents (or work of a different nature that we absolutely have to do), and not abandoning them is our cardinal priority.

I don’t know if Trump will revoke the FCC licenses of all the media outlets that oppose him. I don’t know if we’ll have propaganda-riddled State TV instead of a range of news outlets. I don’t know how censored or dangerous social media sites will become under the ownership of Elon Musk and his ilk. There are too many unknowns right now.

I lay awake all night last night in a way I haven’t done often since the last Trump administration. I tried to imagine what I could say here today and I came to the keyboard still not knowing. But I did what I always do when I’m in this place. I pulled up the site, began a new post, typed Children Of Israel Are Never Alone as my subtitle, as I do in every newsletter, and pulled up my blue and white lion guarding a Jewish home. I wrote, Hey, beloved tribe.

These familiar actions always unlock my path to you.

I used to pour my heart out on Facebook, about all things political and non. That changed this year, and here’s why:

I would write about literally anything else — my daughter, my son, the goofy banter I engage in with my husband, my responses to nature or art or current events, my latest vegan creation, my cat, and I would get a lot of engagement. I’m fortunate to have a very engaged and intelligent Facebook circle and my posts are usually wonderfully interactive.

But I’d also post about the anti-Semitism that was splashing around academic and cultural spaces like lye, and there would be silence. I don’t have to tell you this. Every single one of you already knows. And that silence to me would be as painful, or possibly even more so, than what was happening on the ground.

So I stopped pouring my heart out there, and brought it here instead. My engagement on Facebook has become superficial compared to what I do here. You are the people I trust with my candor, my heartbreak, my fear, my moral inventory, my spirituality.

So I’m just going to be myself, and talk to you in the rawest way from where I am.

As I posted yesterday on my own Facebook page:

I watched lengthy presentations before election day by the folks considered the best data guys in the business, guys I’ve never known to be wrong. By every single marker — funds raised, volunteers lined up to work, rally attendance, early vote exit polls, formidable ground game, celebrity endorsements, Obama-level excitement and enthusiasm — VP Harris was crushing it.

Then, yesterday morning, all the major polls swung in her direction.

I feel intense regret and even guilt for believing she would win and saying so, though I was definitely in excellent company.

At the time, I felt so good about the fact that — as Simon Rosenberg had constantly advised — I’d worried less and done more. I gave much more money than was comfortable for me, and I even thought I’d convinced more people, in one-on-one conversations, not to vote for Trump than I ever had by phone-banking or writing letters. Why should a random stranger getting a cold call listen to me? But people who knew me would, and many did. And I felt good about where we were, judging by all the data points I had.

Something else I wrote on Facebook was: I really hope we can skip days and weeks and months and years of every single person blaming someone different for where we are. Let's just fucking skip that whole tiresome orgy.

But of course, that’s what I woke up to. Righteous hot take after righteous hot take blaming Kamala Harris, the DNC, the Democrats in general, the Squad, the Russians, the media, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the sociopathic GOP, Merrick Garland, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, American greed, end-stage capitalism, the U.S. oligarchy, foreign disinformation campaigns, the far leftists who pushed America to the right, the fake feminists and sociopathic liberals who abandoned feminism and liberalism to cape for Hamas, the Jews moving right, the Muslims in Dearborn, the third-party voters, white men, white women, Latino men, everyone who’s clueless enough to be shocked and sick, and the list goes on and on and on and on. I read five million assertions that the Democrats have a lot of soul-searching to do. I read ten million paeans to Trump for tapping into something primal and intuitive as no one else ever has, for being the greatest comeback in political history.

Fam, I can’t do this again. I’m not saying I don’t assign blame, myself, to any of the above — I have, and I do. But I’m not going to put my energy into that.

You know what hot take I related to the most? So many people posted the same irrational thought that I had all evening: I can’t shake the feeling that somehow it’s my fault. I felt that way too. Because there’s some innate Jewish superstitious belief that I didn’t suffer enough this time. I thought we were winning. Jewish anxiety is thought to be proactive. If we suffer to G-d’s satisfaction over an imagined outcome, perhaps we can keep it from coming to pass.

But the rational part of me knows that absolutely nothing else I could have done would have made the slightest difference. Because the Harris-Walz campaign had everything it needed and then some — and in this time, in this place, it wasn’t enough.

Kamala ran an extraordinary campaign in 100 days. She did countless incredible things under impossible circumstances. She had superhuman energy. She raised a billion dollars. She had a fantastic debate performance, a positive and inclusive and moderate message; she had an army of volunteers, jaw-dropping attendance at her rallies, the hottest celebrities in the world in her corner.

No Democrat could have won this election for reasons we need to grapple with as a nation. Our country is ailing enough to have chosen Trump in spite of everything, knowing full well who he is. Sometimes we can put up an incredible fight and there are still forces beyond our control.

So the question becomes: what now?

I will be back tomorrow and Friday to continue processing the outcome of this election, even though I don’t usually write a column on Thursdays and even though I usually put out a Jews Of The Universe column on Fridays. This is an emergency, and having a normal week isn’t possible under these circumstances.

My husband, kids and I have scheduled a family meeting tonight. Every one of us is crushed to the core and all I have for my kids is this: we are not in control of everything that happens, but we can always choose our response to it. We are meeting to plan our response as a family. I know many of you have kids old enough to understand what just happened, kids who are freaking out, and my two cents, for whatever it’s worth, is that we need to confront it with them head-on, without hiding the horror and also without succumbing to hysteria or despair (however warranted).

There’s only one thing I know for sure right now: I believe this community will become more important than ever, and I will rise to the moment. Whatever I do, I will do with you. I love you all, with all my heart.

Am Yisrael Chai.