Dear Friends,

Oh, how we want THE answer. Yet life is filled with irreconcilable paradoxes. We are each a mass of contradictions. The sublime and the ridiculous cohabit every moment. We are alive now, yet we all will one day die, and we cannot know when. Our lives are short, yet filled with literally countless moments. We make decisions, yet can never truly predict their outcome. In embracing uncertainty, we embrace life. In embracing life, we embrace uncertainty.

Please, God (or, Please, To Whom It May Concern - who knows?) grant me enough humility to know that I could be wrong. Grant me enough courage to keep doing what I think is right, despite the fact that I could be wrong. Grant me enough humor to leaven life’s absurdities and challenges. Grant me the ability to be awed by the glory that inhabits every corner of creation.

Multiple things can be true at once. For example:

The State of Israel can be ruling lawlessly and cruelly over a Palestinian population, and can have engaged in a war in Gaza in which Israel caused rampant destruction and death, with no resolution in sight;

AND

Hamas, an organization with a murderous ideology that is committed to the annihilation of Israel, can have instigated their own people’s devastation by massacring and abducting some 1,500 Israelis on October 7, 2023;

AND

People around the world can adopt the tropes of antisemitism, singling out Israel and the Jews as the vilest and most dangerous entity in the world.

The Jews can make up .02% of the global population, a percentage so small that most people in the world will never even meet a Jewish person;

AND

Antisemitic myths can flourish claiming secretive Jewish power and control over almost any imaginable event.

Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote in such high numbers in this past Tuesday’s Israeli elections that they are in a position to become the potential kingmakers in forming the next government;

AND

Palestinians in the West Bank can be denied basic rights, and be continually threatened with government-sanctioned violence and ethnic cleansing;

AND

Thousands of Jewish Israeli citizens can go to Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank and risk their own safety protecting those Palestinians, in protest of their own government’s policies.

My birthday was a few days ago, and I just turned 71. And I must say, with each added year I better grasp the adage, “the older I get, the less I know.” It’s a big world, and I am humbled by my smallness. Nonetheless, I will continue to express my opinions, to treat others as I would wish to be treated, and to stand up for what I believe is right. I will reject simplistic and binary ideologies. I will support leaders who appreciate and address the inherent complexities and fundamental interconnectedness of our world. And, to deter my tendency toward self-righteous piety, I will also remember that I could be wrong.

With love, and wishes for Shabbat Shalom to all who celebrate,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

I just finished reading Dara Horn’s bracing and brilliant new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. I read widely on the history of antisemitism and its current manifestations. This book may be the clearest and most accessible work I have encountered.

Amidst all the crises clamoring for our limited attention, we must choose our sources of information wisely. I recommend reading or listening to Dara Horn as a very wise choice. (If you prefer listening to reading, she is appearing on multiple podcasts currently to promote her work. Here she speaks with Dan Senor.)

As her book title makes clear, Horn has no issue with being brash or provocative. She is unapologetic about her points of view and her conclusions. She is clearly brilliant, but also makes fun of herself easily. She is quite funny and a master of sarcasm. I might occasionally quibble with a few of Horn’s statements, but her forthrightness is utterly refreshing, her writing is terrific, and her arguments are thoroughly researched and compelling.

Horn is a well-regarded novelist with a doctorate from Harvard in comparative literature, studying Yiddish and Hebrew. In 2021 she published her first non-fiction book of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the insidious nature of contemporary antisemitism. She was overwhelmed by the response to her book, as thousands of Jews approached her to relate their own experiences with antisemitism, and to beseech her for a solution. Then, as her website explains,

in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel and the subsequent attacks on Jewish communities worldwide, the calls started coming not just from average readers but from university presidents and the United States government. From her front-row seat to this nightmare — including serving on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, meeting with the White House and Congress, and speaking with communities of all backgrounds across North America — she was surprised to discover that there was far more ignorance than malice, and saw an opportunity for change.

A result of this unexpected journey is her new work, The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. The book is not a comprehensive history of antisemitism. It is a series of deeply researched, interweaving essays that explore topics such as the failures of Holocaust education, the long history of the antizionist movement, and the organized plot to poison artificial intelligence with anti-Jewish propaganda (a story that I, for one, was unfamiliar with.) Connecting all of these subjects is antisemitism, which Horn calls “the Big Lie”: the destructive myth that Jews are destroying whatever a specific culture values most.

In the latter chapters Horn addresses the crucial subtitle of her book: A Love Story for the Living. First she speaks to the question of what can be done to address the resurgent Big Lie of antisemitism. Much is of course beyond our control, but Horn suggests that one thing we can do as Jews is to proactively tell our story, both to our own people and to the world at large. Ours is a unique, unlikely, and inspiring story of, as she describes, “a tiny, counter-cultural group whose groundbreaking ideas shaped world history.” Our refusal to bow to tyrants, our determination to retain our own ways, and our insistence that no person is above the law have been a thorn in the side of tyrants for thousands of years.

Jews make up a vanishingly small fraction of the global population, and in her travels Horn realized that many of the people she met did not have any Jewish friends or even acquaintances, and knew next to nothing about Judaism or Jewish history. She found that most people were eager to learn; by providing them with a basic narrative of the Jewish people’s astonishing and ancient story and culture, she could provide some inoculation against the big lies about Jews that now pervade our social media. Horn has created a new educational initiative, which she calls The Tell. Do look at the website - it is concise and powerful.

Finally, Dara Horn writes of love: her love of Judaism, Jewish study, and Jewish practice. Her love of Jewish community, and of Jewish resilience. She writes movingly of the almost 4,000-year love affair between the Jewish people and our God. As a rabbi, I know that Jews need to hear these love stories. Jewish life, culture and spiritual teachings have enriched me beyond measure - I do not know who I would even be without this love. Yet antisemitism, like all bigotry, reduces us to cartoon villains. All depth is lost. The best antidote to being flattened by stereotypes is to embrace one’s culture more fully. My colleague Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum would exhort her congregation: “What do you do in the face of anti-Jewish hate? Be more Jewish!” This is the love story for the living that Dara Horn offers us. May we continue to choose Jewish life, especially in dark times, as our ancestors did before us.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

I was invited to speak at Rosh Hashanah services at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, where I serve as rabbi emeritus. I would like to share my remarks with you here, along with my deepest wishes to you all for health, strength, courage and joy in the coming year, whatever comes.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

(I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project)

Exactly 25 years ago today, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sequestered in Dena Crane’s little yurt, writing my sermons for the High Holidays. Dena’s yurt had no telephone - and this was before Wi-Fi and cellphones were ubiquitous - so it was an ideal retreat where I could focus without distractions. I completed the talk I planned to give and walked out to my car. Dena had slipped a note under my windshield wiper: “You had better watch the news.” I turned on my radio and listened to the unbelievable events transpiring that day.

Rabbi Karen invited me to reflect with you this evening on this fateful anniversary.

I imagine that those of you who are old enough to remember that day are now also recalling your whereabouts at that moment. Do take a moment; each of us has a story to tell, each of us was affected in particular ways.

The images of the planes crashing into the twin towers are indelibly etched in my mind, and the feeling of horror in my gut is immediate and still sickening. Even though a quarter century - astonishingly - has passed since that tragic day, as I recall it now my anguish still dwells within me. And I was 100 miles away from Ground Zero. How much the more so for those who were much closer to this tragedy. My heart goes out to all survivors. Not just of 9/11, but of the countless traumatic events that tear lives apart, all the senseless violence that our benighted species inflicts on one another. I pray for all the victims of violence, everywhere. May every damaged human find resilience within, may they be comforted and supported from without, may they find their way toward rich and purposeful lives.

As we gather for Rosh Hashanah and prepare to enter a New Year, I pray that each of you also find resilience within, and may you be comforted and supported from without. May we all find our way toward rich and purposeful lives. May we all find sweetness and joy, love and inspiration amidst the wreckage and the discord of our world. May we not be swallowed by the juggernaut of hatred and fear that threatens so much of our world. May we be resourceful, and brave. May we choose life, and not shrink from it.

Jewish wisdom teaches us that humans are endowed with free will, and that history therefore is not foreordained. That is the core message of these High Holy Days: we can change course, we can build more vibrant lives and a more generous world. No final verdict has been written, and therefore I do not give up hope. But I also know that our nation and our world are teetering, and that we may not be able to right ourselves before a growing torrent of man-made catastrophes overtakes us. I look back with bitterness at the course our nation chose after 9/11, a path of needless war and domestic repression. I remember the goodwill and mutual concern that briefly united our nation and much of the world after the Twin Towers fell, and I grieve for what might have been.

The long vantage of Jewish history assists me during these times. Like a fiddler on the roof, we have teetered on the edge of death and destruction so many, many times. Those collective memories haunt and frighten us. And yet we are still here, determined to live meaningful lives. My Judaism gives me strength to withstand the grave uncertainties that we face, to heed my better angels, and to notice with joy all the gifts I continually receive. Being here with you all this evening is one of those joys.

25 years ago, Rosh Hashanah arrived on September 17, just 6 days after the Twin Towers fell. I vividly remember that evening; we gathered in our tent in a state of collective shock. Among us were many literal refugees from New York City. Each had a harrowing tale of escape. Some had only the clothes on their backs. I looked back this week at the words of welcome I shared with the community that evening. I want to span the intervening years right now, and share what I said in 2001 with you tonight:

Welcome! The earth has circled the sun again, the moon of Tishrei is renewing itself, and, as we have for thousands of years, through fire and water, we Jews and our friends are gathering to mark our Holy Time, Rosh Hashanah. Welcome. At this particularly sad and frightening time, we especially want to open our arms to all who came to join us, from far and near. Some of us are refugees and survivors from New York City. Let us open our arms to one another. Please take a few moments to welcome new faces around you, ask where they’re from, introduce yourselves, and wish them a shana tova, which literally means a good year.

Exactly one year ago, [the year 2000] on Erev Rosh Hashanah, I stood before you as I do now, and I shared my wonder and gratitude at having been blessed with a new baby, good health in my family, and many other blessings. Allow me to quote what I said: “This is a wondrous moment of well-being. I relish this time. It will change. I hope it will change only for the better. But we know better. There will be pain, there will be loss, there will be death.”

Little could I imagine the extent of pain and loss and death that we would all be facing this Rosh Hashanah, not even one week since the deadly attacks on New York and Washington. We are swirling in a maelstrom of fear and grief, facing the potential of protracted violence and war. It is a traumatic time.

And now, it is Rosh Hashanah, and we are here. We will make our sanctuary under this tent. We will strengthen each other. We will weep together. We will comfort each other. We will hold each other in our hearts and lift each other up. Begin now: open your heart in compassion for all those here gathered around you. Include in your prayers any folks who desired to be here but were not able. Expand to all those affected by the attacks. Include Israel. Include all of suffering humanity. Here, under our tent, in our small corner of the world, in the midst of tragedy, we commit to awakening the best that is in us. We will emerge from this holy time strengthened and alive, ready to face this next chapter of our collective lives.

The gates are open.

We entered the gates of those High Holy Days in 2001, and, Baruch Hashem, we are still here, stepping forward once again. Indeed, every year, no matter how broken our world, no matter how difficult the way forward might appear, the gates of teshuvah - return, recommitment, responsibility - are open. Let’s enter together, then. Take my hand, take the hands of your loved ones, take the hands of everyone in this room, of anyone around the world who desires to be and do better, hold these hands so that if one of us stumbles, they will not fall. Let us lift each other up as we walk into the unknown future together.

Shana Tova.

Dear Friends,

I’m back home from the Shalom-Musik Festival in Cologne, Germany, just in time for Rosh Hashanah. The Shalom-Musik Festival is a biennial celebration of Jewish music and culture. I led and performed at the previous gathering in 2024, and was delighted to be invited back this year. This year I traveled with my dear friends and musical collaborators Robert Bard and Reggie Harris, and we had some rich opportunities to present: Reggie and I spoke on a panel titled Civil Rights in America Today; I led an open Shabbat service with Cantor Jalda Rebling of Berlin; we performed our concert Let My People Go: A Jewish and African American Celebration of Freedom; and Robert and I presented another concert called Songs that Are Prayers. The events were well-attended and well-received, and I return home energized and delighted.

The festival uses performance venues all over the city: concert halls, churches, meeting spaces, museums, and even the Dom, the enormous cathedral in the city center that dominates the skyline. The festival organizers - Ulrike Neukamm, Claudia Hessel, and Thomas Hoft - have spent years cultivating relationships between the very small Jewish community in Cologne and the powerful Catholic and Protestant churches. I understand that until Shalom-Musik came on the scene in 2022, there had never been any active cooperation between these communities.

The Festival is a wonderful, brave and radical expression of cultural activism. Because of the Nazi genocide, there are of course very few Jews in Germany. Most of those Jews who are actively involved in Jewish community life understandably maintain a low profile. The synagogues have metal detectors and armed guards. To advertise and curate an explicitly Jewish festival is not a frequent occurrence. In addition, the contemporary discourse around Jews almost exclusively focuses, on the one hand, on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and on the other hand, on the dangers of rising antisemitism. These issues become the entire palette for considering Jews and Judaism. Our identity gets flattened. To celebrate the breadth and vitality of living Jewish culture is a radical act of humanization.

This year’s festival arrived at a moment in Germany when the mood is dark. While we were performing this past Sunday, elections were being held in Saxony-Anhalt, a small state in former East German territory. The Alternative for Germany party (AfD), an openly Neo-Nazi, antisemitic and anti-immigrant group, would win more votes than any other party (a victory, by the way, that Donald Trump publicly celebrated.) The Germans I spoke with fear for their country’s future, worrying that they are not far behind the United States’ slide toward fascist intolerance.

But the Festival created an oasis of artistic joy. The organizers honored us by holding all of our events in the Antoniterkirche, the largest and most famous Protestant church in Cologne, located in the bustling shopping district in the city center. The Gothic building dates to the 14^th century. During World War II the Antoniterkirche was bombed and badly damaged, along with most of the buildings in Cologne. After the war, many of the historic buildings were painstakingly reconstructed.

A main attraction in the church is a sculpture known as The Floating Angel. It was created by Ernst Barlach in 1927 as a memorial to all who perished during World War I.

The story of this sculpture encapsulates recent German history. In 1937 the Nazi authorities denounced the sculpture as “degenerate art” and melted it down for their war effort.

But a plaster model of the Angel remained, and in 1939 a new bronze was secretly cast, and then hidden from the Nazis throughout the war. In 1953 it was hung in the newly rebuilt Antoniterkirche, now as a memorial to the fallen of both world wars.

Today the Antoniterkirche stands firmly as a liberal bastion of tolerance. Pastor Markus Hertzberg enthusiastically agreed to Shalom-Musik’s request to hold a Shabbat service in the church sanctuary, and welcomed us warmly. It can still feel strange to me to lead a Jewish service in a church. Ancient Jewish law prohibits a Jew from even entering a church, let alone leading a Jewish ritual in one. Growing up, churches for me were at best alien territory, at worst enemy territory. But for decades now I have felt that we must build bridges between our various communities, not walls. To state the obvious, mutual respect and understanding is the only path towards peace in our profoundly interconnected world.

And so, several hundred Gentiles and Jews gathered to welcome Shabbat in a 14^th century church in Germany, our voices resonating together under the massive arched ceiling. We paused, we breathed, we smiled, we sang. A moment of repair between Germans and Jews. A moment of grace and communion in these fractured times.

I send these words to you on the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001. A brand-new century began tragically with the violent shattering of so many lives, fueled by religious fanaticism. Our world still reels from the aftermath of that attack, and from the disgraceful cycle of war and death and hatred that followed. But I also write these words on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The message of Rosh Hashanah is that we can change our ways. We can atone for past wrongs, and choose a new path. I want to express my unbounded gratitude to the beautiful and dedicated organizers of the Shalom-Musik Festival for showing us the way, and for including me in it.

With love, and wishes for a good year for all,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

On Sunday, August 30 at 4pm Reggie Harris and I, accompanied by Robert Bard on bass, will present our uplifting concert “Let My People Go: A Jewish and African American Celebration of Freedom” at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation. The concert will also be streamed online. I would love to have you and your loved ones join us - you can register here! Proceeds will benefit the WJC.

Later that week, Reggie, Robert and I will be flying to Cologne, Germany, where we will perform our concert at the Cologne Jewish Music Festival. (I performed at the previous festival, and am thrilled to have been invited back.) I look forward to sharing with you about the entire experience.

The seeds of Let My People Go were planted and then sprouted and matured during our annual Passover seders, beginning decades ago. Reggie and his then partner Kim Harris were regular participants, and music filled the room as we sang traditional Jewish Passover songs and freedom songs from the African American tradition. We soon realized that the Jewish and Black communities both draw inspiration and sustenance from the Biblical story of the Exodus. We each identify with the oppressed slaves under the tyrant Pharaoh, and their journey towards freedom. The ancient tale became the abiding metaphor for our own liberation struggles.

We also dived deep into the history of the many Jews, both prominent and unsung, who chose to be allies to Black people during their long struggle for civil rights. And we shared honestly how that alliance unraveled, and about the ways that antisemitic and racist oppression align and also the ways that they differ. We harvested this music and these insights into an album, a tapestry of song and story, and have since had the opportunity to perform it in churches, synagogues and concert halls around the United States and even in Europe.

I hope you will be able to join us, in person or virtually, on August 30. Come ready to lift your voice in song with us, as we remember that somehow, someday, we shall overcome.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

Long ago I heard the incomparable folksinger Pete Seeger (1919-2014) tell a story about two little maggots, and the story has stayed with me ever since*. I am sure the telling has changed as I have repeated this story over the years - Pete called that the “folk process.” But I’m pretty certain that I’ve got the essence of it right. Here’s how it goes:

There were two maggots - you know, little worms - who were living in a garden shed. Not a bad place to be if you’re a maggot. One morning they happened to be sitting on a shovel, when a man picked up the shovel, slung it over his shoulder, and headed to work. The maggots held on for dear life, but finally one of them slipped off and then the other. The first maggot landed in a crack in the sidewalk, while the second maggot landed in a big pile of fresh dog turd. Well, the first maggot was in terrible straits. He tried to climb out of the crack, but the sides were too steep. It was dark, and there was nothing to eat or drink. Meanwhile, the maggot who fell in the dog turd ate to his heart’s content. What a life! After 3 days or so, this maggot thought to himself, “Hey, I wonder what happened to my brother?” He decided to go looking. He humped his way along the sidewalk until he came to a crack. He peered over the edge and thought he saw something, so he called down, “Is that you, brother?” “Why, yes!” the first maggot shouted. “You look terrible, brother,” the second maggot said, “What happened to you!” “Well, I don’t know, I fell off that shovel and found myself in this awful place. I’ve been trapped here and I’m starving. But you, brother, you’re so fat and sleek! How did you do it?” The fat maggot replied, “Brains and perseverance, brother, brains and perseverance.”

This evening, right after the sun sets, the slim crescent of the new moon of Elul will briefly appear just above the western horizon. This sighting marks Rosh Hodesh Elul, the New Moon of the month of Elul. Rosh Hashanah is now one month away. On the Jewish calendar, we are entering the season of teshuvah, a time for introspection and honest self-evaluation. For some reason, the story of those maggots is with me these days, and I want to embrace its message.

Lord, keep me reasonably humble as I keep stumbling through this life. Help me laugh at myself, and at life’s absurdities. May I be ever grateful for the unearned gifts that sustain me. As I think about Pete Seeger’s hapless maggots, may I always remember that there, but for fortune, go I.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

*After reading this post, my friend Andy Teirstein informed me that this story is by Carl Sandburg, and that Pete Seeger learned it from him. It appears in Sandburg’s epic prose-poem, “The People, Yes” (1936).

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

Last month I watched the dedication ceremony of the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama’s speeches and all the glorious music moved and uplifted me, feelings that remain with me now, weeks later. It is so very heartening to be reminded that the values of integrity, cooperation, grace and compassion that I cherish are still shared by so many, as exemplified by the Obamas and by the mission of their new center.

If you’d like, you can find Michelle Obama’s remarks here, and President Barack Obama’s here. If you have the time, you can watch the entire lengthy ceremony here (the formalities begin at 20:39 of the recording.)

During his remarks, President Obama dwelt on a famous phrase that has sustained him: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” These words have been so important to him that he had them woven into the border of the rug that lay in the Oval Office during his tenure at the White House. And now a sculpture interpreting that theme stands on the grounds of the new Obama Center.

This phrase was made famous by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On March 25, 1965, the marchers for voting rights completed their 54-mile trek from Selma, Alabama. Joined now by many thousands of others, they arrived in the state capitol of Montgomery. There, standing on the steps of the State Capitol building, Dr. King addressed the crowd and the nation. As he neared the end of his stirring speech he said, “How long [will it take]? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Reflecting on his experience during the Selma to Montgomery march, King later wrote, “There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship.”

There is no way that we can confirm the truth of this conviction. It is not self-evident that morality and justice somehow inhere in our creation. History teems with examples of the powerful and the cruel enjoying the fruits of exploitation without punishment and without remorse. From where did Dr. King draw his faith?

From the Torah, Dr. King’s Old Testament. It is our Torah that insists that there is a moral order that transcends but also informs human affairs. It is our Torah that assures us that our conscience, our awareness of right and wrong, is birthed from an infinite divine conscience that desires us to do right.

Israel’s covenant with God demands that we pursue justice. This conviction led to the emergence in ancient Israel of the position of the prophet. The prophet spoke for God, who had liberated us from cruel bondage in order to create a better society. The prophet’s role was to hold the powerful accountable to the demands of justice. They spoke in the town square and in the royal court, sparing no one with their admonitions. The prophets were often persecuted for their candor - what ruler wants to be reprimanded, privately or publicly? - but Jewish tradition considered their words to be so essential that they were canonized, made holy, and included in our Bible.

Martin Luther King Jr. inherited this prophetic mantle, and like the ancient prophets, and despite his tragically shortened life, his words live on. But Dr. King did not, in fact, create the metaphor of the arc of the moral universe. He was paraphrasing an earlier prophetic voice, Reverend Theodore Parker. Parker was a white Unitarian minister and fervent abolitionist. In 1853, from his pulpit in Boston, Parker delivered a passionate sermon against slavery titled “Of Justice and Conscience.”

At the dedication of the Obama Center, Barack Obama eloquently elaborated on Reverend Parker’s sermon, and I want to quote President Obama at some length:

[A]t the time, the abolitionist cause seemed lost, the compromise of 1850 had made harboring fugitive slaves a crime under federal law, even in those states that had abolished slavery.

And in a case that garnered national attention, a young fugitive in Boston had been seized and tried and marched to the wharf by hundreds of armed officers, where he was summarily put on a ship bound for the south, where he would remain in shackles and chains. It was a moment of profound uncertainty and despair, a moment the minister called darker than any New England had witnessed.

“We do not see,” Reverend Theodore Parker observed, “that justice is always done on earth. Many a knave is rich, sleek, and honored, while the just man is poor, hated, and in torment. I do not pretend,” the preacher said, “to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience...[and] I am sure it bends towards justice.”

President Obama continued:

The good Reverend was under no illusions about the perils and obstacles facing the abolitionist cause. His words offered no easy answers, no comforting assurances that he or his congregation would live to see the progress they so desperately sought.

Rather, his was a declaration of faith, a defiant call not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves and true to one another, and to keep fighting to fulfill the promise of this nation, even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.

Reverend Parker offered a declaration not of fact, but of faith. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he said. Parker’s humility speaks to me, as my eye too “reaches but little ways.” But ever since Moses beheld the burning bush we have heard the call to address our world not just with our eyes, but with our inner vision of what is right, our inner knowing. As we struggle to keep track of that very, very long arc, may we too, in the words of Dr. King, feel that we have cosmic companionship.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

POSTSCRIPT: Since posting this piece, I’ve had several conversations with readers who find themselves stymied by the term “faith”, as in when President Obama said that Reverend Parker offered “a declaration of faith.” For many of us, faith has come to be seen as the purview of the religiously certain, a belief that there is a Supreme Being who is guiding human affairs and has our best interests always at heart. For those of us who do not see life in this way, we often feel forced to reject “faith” and to say, therefore, that we do not have faith.

So what do I mean by “faith” mean here? Certainly not belief in a promised outcome. Perhaps there are some other terms that might be more apt, such as steadfastness. In that sense, we might use the idiom “keep the faith,” as in, “don’t give up, even when all seems lost.” For the arc of history extends beyond our small view. It is hubris to predict the future with any certainty. Humility dictates that we accept our not-knowing. Our conscience dictates that, despite not knowing, we also not succumb to despair. Keep the faith.

Dear Friends,

I am a mixed bag. All manner of feelings and thoughts tumble around within me. Some are mundane, some are exalted, some are selfish and mean, some are ridiculous. This goulash of contradictions seems to be the human condition. The Torah describes us as being formed from the clay and infused with the Divine breath - a merging of matter and spirit. The ancient Rabbis conclude that our task is to master this unwieldy mix, so that our baser instincts can be enlisted in the service of our higher aspirations. But the Rabbis are openly skeptical about our chances, and often wonder whether God, as it were, perhaps made a mistake in creating us. They conclude that, mistake or not, we are here, so we had better keep trying to heed our better angels.

It’s pretty wild witnessing the range of my inner states. Sometimes my worries overtake me. Sometimes I am enraged, sometimes despondent, preoccupied with the state of the world. Sometimes I feel giddy, sometimes exhausted, sometimes loving, sometimes loathing. Such is the circus within.

And sometimes I am graced with the state of wonder. Amazement. Awe. I think this is my favorite channel. For the past few days this awareness has been very strong within me. Everything I see - all of existence, in fact - strikes me as a miracle, plain and simple. It is inexplicable that I am here, that anything at all exists. All of it is an unearned gift that I can never repay, only enjoy and inhabit. The vegetables that grace my early summer plate - such texture and color and variety! I am utterly boggled to think that this nutrition is the product of sunshine and water and soil, nurtured by human hands. I am astonished. And not only the natural world - my car also fills me with awe. For people to figure out how to fabricate and construct this incredible machine, for me to drive around in it, is a miracle. I am blessed beyond all reason, blessed to simply be.

To see everything as a miracle does not negate or deny our struggles or our suffering. Rather, it frames my difficulties and my fears in a way that makes them more bearable. Saturated with wonder, my viewpoint grows very large, large enough perhaps to be able hold more of the world’s complexity and pain without becoming overwhelmed. Saturated with wonder, my sense of smallness in the face of universal mystery and grandeur does not daunt me; in fact I feel comforted and connected, privileged beyond measure to be alive. Saturated with wonder, I overflow, and have more to give to those around me. My cup runneth over.

Spiritual traditions aim to nurture this awareness. The daily Amidah prayer, composed some 2,000 years ago, contains a phrase upon which I always linger:

We acknowledge you, praise you, and thank you...for your miracles that greet us every day, and for your wonders and goodness that are with us every hour, morning, noon, and night.

It is a miracle that I can compose these words. It is a miracle that I am able to send them through the ether and onto your screen. Amidst the chaos of our inner and outer lives, may these words uplift and expand your awareness.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

This week’s Torah portion recounts the story in the Book of Numbers of Korakh’s rebellion against Moses as the Israelites journey through the wilderness. I composed this piece in July of 2016, before Trump’s ascendance to the Presidency. The lessons of Torah remain ever relevant. This essay appears in my book of Torah commentaries, Turn It and Turn It, For Everything Is in It.

- Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

Korakh assembles 250 Israelite leaders and publicly confronts Moses and Aaron: “Why do you merit to be the leaders?” Korach’s argument sounds reasonable – did not YHVH speak to all of the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai? Did they not all enter into covenant with YHVH at the mountain? Does not the Divine Presence dwell amongst all of them? Why then should the brothers Moses and Aaron have the power of Chief Judge and High Priest? How about a little more power-sharing here? And did not Moses himself recently exclaim, “Would that all YHVH’s people were prophets!” (Numbers 13:29)

It sounds good, but the Sages and Jewish tradition don’t buy it. Instead, the Sages examine what can be learned about Korach elsewhere in the Torah, and determine that his words are hollow and self-serving. They then read between the lines and midrashically* paint Korakh as the embodiment of demagoguery, a phenomenon they clearly are deeply acquainted with, (when it comes to human behavior, there is nothing new under the sun), and they hold Korakh up as the exemplar of this form of dangerous political leadership.

The commentators note that Korakh is not an ordinary citizen. He is Moses and Aaron’s first cousin. He is part of the priestly elite, and his role is to care for and transport the Ark of the Covenant and all the other sacred objects that furnish the Holy of Holies. Korakh is clearly among the most privileged Israelites. The midrash describes Korakh as exceedingly wealthy, as well.

Just prior to the verse cited at the beginning of this essay, Parashat Korakh opens with an unusual wording: וַיִּקַּח קֹרַח Va’yikach Korakh… --“And Korakh took…” (16:1). Took what? Why does the Torah not say “And Korakh arose”, or “And Korakh gathered around himself…” The midrash expands upon this strange opening and explains: Korakh took people in with words. His followers were taken in by Korakh’s rhetoric. Korakh, the rabbis assert, possesses the gift of gab. He knows how to inflame his followers’ grievances and reinforce their sense of entitlement. He distorts and selectively ignores the truth in order to win people over.

For example, the other named leaders that Korakh gathers around him have their own reasons to be aggrieved at their exclusion from the highest echelons. Dathan, Aviram and On are all of the tribe of Reuben. If you will recall, Reuben was Jacob’s first-born. Yet descendants of the tribe of Levi are in control. Doesn’t the Torah explicitly direct the inheritance to go to the first-born son? Shouldn’t they be in charge?

But their emotion ignores history. Their patriarch Reuben long ago fell from grace, after he slept with Bilhah, one of his father Jacob’s wives. Jacob stripped him of his first-born privileges (see Genesis 49:3). Yet perhaps Korakh knew just what to say to appeal to the Reubenites’ humiliation, to promise them restored status, and to get them to stand by his side.

Dathan and Aviram themselves are good matches for Korakh when it comes to political theater and twisted rhetoric. When Moses suggests that they and Korakh meet with him to discuss their grievances, Dathan and Aviram refuse, and call a press conference (as it were), announcing, “We will not come! Is it not enough that you brought us from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die in the wilderness, that you would also lord it over us?” (Numbers 16:12-13) Dathan and Aviram have the temerity to refer to the Israelites’ former land of enslavement with the very same language that Moses promises for their future: a land flowing with milk and honey! Ah, claims the populist, remember the good old days, and how good you all had it then?

The midrash further elaborates on Korakh’s casuistry (specious argument), creating passages in which he picks apart Moses’ instructions and laws, making them seem pointless and burdensome. He proclaims Moses’ choice of Aaron as High Priest to be pure nepotism, a brazen attempt to consolidate all the wealth of the priestly tithes in Moses’ own family. Korakh incites the people, commenting on how well fed these leaders appear to be.

As always, the demagogue mines a kernel of truth, which is what gives his argument momentum. Moses does possess great authority; Aaron does receive the best cuts of meat. They are privileged. But Korakh also ignores the greater truth: Moses has never governed for his own enrichment. He carries the burden of leadership without fanfare, just as his brother Aaron carries the sins of the entire People on his shoulders when he seeks God’s forgiveness. Aaron and Moses serve a higher purpose, and resist the aggrandizing temptations of power. But Korakh, despite his compelling rhetoric and his populist appeals, serves no one but himself.

Thus Jewish tradition uses the contrast of Korakh and Moses as an object lesson in leadership, teaching us to be wary of self-serving leaders. In Pirkei Avot, The Teachings of the Sages, Korakh becomes immortalized as the example of the wrong path: “Any dispute that is in service of the common good will have enduring value. A dispute that is not in service of the common good has no lasting value… And what is an example of a dispute that has no lasting value? The dispute of Korakh and his companions.” (Pirkei Avot 5:17)

In our portion, we are rewarded with a satisfyingly fantastic and wish-fulfilling ending to Korakh’s rebellion: the earth opens its mouth and swallows him up along with his cohort. Problem solved, I suppose! But we don’t get to expect any miracles in our own political dramas. Rather, we have to remain vigilant against the Korakhs of our day. We must shun the fleeting satisfactions of self-righteous rage that cloud our own good judgment, and hone our abilities to argue with reason and to work with passion for the common good.

*Midrash is the ancient and time-honored Jewish method of interpreting the Bible, from the root darash, to seek.

Dear Friends,

In my previous post I wrote bluntly about Israel’s deteriorating democracy. But I also wrote this:

As in the United States, there are many dedicated citizens in Israel who passionately oppose these fascist wannabes. And there are many more who are simply trying to make a living and keep a roof over their heads. We must resist our inclination to reduce entire societies to stereotypes of good or evil. We must continue to find our way to do good in the moral morass that is our world.

I have regularly reported in this blog about some of those many dedicated citizens who, against daunting odds, courageously continue to find ways to do good, to seek peace, and to advocate for a just and shared society in Israel and the Palestinian territories. As my readers know, I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to one of those efforts, the Sulha Peace Project.

Today I wish to highlight several more groups - among many - that might inspire you and also your support:

Tag Meir

Tag Meir means “Light Tag”. This is a Hebrew pun, and to understand its meaning we must describe the name’s origin. In 2011, there was a dramatic increase in hate crimes against innocent Palestinians by young Jewish extremists in the West Bank. They named their activity Tag Mechir, which means “Price Tag”, as in “this is the price you will pay for impeding our efforts to Judaize the West Bank territories.”

Dr. Gadi Gvaryahu, a religious Zionist Israeli man, was disgusted by the coopting of Judaism by these racist zealots. For years Gvaryahu had been active in religious Zionist circles, promoting the concepts of moderation and tolerance as the authentic values of Judaism. Now he broadened his reach. Changing one Hebrew letter, “Price Tag” became “Tag of Light”. The goal was to counter acts of violence with acts of love. The Tag Meir participants would visit Palestinians who had been victims of Jewish violence, and they would visit Jews who had been victims of Palestinian violence. The Tag Meir coalition has expanded over the years to include Israelis of all stripes, including Muslims and Christians.

The Tag Meir coalition continues to be extremely active, reaching out across Israel’s social and ethnic divides with gestures of compassion and love that rarely make the headlines. Please explore their website and their Facebook page and take some time to absorb the commitment and courage of these ordinary Israelis.

Yad B’yad Arab-Jewish Schools

Yad b’yad means “hand in hand.” Founded with 50 students in 1998, the Yad B’yad schools have grown into a network of 6 schools around Israel that serve thousands of Arab and Jewish students and their families in a bilingual, multicultural, values-based educational system. I will never forget my visit many years ago to their flagship campus in Jerusalem. Each classroom is co-taught by an Arab and a Jewish teacher. All students learn both Hebrew and Arabic. This cross-cultural outreach is a challenging undertaking under the best of circumstances. As racism and hatred grow in Israel, the Yad B’yad schools face increasing internal strains and also violent threats and attacks from without on their facilities. Yet their enrollment continues to grow, making it clear that there is hunger among a substantial segment of both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel for a truly shared and peaceful society. I urge you to dive into their excellent website and learn more about this movement.

Rabbis for Human Rights

I have been a supporter of Rabbis for Human Rights since its inception almost 40 years ago. RHR’s member are Israeli rabbis and rabbinical students from all denominations who share the central Jewish tenet that every human being is created in the image of God. This principle leads RHR to fight for the dignity, rights and safety of everyone under the jurisdiction of the State of Israel, be they marginalized minorities, Palestinians living under occupation, or foreign migrant workers in Israel. The members of RHR walk their talk, and I am in awe of their courage. You can learn more about their holy work on their website, and take a look at their most recent newsletter, too.

The Jerusalem Youth Chorus

The Jerusalem Youth Chorus is a choral and dialogue program for Palestinian and Israeli youth based in Jerusalem. I was moved to tears when I saw them on tour in the States a year ago, and if I am able, I hope to bring them to the Hudson Valley where I live when they tour again in the future. In the concert I attended, these beautiful young people spoke directly about the staggering obstacles that they face just to remain connected to one another. But making gorgeous music together helps them to balance the pain of their lives with joy and connection. Their most recent video is a song they created with an American youth chorus, Uniting Voices Chicago, celebrating the work of Standing Together, yet another organization of Jews and Palestinians in Israel fighting for a just society.

You can watch and listen to many more recordings of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus’ music, including their appearance on “America’s Got Talent”, here.

Prospects for a shared and just society in Israel - and in Gaza and the West Bank - seem to recede almost daily from our view. Yet these righteous, life-affirming groups continue to nurture their humanity and to keep their dreams alive. And they are not alone. The Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) has more than 200 affiliated grassroots organizations. I invite you to explore the directory describing all of ALLMEP’s members. Be inspired, and let’s offer whatever support we can.

With hope and love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

Dear Friends,

Every nation creates its own mythos, a story about what makes “us” special. These stories are key to creating a national identity that binds citizens together with a sense of common purpose. At their best, our national myths can be aspirational and inspiring. But our attachment to these stories also easily blinds us to the messy, conflictual, and often cruel nature of our species. The truth about ourselves and our societies is always more complex than the straightforward narratives that we like to construct about ourselves, whether individually or communally.

The mythos of the modern nation-state of Israel has inspired me for as long as I can remember: the scattered and exiled Jews of the world, ever beset by the dangers and degradations of antisemitism, would return to our ancient homeland and reconstitute ourselves as a proud people in our own land. And in so doing, we would fulfill our ancient prophet Isaiah’s call to be “a light unto the nations,” and construct a just and humane society.

This Zionist vision propelled perhaps the most unlikely and remarkable nation-building project ever attempted. The very existence of the State of Israel, built with incredible determination and sacrifice, still awes me.

And as we know, the reality of that nation-building is much more complex and morally “gray” than any story we might tell about it. Numerous brutal wars have been fought, none more so than the current conflict that erupted on October 7, 2023. Another people call the very same land their home, and have been repeatedly displaced and disenfranchised. Israel controls, often brutally, a Palestinian population who lack the rights of citizenship.

In recent decades religious triumphalism, racism and ultra-nationalism have steadily displaced the democratic norms upon which the nation was founded. As Israel lurches towards authoritarian rule, capable and principled legal, military, and security officials are being purged from leadership positions. (These trends are depressingly similar to what is happening here in the United States.)

Nothing illustrates the unraveling of Israel’s moral fiber better than the political rise of Itamar Ben-Gvir. A right-wing agitator, proud racist, and violent settler, Ben-Gvir and his party were long banned from participating in Israel’s parliament. Now, thanks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s lust for power, Ben-Gvir sits in the government as Minister of National Security. This reprobate is in charge of the police, the prisons, and security control of the West Bank. These governmental authorities are condoning and engaging in state-sponsored terror, often murderous, against their perceived enemies, whether they be Palestinians under Israeli military control, Palestinian citizens of Israel, or Jewish Israelis whom they label as left-wing. Many like-minded ideological zealots are now leaders in the Israeli army, who stand by or even participate as lawless atrocities are committed.

At his recent highly publicized fiftieth birthday party, Ben-Gvir’s wife presented him with a birthday cake decorated with a picture of a noose, and the message, “Mazel Tov - sometimes dreams are realized.” It’s that bad.

The perversion of religion to serve nationalist and racist goals is, of course, not unique to Judaism. Fundamentalist Moslems and Christians, and now increasingly Hindus, also defile their own sacred teachings in the service of supremacist goals. Here in the U.S. we have Christian Nationalists serving in the heart of our government, spouting hate in the name of their God and country no different from the Ben-Gvirs of Israel.

But, as in the United States, there are many dedicated citizens in Israel who passionately oppose these fascist wannabes. And there are many more who are simply trying to make a living and keep a roof over their heads. We must resist our inclination to reduce entire societies to stereotypes of good or evil. We must continue to find our way to do good in the moral morass that is our world.

The global explosion of antisemitism in the wake of October 7, 2023, makes it even more difficult to maintain a nuanced and reality-based engagement with Israel. Essentially, antisemitism tells a story about good and evil, and the evil role is assigned to the Jews. The Jews are The Problem, and the source of humanity’s ills. Eliminate or subjugate the Jews, and the problem of evil is also solved. This narrative translates easily to the global stage: Israel, as the Jewish State, is identified as The Problem, the epicenter of evil. History and geopolitics get flattened into a simple morality play. Additionally, “Jews”, “Israel” and “Zionism” get conflated, such that Jews everywhere are suspect, shunned and endangered.

History has taught Jews that our presence in whatever larger society in which we live is conditional, and revocable at any moment. To cope with this reality, we have striven to show how extra-special we are, how indispensable, just so that we might be allowed to exist. When Israel was founded, we transferred this attitude to our new nation: we would show the world that we belonged by being exemplary, truly a light unto the nations, as it were. Nothing less could validate our claim to be a member of the family of nations.

Like many of us, I have held passionately to this elevated vision of Israel, despite the mounting evidence that much of it was wishful illusion. Since October 7, my ingrained defense of Israel as an especially moral society has slowly and painfully peeled away. Israel is in reality a nation of impressive accomplishments and horrible sins. In other words, a normal country.

Ironically, the Jews becoming a “normal” people was an original aspiration of the Zionist vision. By returning to our homeland and reconstituting ourselves as a normal country, we Jews could leave behind our anomalous position as an always-suspect minority. Early Zionist thinkers like Theodore Herzl naively assumed that antisemitism would fade away once the Jews had their own national home and had gotten out of Europe’s hair. Herzl underestimated the fundamental structural role that antisemitism plays in the Western tradition.* I am convinced that there is little we Jews can do to prevent antisemitism from regularly resurfacing, especially during uncertain times, when so many people search for a scapegoat upon whom they might blame their undeserved suffering. There is also, therefore, little that Israel can do to prevent being cast as a unique and dangerous outlier among the nations of the world.

So what do I do with this bleak picture? My answer does not seem to change. I love my homeland. I love my friends and family there. I love the landscape and the history that suffuses that landscape. I love this one place in the world where Judaism defines the culture. I support the many brave Israelis and Palestinians who recognize each other’s humanity and work against the forces of intolerance and evil. Despite my microscopic influence, I will continue to oppose the oppressive and hateful regime that now rules Israel, and at the same time I will continue to defy those who would demonize Israel and call for its demise.

As much as we wish human history was a mere story, with good and evil clearly assigned, and with a happy ending that we might cheer for, it is not. I simply will not abandon the home of my people, even if history once more appears to turn towards tragedy. Even if I understand now that Israel is just another country.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I wish to thank my daughter, Timna Jahoda Kligler, for her clear-eyed analysis and for her patience with me as I adjust to new “normals”.

*See David Nierenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013); this video of Nierenberg lecturing; or, for a shorter summary this column of mine from 2024

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

Our prayers are not restricted to the prayer book. Popular songs can also express our deepest longings and our greatest joys. A great song is a kind of prayer - it breaks our hearts open, and rekindles our spirits.

I have really been enjoying putting together a new musical program with my collaborator and bassist Robert Bard that I am calling Songs That Are Prayers, Prayers That Are Songs. The songs are in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Some come from religious sources, others from surprisingly secular origins. All have some interesting connection to Jewish culture.

I will be bringing this program to Germany this coming September, when I return to the Cologne Jewish Music Festival. But first, I get to perform it locally; if you live in my neck of the woods, I invite you to join me at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation on Sunday, May 3 at 11:30am. The performance will be preceded by a brunch. You can register here.

In this video, I describe and share a song by Leonard Cohen, If It Be Your Will. As he frequently did in his writing, Cohen draws deeply from Jewish sources and sensibilities in this piece. And of course, he puts his unique stamp on the song, poignantly describing the broken human condition, while still reaching for transcendence. Here are the lyrics:

If it be your will, that I speak no more

And my voice be still, as it was before

I will speak no more, I shall abide until

I am spoken for, if it be your will

If it be your will, that a voice be true

From this broken hill, I will sing to you

From this broken hill, all your praises they shall ring

If it be your will, to let me sing

If it be your will, if there is a choice

Let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice

Let you mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell

If it be your will, to make us well

Then draw us near, and bind us tight

All your children here, in their rags of light

In out rags of light, all dressed to kill

And end this night, if it be your will

If it be your will

May we all find the songs that deepen and enliven our days.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

(My gratitude to Marka Knight for introducing me to this song.)

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

I have spent the past couple of weeks preoccupied with my health. A puffy, swollen calf turned out to be evidence of a blood clot in my leg. Ultrasounds, CT scans, a stay in the hospital, IV drips, blood thinners - all of this was new to me, who had somehow blissfully avoided any major health crises for my first seventy years. The scans showed small embolisms throughout my lungs. My only symptom the past months had been feeling unusually short of breath during my workouts.

Two weeks later, the medication is working wonders. The clots are dissolving, the swelling is almost gone, and my familiar energy has returned. It appears that I didn’t just dodge a bullet; I dodged a hail of bullets. I am blown away by my luck. As usual, words can only begin to approximate the wonder and gratitude that I am experiencing, but I must try.

I am grateful to the researchers and scientists who have devoted themselves to understanding the workings of the human body, and to painstakingly crafting diagnostic methods and treatments that can restore people to health. Because of them, I am able to live. May they be supported, respected and honored in all of their holy work.

I am grateful to all of the health care professionals and caregivers whom I encountered these past weeks. Thanks to the expertise of my physical therapist and my doctors, the problem was accurately identified. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how ponderous and frustrating our health care system has become, driven by profit, mired in bureaucracy, and rife with inequity. Even as I got swept up into that impersonal labyrinth as I entered the hospital, almost every person I encountered was kind to me, and concerned for my well-being. Because of them, I am able to live. May they too be supported, respected and honored in all of their holy work.

In the siddur, the Jewish prayer book, is a series of prayers of gratitude one is to recite every morning. I love and embrace these prayers as they help me frame my day with thanks before I can relapse into complaining. Perhaps my favorite is the blessing in gratitude for our functioning bodies. It originates in the Talmud (Berachot 60b) and is quite ancient:

Blessed are you, Source of Life, our God, who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known before your throne of glory that if one of these passageways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. Blessed are you, miraculous Source of All, the wondrous healer of all flesh.

I give thanks for my circulatory system, an estimated 60,000 miles of blood vessels bringing life to the trillions of cells that make up me.

I give thanks for my digestive system, transforming organic matter into the energy that sustains me.

I give thanks for my nervous system, a wondrous network of electric impulses that governs my behavior and somehow allows me to be aware and to act.

I give thanks for my lymph and excretory systems, allowing me to clear out the waste that my body no longer needs. For endocrine, and bone marrow, and liver, and lungs, for them all.

I give thanks for my senses, through which I experience being alive.

I am endowed with an unfathomable symphony of interactions that allow me to stay alive and stand before the mysterious Source of Being. Stunned into wordless awe by the unlikelihood of my own being, blessed to enjoy another day, I breathe my gratitude.

May you too be so blessed.

With love, and Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow, March 28, 2026, millions of Americans will gather around the country (with additional supportive protests in many other nations) to declare our opposition to autocracy and tyranny. At the previous “No Kings” rallies that I have attended, the mood has been upbeat, even fun. Strongmen tend to take themselves very seriously, and certainly do not like being mocked. Oppressors oppress; humor and joy are buoyant, counteracting that pressure, and demonstrating that our spirits will not be crushed. I have certainly felt uplifted and strengthened by joining the crowds who are determined to express our shared commitment to democracy.

Tomorrow’s rally falls just a few days before the beginning of Passover. The story we tell at Passover asserts that the very Source of Creation opposes tyrants like Pharaoh. The Torah unequivocally assumes that anyone who would crush other human bodies and spirits in service of their own power is subverting the very intention and moral law of Creation. I invite you to reread my piece from last Passover, where I elaborate on this core Jewish axiom.

Tomorrow’s rally is also auspicious in that it is the first “No Kings” gathering of 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of our nation. Especially now, the Declaration deserves careful rereading. The Founders begin by asserting a truth they find to be self-evident: that all men [sic] are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights. This claim aligns with the Torah’s understanding that all people are created in the image of the Divine, that is, that every person, regardless of station, is endowed with a majestic and irreducible essence.

We tend to be less familiar with the rest of the Declaration, in which the Founders lay out the tyrannical behaviors of King George III that have led them to declare independence. In the face of Donald Trump’s tyrannical behavior, this latter part of the Declaration remains stunningly relevant, especially as we mark “No Kings Day.” These claims from 250 years ago seamlessly align with our own experience today. Here are some of the most salient passages:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

•He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

•He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

•He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

•He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

•He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

•He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

•He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

•He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

•For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;

•For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States;

•For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world;

•For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent;

•For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury;

•For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences;

•For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.

•He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

•He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us...

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

As a patriotic American, and as a committed Jew, I say “No!” to all tyrants, unfit to be the rulers of free people.

Shabbat Shalom, and in Solidarity,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

Gratitude to Rabbi Karen Levine for directing me to read the Declaration of Independence more closely.

(I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project)

Dear Friends,

I recently returned from a road trip with my friend Reggie Harris. Reggie is a gifted and beloved singer-songwriter and storyteller, and a scholar of African American history and musical traditions. He is an ambassador across racial divides, a role he embraces and fills with his unquenchable joy and his inspired truth-telling.

Reggie had knee replacement surgery in December, but he was determined to get back on the road. He invited me to join him on tour in order to give him a hand, as he was still recovering his strength and his mobility. I will take any opportunity I can find to hang out with Reggie, and I had the time available. I met up with Reggie in Knoxville, Tennessee. For the next twelve days I was his driver, roadie, and right-hand man. I also got to perform with him, which was icing on the cake. We drove all over South Carolina, North Carolina, through West Virginia, into Ohio - parts of the country I had never visited before - and finally across Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. It was Black History Month, and Reggie had booked a grueling schedule of concerts in churches, elementary schools, senior centers, coffee houses and house concerts. It was exhausting and kind of nuts - two old guys acting like we were half our age - and, it was a total joy, and a huge lift for us both. Reggie’s songs and stories are still singing in my head.

Ever since we met (on the basketball court!) almost forty years ago, Reggie and I have wanted to understand each other’s experience, Reggie’s as a Black man and mine as a Jew. We now are decades into illuminating and challenging conversations about the dynamics of racism and antisemitism, where they differ and where they intersect. In 2006, with Reggie’s former partner Dr. Kim Harris we created an album of music and spoken word titled Let My People Go: A Jewish and African American Celebration of Freedom. We performed this concert in churches and synagogues locally and around the country, and even in Europe, bringing diverse audiences together and demonstrating that we can still find common purpose. (Our next Let My People Go concert will be at the Shalom-Musik Festival in Cologne, Germany this coming September.)

This past November Reggie and I led a group of Jewish travelers on a Civil Rights Pilgrimage tour to visit key sites of the Civil Rights struggle. Reggie has led many such pilgrimages through the Living Legacy Project, and in the past I have joined in as a participant. I was profoundly moved by this experience. When a Jewish group approached Living Legacy about crafting a tour that would include a particular focus on the history of Jewish involvement in supporting the Black Civil Rights struggle, Reggie suggested that we lead the tour together.*

Our journey was a pilgrimage, walking in the footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement heroes, the prominent as well as the unsung, and a “seminar-on-wheels”, visiting museums and monuments, and listening to speakers in Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham as they recounted the brutal history and legacy of racism in our nation.

With our explicitly Jewish group, our journey also became an opportunity for our travelers to air their fears and confusion about the surging antisemitism in our world today. Reggie and I found ourselves counseling our group on how to cope with fear. We American Jews have been lucky in that most of us can “pass” as white; if we don’t publicly wear Jewish symbols or garb, we can avoid the antisemitic gaze. We American Jews also have been lucky in recent decades in that we have not faced much overt bigotry, a situation that is rapidly changing. Reggie pointed out to us that Black people like himself cannot hide or pass; they are always exposed to racism. As a Black man, Reggie has had no option but to learn how to manage his fear, maintain his dignity, and keep his heart open to others every single day. Reggie told us directly: we Jews are out of practice in confronting hatred. We help no one, least of all ourselves, if we spin into panic or if we freeze into a defensive crouch. We have more inner strength than we know, and sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to call that strength up and to embody it.

Reggie has composed a lot of great songs, and one of my favorites is Windows of the Heart:

We sit alone together
Each from our different world
Suspicious of each other
Position flags unfurled

So much lies broken between us
Lines of connection down
Standing in ruins of pain & mistrust
Searching for common ground

So we stumble through our points of view
Logic falls apart
In that moment of communion
We see a place to start
Through the windows of the heart

In gratitude for precious friends,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

*If you have the time, I highly recommend Henry Louis Gates’ new 4-part PBS documentary Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which does an exemplary and unflinching job laying out this complex story.

(I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project)

Dear Friends,

The full moon arrives tonight, and the Festival of Purim arrives with it. Purim is a holiday of masks and costumes and unbridled silliness, during which we read Megillat Esther, the Book of Esther. It is a fanciful, farcical story written some 2,400 years ago and set in the Palace of Shushan, the capital of ancient Persia. Haman, the wicked Prime Minister, persuades King Ahasuerus that all the Jews of his kingdom must be annihilated. But Mordechai the Jew and his niece Esther turn the tables on Haman. While hiding her Jewish identity, Esther becomes Queen. Esther arranges a special banquet with Haman and the King, at which she reveals her Jewish identity and explains to the King that Haman wants her killed, along with all of her people. The King turns on Haman, who is hung on the gallows he had erected to hang Mordechai. The Jews of Persia defeat their enemies, live in peace and honor, and are told to celebrate Purim forevermore.

This story is fiction, filled with humor and irony, and is a Hebrew literary gem. It brims with mythic archetypes: the foolish king, the wicked villain, the wise uncle, the beautiful heroine. There is no evidence that the tale told in the Megillah has any historical basis.

Dangerously, many people confuse myth with history, and in doing so cause great harm and evil. Jews who take this story literally use it to justify murderous attacks against present day enemies. In 1994, the infamous Baruch Goldstein chose Purim to walk into a mosque in Hebron and slaughter 29 Muslims, thus in his mind reenacting the revenge the Jews of ancient Shushan took against Haman’s forces in the Purim story. After Hamas’ genocidal massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023, the Purim story was again invoked as Biblical and timeless justification for ruthlessly destroying enemies who would destroy us.

This Purim it is especially tempting to mix myth with current events. Iran, which is present-day Persia, has been calling for the utter destruction of Israel since Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. The ancient story of Haman could not be more resonant than at this moment, as Israel seeks to destroy the power of the Islamic state of Iran, which has literally demonized us for decades and made our annihilation the central platform of its regime.

I am not feeling festive this Purim. The current war is causing great devastation, its motivations and merits are debatable, and its ultimate outcomes cannot be predicted. The impulse to simplify this conflict by analogizing it to the ancient Purim story is almost irresistible this year. I urge us not to go there. It is a false comfort to simplify or justify the horror of war by invoking a mythicized history.

Reading the Megillah personally rather than politically

This somber year, my approach to the Purim story will be personal, not political. A particular verse from the Megillah has grabbed my attention. In Chapter 4, Mordechai learns that Haman has persuaded the king to decree that all the Jews in the Empire will be annihilated. Mordechai sends a message to Esther in the palace, informing her of Haman’s plan and urging her to go to the king and plead with him on behalf of her people. Esther hesitates, understandably: anyone who enters the king’s presence uninvited is to be put to death, unless the king perchance welcomes them. Mordechai then tells Esther,

“Who knows, perhaps it was for precisely this moment that you have attained your royal position!” (Esther 4:13-14)

Esther hears Mordechai’s charge, and responds by asking all the Jews to fast and pray for her welfare: “I will go to the king, even though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish!” (4:16)

This is the moment in every good story when the hero accepts that they have a vital task to fulfill, and that to fulfill that quest they must rise above their fears, and be willing to sacrifice the sweet life that they enjoy. Moses, happy with his life as a shepherd, hears God’s call at the burning bush and knows that he must return to Egypt and rescue his people. Frodo Baggins (I am a lifelong Lord of the Rings guy) recognizes that he must leave his peaceful home in the Shire to fulfill a perhaps impossible task that no one else can do for him. And Esther, who could continue to conceal her Jewish identity and live a luxurious and cloistered life in the palace, determines that she must risk everything to save her people.

We are meant to be inspired by and to identify with the heroes of these tales: ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances, asked to rise above their fears and their sense of smallness in order to do the right thing. Of course, great stories take us to faraway lands and into epic narratives where the stakes are existential and grandiose. It is vanishingly rare that our own lives rise to that dramatic pitch. But still, even in the mundanity of our everyday challenges, we are each the hero of our own story. And our stories matter. This Purim I will imagine that Mordechai is speaking to me: “Who knows, Jonathan, perhaps it was for precisely this moment that you have attained your position!” In other words, putting myself at the center of my story, what is asked of me at this moment? Perhaps to comfort the sufferer; to make the house welcoming for the tired guest; to join the rally, even if I’m frightened; to get people singing together; to write this piece. My days are not epic. I will not be saving the world. Nonetheless, I will try to be like Esther in my own story. I will assume that my presence in any given situation is both meaningful and important, and that I have a contribution to make that no one else can do for me.

Bless you all, my heroes. Unknown tasks and unknown times lie ahead for us. Though we might tremble before these challenges, let us meet them with as much grace and grit as we can muster.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

(I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project)

Dear Friends,

I have not posted in several weeks - life has been full, especially with shoveling snow during this unusually stormy and frigid winter. I hope and plan to write again soon. In the meantime, I would like to share a recent Torah teaching by my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Karen Levine. I am grateful for Rabbi Karen and the many wise teachers in my life.

If you live in an area in the Northeast United States that is beset by today’s blizzard, may you and your loved ones be safe and warm.

With love to all,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

(I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project)

Where Humans Meet Divine Awareness: A Teaching on Parashat Terumah
Rabbi Karen Levine

This [past] week’s parasha, Terumah, “Gifts,” is the first of five Torah portions dedicated to describing the building of the mishkan, commonly translated as “tabernacle,” but more helpfully understood to be a container, dwelling, or meeting place for the intersection of matter and divine consciousness.

Over the next several weeks our sacred story will describe in great detail — down to the exact measurements and the materials to be used — how it will all be put together, including fabrics and patterns for the priest’s ceremonial garments and the recipe for the sacred incense. First, the people receive instructions from Moshe and then set about fulfilling the command, doing the actual sewing, building, and crafting, all in the service of creating something beautiful that will express the value of divine presence at the center of their lives.

Why so much detail? Why so many words — and parchment panels in the scroll — connected to one piece of narrative, more than any other topic in the Torah? Why this?

It’s tempting to read these chapters as an historical accounting of an actual structure, easy to glaze over the details, to think: I am not a builder, a weaver, an artisan of metal objects; easy to question, how did these people, former slaves, acquire so much gold, gems, and fine cloth? Did they really leave Egypt with planks and poles of acacia wood? What does this have to do with me?

Consider, however, that this is a wisdom text, not a history book, and as a transmission of spiritual instruction, what are our ancient ancestors communicating? What is this “message in a bottle” that can inform and illuminate contemporary problems?

A few chapters back, the Torah describes the revelation at Mount Sinai, what we call the Ten Statements or Commandments, which begin with the declaration of universal oneness:

אָנֹכִי יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִ͏ים׃

I am the ETERNAL your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt/constriction, the house of bondage. (Exodus 20:2)

“I am.” The first, and central, understanding that defines Judaism. The recognition that there is an aspect of reality that humans are in relationship with, but that is not human. Then, think of the mishkan as a metaphor for the place where human and God meet, the intersection of matter and “consciousness”; brain and mind; body and spirit; whatever language describes this best for you.

If we weigh the importance of a teaching based on the amount of physical space the Torah scroll dedicates to a particular story or motive, this story, the narrative surrounding building the Mishkan, looms large. Clearly, the Torah wants us to take our time with it, to sit for a few weeks with the Ten Statements (and the subsequent elucidations from parashat Mishpatim), and consider how we might best integrate revelation into how we live.

Consider these next several weeks as an extended meditation on the miracle of life and the gift of consciousness, time to contemplate our place in the order of the universe and explore how our bodies, our thoughts, and then our actions, might reflect the value we place on appreciating our aliveness. This is the gift of Terumah.

Dear Friends,

Before the immediacy of my recent trip to Israel flows inexorably away down the stream of time, I would like to share one more memorable experience.

I had one last day in Jerusalem before flying home, and my time was my own. Two years ago the National Library of Israel completed a magnificent new building and I wanted to visit it. It sits on Givat Ram, a hill in the center of West Jerusalem that serves as the seat of Israel’s most important governmental institutions. On one side of the National Library is the Knesset, Israel’s parliament building. On the other side is the Israel National Museum. Nearby is the stunning Supreme Court of Israel building. Spreading down the slopes of Givat Ram is the main campus of the Hebrew University, which manages the National Library. Similar to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the buildings on Givat Ram represent the pillars of modern secular democracy: unfettered access to information, culture and knowledge, an elected legislative body, and a court system that adjudicates the law.

Despite the presence of these institutions, it is legitimate to question whether Israel at this time still functions as a liberal democracy. Recently, no less a personage than retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak stated, “Are we a liberal democracy? My answer: Not anymore.” (Read more about Barak’s searing and clear-eyed critique here.) The degradation of democracy in Israel parallels what we are experiencing here in the United States.

Nevertheless, many of Israel’s democratic institutions continue to hew fiercely to their missions, not least the National Library. The National Library collects copies of all printed matter published in Israel in any language. It houses the largest collection of Hebrew books in the world, as well as a substantial collection of precious manuscripts from the Islamic world. It is the central research library of Israel, and its holdings are available to the public.

For a culture such as Judaism that reveres and sanctifies language and the written word, the National Library is more than an institution; it is a shrine, a symbol. It is a monument to knowledge and to literacy, among the highest values of Judaism. Its position in the center of modern Jerusalem speaks volumes (pun intended) about the place of these values in a Jewish society.

The National Library building is a long, asymmetrical, sweeping structure, meant perhaps to represent an open scroll. When I visited, the spiraling, light-filled reading rooms and stacks were busy with students. The permanent exhibit displays rare books and texts from the region, books in Hebrew, Arabic and Persian all being given pride of place, with captions in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

Letters of Light

Outside the library, landscaped into the hillside, is a sculpture installation by Israeli artist Micha Ullman. The name of the sculpture is Letters of Light. It has two levels. Above is a circular plaza, adorned with a ring of standing limestone shapes. When the sunlight passes through these shapes, each one limns a different Hebrew letter on the plaza floor. In the center of the circle are thick glass panes through which you can peer down into a room below. The glass openings form the Hebrew letter Aleph, the English A, and the Arabic Alif. In Jewish tradition, Aleph is the soundless letter that precedes all sound, the “still small voice” out of which language springs.

The lower level is accessed through a long passage. It is an unadorned concrete vault. Sunlight streams through the glass openings above. As the hours pass, the shapes of the Aleph, A, and Alif sweep across the walls and floor of the simple room.

Micha Ullman, who is now in his late 80s, created Letters of Light as a companion piece to his 1995 work, The Empty Library. The Empty Library is situated in the Bebelplatz, a central square in Berlin. Here, on the night of May 10, 1933, Adolf Hitler and the newly empowered Nazi Party made their intentions clear with a massive public book burning ceremony. In his speech before the many thousands assembled, Joseph Goebbels declared, “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end.” Some 20,000 looted books were burned that night.

The Empty Library can be seen through a large glass plate set into the cobblestones of the Bebelplatz. One peers through the glass into a space below filled with empty bookcases large enough to hold the 20,000 books that the Nazi mob burned in 1933.

Ullman explains that while The Empty Library symbolizes the attempt to destroy the written word and the Hebrew language, Letters of Light symbolizes birth, beginnings and creation. The dimensions of the underground space below the memorial in Berlin are identical to those of the underground space below the Jerusalem sculpture.

I saw The Empty Library when I visited Berlin in 2009, and remember it vividly. Here in Jerusalem, the same artist has fashioned his response to those empty bookshelves. Here in the nation of the People of the Book literature is once again being sanctified.

The National Library represents the very best of the Israeli experiment, this utterly improbable effort to reconstitute a people and a culture in their ancient homeland after centuries of dispersion and near annihilation. The modern State of Israel, founded on the principles of liberal democracy, has fostered an astonishing cultural renaissance for the Jewish people. That renaissance is inextricably entwined with the ongoing bloody and tragic history of this land. So much has been built, and so much has been shattered.

I sat down on a nearby bench on this sunny and pleasant day to collect myself and to gather these thoughts. There is still so much to celebrate, value, and fight for here. For me, in this place that I cherish, grief and love commingle in the crisp January air.

With love,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

I donate all revenues from paid subscriptions to this blog to the Sulha Peace Project

I wrote this essay on February 4, 2025, shortly after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Trump immediately translated his words into action, with clear and frightening parallels to Hitler’s first weeks in power - I wrote about that as well, and invite you to reread my column from February 21, 2025. A year into Trump’s second term, it is clear that he and his administration are doing their utmost to fulfill their authoritarian and fascist aspirations. (If you would like, read this excellent summation by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic from earlier this week.)

Every January in the Jewish liturgical calendar we find ourselves immersed in the Book of Exodus, and the story of Pharaoh’s tyrannical and murderous reign. On the secular calendar, today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations General Assembly to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp in 1945. Following the murders of innocent civilians in recent weeks in Minneapolis by ICE, Trump’s private militia, our nation has reached a shocking but potentially positive inflection point. With these confluences in mind, I thought it worthwhile to reprint my words from a year ago.

Dear Friends,

I recently learned about “Godwin’s Law.” It was created by Mike Godwin, an early internet enthusiast who coined the term in 1990. Godwin was troubled by the way that the rhetoric of online discussions inevitably escalated into extreme language, often culminating in someone comparing their debate opponent to Hitler or the Nazis, no matter what the topic under discussion.

To draw attention to this phenomenon, Godwin formulated it as a “law”, calling it a “pseudo-objective way...to make it funny.” Godwin’s law states: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1.”

Godwin’s Law proved so popular that it in 2012 it was included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

I am very familiar with this phenomenon, and not only from internet debates. In my many years of leading classes and discussions, I learned that I could count on someone making their point (and derailing the discussion) by invoking the incomprehensible evil perpetrated by the Third Reich. As a result, I have always been very cautious when comparing current events to Hitler’s Germany, not wanting to make inflammatory statements that cut off thoughtful analysis.

However, in an interview about a year ago, Mike Godwin made clear that, unfortunately, he finds comparisons between Trump and Hitler’s rhetoric and tactics to be apt and fair. I agree with him. Trump regularly and reliably invokes metaphors and terms that mimic Hitler’s speeches. Godwin suspects that Trump is fully aware that he is parroting Hitler’s greatest hits, and that Trump does so because of the positive response these lines evoke from his followers. I think it is important to view Trump and Hitler’s words side by side, and I have collected some relevant examples below.

While noting the many similarities, it remains crucial that we recognize the differences between Hitler’s Germany of the 1930’s and Trump’s United States today. Germany was in the midst of a crippling economic depression; the U.S. is a wealthy nation with a thriving, though glaringly inequitable, economy. Germany had a scant history as a democracy – the Weimar Republic, which came into being in 1918, was the first time Germany had ever had a constitutional republic. Germany’s national institutions were not strongly established. The United States has been a constitutional democracy for almost 250 years, with strong traditions and institutions. Hitler focused primarily on the Jews as the source of Germany’s (and humanity’s) ills. Trump has chosen to focus on other scapegoats, especially immigrants, people with dark skin, Leftists, and trans people to explain what is “ruining” our country. (The danger to Jews is real and ominous in Trump’s America, but we are not currently in the explicit crosshairs as we were in Hitler’s Reich.)

These important distinctions do not detract from the common strategy of Hitler, Trump and all autocrats: to invoke an idealized past; to identify an “enemy within” that has destroyed that idyllic existence; and to dehumanize, isolate, blame and punish that enemy. In this way the autocrat can consolidate their power base as the “authentic” and deserving people, and can also assume greater and greater powers in order to combat the so-called existential emergency.

In the Jewish liturgical calendar, we are currently reading the Book of Exodus, and so my mind has also been on Pharaoh, the archetypal tyrant of the Bible. I find that the Torah’s descriptions of Pharaoh’s attitude and actions toward the Israelite slaves provides a timeless template of the autocrat’s playbook. So, for good measure I will include some Biblical passages next to some of the contemporary quotes. Here, then, are some samples of Hitler’s and Trump’s words that align with Pharaoh’s attitudes:

THE ENEMY WITHIN

And he said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.” Pharaoh, Exodus 1:9-10

“...[T]hey ought to have recognized that the strength of a nation lies, first of all, not in its arms but in its will, and that before conquering the external enemy the enemy at home would have to be eliminated,” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

“We have the greatest military in the world but you have to know how to use them. It's the enemy from within. All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That's a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Donald Trump, October 11, 2024

“For never in our history have we been conquered by the strength of our outside enemies but only through our own failings and the enemy in our own camp,” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.” Donald Trump, November 11, 2024

SUBHUMAN

So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; they are animals. Before the midwife can come to them, they have given birth.” Exodus 1:18-19

“We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.” Heinrich Himmler (leader of the SS), 1936

“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals’ … Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals when you’re talking about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.’” Donald Trump, April 2, 2024

VERMIN

But the Israelites...multiplied and swarmed, so that the land was filled with them. Exodus 1:7

“Should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” Adolph Hitler, Hitler Speaks, 1939

“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, the Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Donald Trump, November 11, 2023

And here are some comments by Hitler and Trump that rely on race theory, an entirely modern concept that the Bible authors did not contemplate:

“POISONING OUR BLOOD”

“All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done...But all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.” Donald Trump, December 16, 2023

RACIAL PURITY

“In every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

“You’ve got to get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You're gonna lose your culture, you're gonna lose your country.” Donald Trump, September 28, 2024

GENETIC INFERIORITY

“Individual vices always recur in peoples as long as their inner nature, their genetic composition, does not undergo any essential change.” (Hitler address in Dusseldorf, 1932)

“Does anybody believe in genes? you guys believe in genetics? A murderer - I believe this – it’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Donald Trump, October 7, 2024

Finally:

A LEADER CHOSEN BY GOD

“Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.” Donald Trump, November 5, 2024

RETRIBUTION

“The hour of retribution will come!” Adolph Hitler, New Year Proclamation, 1944

“I am your retribution. I am your retribution.” Donald Trump, March 4, 2023

As the above quotations show, Godwin’s Law no longer applies to discussions about Donald Trump’s designs. While many of us, myself included, remain shocked by Trump’s return to power, we must not ignore the evil that now rages in plain sight. With both modern history and the Torah as our guides, we must clearly name this evil, understand it, and resist it. These are dark times, but we are not alone. Many hear the echoes of Hitler’s regime, and are mobilizing to combat our nation’s current slide toward autocracy and fascism.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” We are not living in Nazi Germany, but especially as a Jew, I know I must listen for the dangerous cadences of that history. I know I must stand up for those who are being targeted in our nation, for further persecutions will follow in their wake. In my next post I will compare the Trump administration’s actions in its first weeks in office with the early days of the Hitler regime. The comparisons are urgent, informative and compelling.

As Moses charged the Children of Israel, חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ - Chazak v’amatz – Be strong and of good courage,

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

Dear Friends,

As you will read, my daughter Timna has been deeply engaged with Israel since her teens. She knows the history, speaks Hebrew, and lived and worked in Israel for several years with both Israelis and Palestinians. Our ongoing dialogue about Israel is honest, sometimes contentious, always impassioned and informed. We trust each other. Timna always pushes me, and makes me think and rethink my positions. I admire her writing, her nuanced thinking, and her humility. I invite you to read her current reflections here, or on her own Substack page, where you can engage with her directly and subscribe if you would like.

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

On Jewish Grief After 829 Days - Part One of Forever

Timna Jahoda Kligler, January 13, 2026

I have not been quiet in my life since October 7th, 2023 but I have been quiet online. For almost 17 years, I have been engaged in an ongoing personal and academic research project into Palestinian/Israeli history and Jewish-American personhood. I have thought about it and written about it a lot. This is what I am thinking about right now, two terrible years since October 7^th.

“You don’t know the context” has become a bludgeon that I have been saddened to see Jews heave around in an effort to silence voices (Jewish and goyish alike) they don’t agree with. This is not that. I have no solutions to offer and I don’t pretend that I do. But I believe in learning the mess of history to understand the present. Eventually I’ll edit some of the long and dense academic papers I wrote between 2020 and 2023 but those are coming later.

These are fragments, part one of forever. Trained as I am by the academy, I kept trying to turn it into a cohesive argument, a structured essay that I could present and say: here, now I am being helpful because I have organized this pain into a theory. But it turns out the fragments are the only structure I have.

As to my personal position and experience I will say this:

There is no such thing as neutrality, there is no such thing as objectivity.

Every day I swim in grief.

I stand against genocide. I stand against apartheid. I stand against the Israeli government. I stand for Palestinian sovereignty and liberation. I love my Israeli family and friends. I lived in Israel-Palestine for nearly five years and always politically aligned with the Israeli far left and that is still where I stand.

I rejoice that captives have reunited with their families. I pray that no more parents will bury their children, that no more children will be orphaned, that no more families will die of starvation, that no more farms and olive groves will be bulldozed, that Palestinians will not be brutalized and attacked by settlers and their military escorts. I have no illusions that the violence has ended with the ceasefire.

I’m thinking about Jewish guilt and guilt about Jews and the zeal people have to either say genocide or not say genocide. There is a common reflex to avow that Israel cannot commit genocide because Jews were victims of the Holocaust, that somehow to be both historical victim and contemporary monster cannot coexist in the same body politic. There is also a wish to assuage Western guilt for the Holocaust, a feeling of dark relief that finally Jews are not victims because they are monsters.

This debate exists mostly independently from what is happening in Gaza and I’m not interested in trying to write a polemic laying out why the Israeli state is indeed committing genocide. As far as I’m concerned, the evidence speaks for itself. I’m also not interested in splitting hairs about whether mass state sponsored murder, starvation, and displacement is or is not genocide which I find to be a distressing trend.

This is one of the most destructive, brutal conflicts of the 21^st century. (Haaretz, June 2025). The Israeli state does not represent all Israelis, Hamas does not represent all Palestinians, humanity remains and it is complex and messy and worthwhile. I hold no judgement or blame towards Palestinians who hate Israel. I love and hate and love and mourn the place that was my home. I still call myself an Israeli leftist.

These days, though I check the news obsessively and then cry about it in the car on my way to work, I mostly feel like I don’t even care about politics. I just don’t want anyone else to be killed. Polarization is a buzzword that erases the human cost. So many people—most of them, like me, watching from afar—have decided which category of lives and deaths matter and which ones are of less concern. It is often subtle, few around me loudly called for death, or announced which lives they will not grieve (which is too often covering a whisper of satisfaction).

They may have wanted it for different reasons but everyone wanted a ceasefire, of course.

It is the silence that is more telling. Who deserves tears and who does not. This confuses me and it hurts me. As I wade through grief I simply don’t want any more children to watch their parents die, any more parents to watch their children starve, any more farmers to watch their olive groves bulldozed, any more death to sweep across the land.

Since June I have weathered the deaths of three people and one dog. Each time I was overwhelmed by the ripples that extend outward from the loss and how the reverberations wash out over everyone who cared about the person we lost and how those reverberations wash into me.

Every life is a universe, every death is a whole ocean.

Each time another beloved died, I wept for them and for their family and for me, but I also wept for every life that was stamped out by bullets or starvation or airstrikes or sorrow because each of those deaths also rippled out, stones falling in a lake. There are so many stones that the ripples crash and intersect and meet until this lake is dappled and choppy in a thunderstorm and the stones sink to the bottom, forgotten.

Like all American Jews, I was raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, so much so that I don’t remember ever learning what the Holocaust is. There must have been a first time that I learned about gas chambers and trains and Nazis and the four sisters of my great-grandmother who were killed because they stayed behind in the old country and my 8-year-old grandfather riding the Kindertransport, never to return home. There must have been a first time that I saw images of concentration camps: tattered headscarves and sharp ribs and piles and piles of dead eyes. There must have been a first time my dad explained that my great-grandparents’ brothers and sisters who stayed in the old country were all murdered, the loss and pain passed down to me through the generations, diluted perhaps but potent and acrid. I was an avid young reader with a vested interest in reading any and all books that were hard and serious, there must have been a first entry in the wide tasting menu of Holocaust literature for young readers I waded in.

But as far as I know, I always knew. What I also knew, deep in my stomach, is that to be a Jew is to be a creature of guilt. Embracing guilt, running from guilt, bestowing guilt, fighting guilt. All the things you are grateful for are also things you are guilty of. You feel guilty you survived, you feel guilty you became White, you feel guilty for Israel, you feel guilty other Jews are so annoying, you feel guilty you do not love yourself, you feel guilty you are a bad Jew, you feel guilty you are the wrong kind of Jew, you feel guilty you are too Jewish, you feel guilty for feeling guilty.

Like the majority of millennial American Jews who went to Hebrew school in in the 90s and 2000s, a vast portion of my Jewish education rested on two pillars: the Holocaust and Israel. Not exactly Israel the place, but Israel the Idea. Jewishness and Jewish identity revolved around the necessity and inevitability of Israel. This had a slightly different flavor for me because my family really does live in Israel. My paternal grandfather was born in Jerusalem, I have aunts and uncles and cousins and close family friends and I grew up flying over every few years for weddings and b’nei mitzvahs and my dad’s sabbaticals from his job as a congregational rabbi. Then, when I was 20, I also moved to Israel-Palestine, started dating my neighbor, and stayed for five years. That was 12 years ago.

I went because I was running away from home and from college, but I also went because I felt a kind of unconscious, magnetic responsibility to Israel-Palestine. I have never felt any loyalty to American patriotism or to the concept of America. I love the mountains and streams of the landscape where I was born and I love my family and—I’ll grudgingly admit—I love the English language and American literature but I have no love for the United States. The United States can sadden me and frighten me and disturb me but it can never break my heart. But Israel: I love it dearly, I loved it even as I couldn’t bear it. I loved it even as I lost the treasured Jewish spirituality of my childhood, even as I understood that Israel the Idea from Hebrew school had almost nothing to do with this violent, vibrant, chaotic, desperate Middle Eastern country that is two countries.

To be a young(ish) progressive Jew is to be consumed by Jewish guilt for Israel; guilt that you didn’t look deeper sooner at the twin pillars of your Jewish education; guilt that the Jewish values your parents and grandparents taught you about how every life is a universe, and to always question authority, and to never forget that we are charged with the always-unfinished job to repair a broken earth—guilt that those values are nowhere to be found in the contemporary Zionist project; guilt that you are seeing images from the Holocaust that shaped your worldview and your generational trauma but this time they are saying that these horrors are being done for you. And so in many ways the obvious choice is to be an antizionist because it aligns with your Jewish values, but—much more quietly—perhaps it lets you still be true to your two pillars of American Jewish education because Israel is still at the center of what it means to be Jewish and so is the Holocaust.

Here is my humble proposition. Let guilt be grief. Grief is activism. Guilt is defensive, grief is expansive. Where guilt isolates, grief has the possibility of communal experience. Where guilt freezes in your tracks, grief, through pain and uncertainty, can move and change.