I wrote this last night. A more professional or thoughtful writer might have erased it and started over this morning. Not me.

I am just sitting here on a Wednesday night thumbing through today’s newspapers with the television on across the room, not clear that any thing I see, hear, or read makes any real sense. Look at what I mean.

We all know that Kash Patel, who should never have been named head of the FBI, went to Italy over the weekend to see the U.S. – Canada Olympics final hockey game. We know he went on the FBI’s jet. The New York Times tells us that he is the FBI director is not allowed to fly commercially because he needs to be in contact through a secure communications system at all times. Why this is necessary, I don’t know – after all, there are deputies and others at the FBI who could man the ship for a while, as they would if the director, say, got sick.

Digression. In Letters From Groucho, Groucho Marx wrote Joe Dimaggio balling him out for going out to eat wearing a normal business suit. What would you have done, asked Groucho, if a ball game had broken out?

Yes, some people are indespensible.

End of digression.

Patel has been director of the FBI for under a year, but has taken at least the following taxpayer-paid trips, none of which are cheap:

1. His trip to Milan for the hockey game.
2. A trip to play golf in Scotland with a bunch of his Navy buddies
3. A trip to see his girlfriend perform in State College, PA
4. A trip to a Texas hunting lodge

In each case, he has said that his trips were really for important meetings, and that the frivolity was just coincidental. And if you believe that….

Next, on CNN, I was listening to the story about Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales, who had an affair with one of his staffers (married, with children), at least partially the result of a boss pressuring an underling. Heis being pressured to resign. He is not going to resign, he says, and he is running for reelection, with an endorsement from President Trump. Will this hold?

By the way, Gonzales, who is 45 years old, also has a wife. And he has 6 children. And, I haven’t yet mentioned it, but you probably know this. The woman with whom he had the affair committed suicide by setting herself on fire! Can this just be ignored?

And then what about Trump and Epstein? I think we know that, even with all of the material that the DOJ has released, and with all over the over redactions and the under redactions (all in favor of the men involved), the DOJ has not released everything. Maybe not even mostly everything. And now we have a prime example. It turns out there was a woman who claims that, when she was underage, Epstein introduced her to Trump. What happened after that, I don’t know. But this survivor told her story, and was apparently interviewed by the FBI several times. Nothing concerning her is among the papers being reduced, but there are documents relating her story that clearly must exist. Unless they have been somehow erased.

And what about our Peace President, whose Board of Peace, is beginning with the reconstruction of Gaza and in theory going on from there to pacify the rest of the world? While managing his Board of Peace, and while claiming to have ended eight wars, he has assembled half of the U.S. military’s attack forces (outside of ground forces) near the Iranian coast, with promises to attack the country again and again if they don’t do his bidding. He sees no conflict between war mongering towards Iran and maintaining he is the Peace President. And I guess he doesn’t think we should see a difference either.

And finally tonight, I heard that Trump is taking credit for the death of cartel king El Mencho over the weekend. I guess this is because the U.S. provided some intelligence to Mexico. Well, my question is: if Trump is the force behind the capture and murder of El Mencho, isn’t he also the force behind the 60+ people who were killed in the riots and attacks in Mexico over the weekend? Or is this just like the 100+ who have been killed in Venezuelan and Colombian fishing/drug boats? As to these folks, his response seems to be “who cares about them, anyway?”

Switching gears, this evening there was a Haberman Institute program (you can see it on YouTube or on the Haberman website, habermaninstitute.org) featured Rabbi Daniel Zemel, recently retired from over 30 (or is it over 40?) years at Temple Micah in DC, and now co-chair of Truah, a rabbinic civil rights group. The topic was the relationship between Judaism and civil rights, both historic and today. I thought Zemel summed it up pretty well in discussing the moral failures of today. They stem, he thought, from failure of people to recognize all people as equal, with the same rights as others, irrespective of skin color, nationality, religion, or personal ancestry. Okay, that is simple enough. But he thought we were at a crisis today, both in American and Israel, where a strong form of nationalism is taking over, and people of other nationalities, religions, or cultures are less valued. People, he said no longer seem to believe that you can be both a nationalist and a universalist, that you have to be one or another. He said, and I agree, that should not be any reason one cannot be both. I would add that finding the proper balance might not always be obvious, but that this is part of the challenge of being both, and it is a challenge we should take up.

Zemel quoted his grandfather, who was also a rabbi, who said that the problem was ……… well, I don’t really remember what he said his grandfather said, but it again led to that illusive balance. We should not be so nice that we put ourselves at risk, nor so mean that we don’t take into consideration the rights of others.  Something like that.

Sort of like what I quoted a day or two ago about Ukraine – too weak to win the war, too strong to lose it.

This also relates to the discussion of yin and yang, as described last Shabbat by Micah Goodman at Adas Israel. But how it relates to yin and yang, I don’t really remember.

You can see that I have a lot of things in my mind. Maybe it isn’t worth the effort to cram them in if all they do is jingle around in there.