Yom Kippur is over. Whew! No more Jewish holidays until ……. Friday night, the first night of Sukkot. Back in the day, this meant that it was time to put up our sukkah, but that was back in the day. We still have the raw material in our basement, but the idea of bringing it all upstairs and putting it together now. I don’t think so. After all, yesterday, I changed two light bulbs upstairs. That took me a couple of weeks.

This year, as you might already know, we did the High Holidays from the comfort of our family room, watching Adas Israel streaming on our TV. As I am still coughing, I know that no one would want to see me sitting next to them. And I still just don’t feel myself ready for prime time. Why that is, I am not sure. But it clearly is. I think I am afraid of people (a weird sensation, to be sure).

But let’s move on (the readers say and I agree).

The Yom Kippur services are long. At Adas, they start at about 9 in the morning, and go without a break until almost 3 in the afternoon. Then there is a 2 hour break, and they pick up again and last from 5 to about 7:30. During that break, there is a tradition to have a guest speaker, and the guest speaker is always someone prominent, and often a congregant.

Yesterday’s speaker was Doug Emhoff, Vice President Harris’ husband, the Second Gentleman. So today, I want to give a major shout out to Doug.

I am going to call him Doug, even though I have never met him, as a token of what appears to be his overall down-to-earthness. His wife seems to call him Dougie (that’s pronounced Duggie, I have to say, for those of you who remember Dougie Martin of the St. Louis Hawks, pronounced Doogie).

I think Doug is a charming person. But more than that, I think, as the first man married to a Vice President, and as the first Jewish man in that position, he has so far been an absolute role model, and I hope that the way he has gone about his position will change not only individuals married to Vice Presidents, but individuals married to others with high government positions, as well.

He talked about his background yesterday. Not an unusual one for a 58 year old Jewish man. Born in Brooklyn, moved at an early to Matawan NJ, about 40 miles south. His family belonged to a Reform synagogue, he had a Bar Mitzvah, he attended a Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania, and when he was 16, his family moved to Los Angeles. He went to California State at Northridge for college, and USC for law school. He was, I am sure, a good student, and he was a good athlete. Just an ordinary Jewish American kid.

He was successful in his career as a litigator and entertainment lawyer with two national law firms, he married, had two children, divorced, and five or six years later married Kamala Harris. And one day, his wife received a call from Joe Biden, and everything changed.

Here is where things get even more interesting. He could have kept up his law practice and simply joined thee Washington office of his law firm. We have seen example upon example of politician’s spouses who maintain, and even concentrate more on, their careers, often raising ethical issues as to whether or not they are making money off the position of their spouses, or whether their business interests in fact influence how their spouses handle their public service positions. We don’t have to go so far as to look at someone like Clarence Thomas’ wife to find examples of this.

But Doug didn’t do this. Doug quit his job (sure, there was a financial cost to this, although I am sure that they are not anywhere near financial distress), and decided to devote his time to supporting his wife and her new responsibilities. He made it clear that giving up his law practice, which he loved, was difficult. And he is staying connected with “the law” with a very part time position at the Georgetown Law School as a visiting professor.

He made other things clear, as well. He is not the power behind the throne; he does not tell his wife how to do her job, and there are many things she knows that she does not tell him. He is not her chief of staff. If anything, she is his boss. He goes out of his way to do more “husband stuff” (his words) and to make sure their relationship runs smoothly, so that she can concentrate on her job, and not worry about her house.

Besides this, he has a job, and an office in the West Wing of the White House. I assume it is a volunteer, unpaid job (this did not come up yesterday) and, through it, he is able to attend various functions around the world as his wife’s representative, or the country’s representative (and I am sure he does this well). But more than that, he has become a point person and spokesman for the Biden Administration’s campaign against antisemitism, often working with Deborah Lipstadt (the official U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism) on this essential, but difficult task, which he says keeps him very, very busy.

I think this is quite something for a Vice Presidential spouse, male or female. What, for example, did Lady Pence do during her four years? She wouldn’t even go out of her house, it appears, if there was a possibility that she might wind up in a room with a man other than Mike. What even did Jill Biden do during her years as the wife of a Vice President? A few things, to be sure, but mainly she concentrated on her own academic job. Lynne Cheney wrote books (good ones). Tipper Gore talked about family values (and then got divorced). No one has done what Doug Emhoff is doing.

I am not one to toot someone else’s horn. I am by nature cynical. I am sure there are things about Doug that, if I knew about them, I would temper my praise. But I don’t know about them. And I will stick to what I know.

Doug Emhoff is the model of what a spouse of a high level American politician should be. Period. Full stop.