Art is 80

We start at U Street to continue our walk up 16th Street. The first building we see, on our left, is the Balfour Condominium.

The Balfour was built as a luxury apartment at the northern tip of developed 16th Street in 1900. Originally named something else, the building was renamed the Balfour in 1909. Arthur Balfour had left the British prime minister’s position in 1905. His Balfour Declaration was not issued until 1917, when he was serving as foreign minister.

The building has been renovated several times. When built, it had 36 rental units. Now, as a condo, it has 54. Units seem to sell between $500k and $700k.

Across the street from the Balfour is the Brittany, another rental building turned condominium,  built in 1914.

The Brittany has 57 units. Today, none are for sale.

As we continue up the street, with both townhouses and apartment houses, I saw a building with a flag I couldn’t identify, and no clear markings on the outside. The flag has red, white, blue, and green portions, and a tree in the middle. “What could it be?”, I asked Google and was told it’s the flag of Equatorial Guinea. So the building has been identified

We then cross V Street, and find ourselves in front of another enbassy, this time the embassy of Angola.

Next to this austere brick building is another building, of a very different style, but also owned by the government of Angola.

Looking once again across the street, we see the Camden Roosevelt Apartments, opened in 1920 and named after former President Theodore Roosevelt.

This building, like many, has had its ups and downs. It has been an apartment building, an apartment hotel, a seniors facility and again an apartment building. I believe all of the units are either efficienvies or one bedroom apartments.  They rent for about $2500 to $3000 a month.

Living at Washington House, at the corner of 16th and W Street is a little less expensive. This building, dating from 1941, has 142 relatively small units. It advertises mainly its views and its tight security.

This brings us to the end of a short, two block walk. Next? We start walking up Meridian Hill, and find the right (east) side of the street borders one of the most interesting and beautiful parks in D.C.  That will be Part 8.

I have the next segment of 16th Street ready to go, but before we move ahead there, here is something else to focus on.

My grandson’s fourth birthday party was held yesterday at the Harry Thomas Recreation Center in Washington’s Eckington neighborhood. The park is bounded by the Metropolitan Branch Trail that runs from Silver Spring to Union Station. The trail, at this spot, is separated from, I think, the CSX rail tracks by 30 adjoining decorated panels. Here are some of my favorites:

There are 22 more. And, on a beautiful Sunday morning, the trail and the rec center were very busy.

I really don’t know a lot about Elon Musk. My concern is that he is too rich, too young, too powerful, and apparently absolutely nuts. I find this to be worrisome.

Musk controls at least these companies: X, Space X (which includes Starlink), and Tesla. But here is my question: what role does he actually play in connection with each of these enormous companies? And how essential is he to these businesses?

I think I understand X the best. He bought Twitter, installed his own people, streamlined the operation, and decided that free speech trumps (ha ha) responsible ownership. This means that the company has lost a lot of money, lost a lot of responsible users, gained a large number of irresponsible users, and – perhaps, to a large extent – become more of a danger than it had been when it was Twitter. It also means that, as owner, Musk can change the direction of Twitter at will. He could make it the Newsmax of social media companies if he wants, and ban all but far-right political voices. Yes, he could. How much time does he spend on X? (That is a purposely ambiguous question.)

As to Tesla, I have no idea how much time Musk devotes to Tesla. After an extraordinary increase in production, he now sees production slowed or falling, and is obviously facing competition from other electric vehicle makers (domestic and foreign, especially Chinese) while the interest of American consumers buying electric vehicles has become somewhat shaky. At the same time, Musk seems convinced that electric vehicles are the future (more on this below). I have heard Musk talk about this, and I have heard him talk about his other focus: cars without drivers (his Tesla driverless system nowvunder investigation). But how much does Tesla depend on Musk himself?

I ask a similar question about Space X, and here the question is much more important. Space X, under contract to NASA, is now our only way to reach the International Space Station (other than through Russia). This is important. Space X is also way ahead, I believe, in the development of reusable rockets, and has been very successful as recently as last week on capturing a returning rocket forcreuse.

Through Space X, Musk also controls Starlink, which is a way to communicate through a low orbit satellite network. Starlink, for example, is the way Ukraine’s army communicates, and it does this through Musk’s largesse – he is providing this to Ukraine for a cost of $Zero. And this is not being done with the United States as an intermediary; at least, I don’t think the U.S. is formally involved. What to make of this? If Musk wants to cut off his Ukraine largesse, he could do it. Immediately, if he wanted. Or if Trump asked him to.

Elon Musk “runs” (in various ways) each of these companies, and more that I haven’t listed here (such as The Boring Company – Google it). At Space X, he is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technical Officer. At Tesla, he is chief Executive Officer. At X, he is the Chairman.

This seems like more than enough for one person. Even if he is a technical genius or a business genius.  But he wants more.

Musk has come out strongly for Donald Trump. I could say that this decision alone raises questions about Musk’s sanity, but I will forego that here. But the way he has announced his support for Trump is a different story. He has so far donated at least $75,000,000 (a pittance for Musk, of course). On X, he has not only allowed Trump back on the app (he was banned when it was Twitter), but he has himself not only posted about Trump over and over, but shared hundreds of others’ posts about Trump (many with fake news), while (I have read) having the algorithm altered so that more X users see Musk’s posts. He is currently scheduling a number of events in which he will participate to promote Trump in the last few weeks of the campaign.

In return, Trump has said that, if elected, he will bring Musk into his cabinet and put him in charge of governmental efficiency. If so, I ask, wouldn’t that be a full time job? And does Musk think he can take a cabinet position and at the same time run his various companies? Both with regard to time and energy, and of course, with regard to conflicts.  On second thought, if conflicts don’t bother Trump, why should they bother Musk?

What else does Musk expect to gain? Much more business for Space X, I assume? Taking advantage of Trump cutting business regulations in general? Having an influence in government regulation of social media companies, of course?

And what about Tesla? Trump has been vocal against the future of electric vehicles. Clearly, Musk wants at least to neutralize Trump on electric cars, and wants to encourage Trump to put confiscatory tariffs on foreign made vehicles.

And Trump? If Trump tells Musk to cut off Starlink access to Ukraine to help Putin win the war, for example?

By the way, what do you think they really think about each other? Musk used to say that Trump is too old, and Trump used to call Musk a bullshit artist.

Yuck, I say. And Musk is right about Trump’s age. And – one last big problem – Musk is only 53. He could be active another 30 years.

Cheers.

You wonder why I am mentioning this on October 19, and not on January 2? It’s because I made it on Rosh Hashanah, just two or so weeks ago. I know that most people don’t make new year resolutions on Rosh Hashanah, but I couldn’t come up with a good reason why they don’t, so I decided to start a new trend. We will see if it catches on.

My resolution related to my biggest problem as an American citizen in 2024. It’s perhaps the reason that I don’t understand why Kamala Harris isn’t running away with the election. My problem is that I don’t, and really never have (or at least haven’t since I was, maybe, 17) understood contemporary American culture. I haven’t followed musical trends since high school. When someone talks about going to a “concert”, I automatically think of, say, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And when they tell me that concert was some pop or rock or hip-hop, or rap singer, I can’t figure out why they call that a “concert”. And, truth be told (I think), I have never been to a “concert” that didn’t feature a classical performance.

Similarly, I haven’t watched network TV shows is, I don’t know, forty years? Maybe fifty. So when someone tells me that “everyone loves Raymond”, I have to admit that I don’t, because I have no idea who Raymond is. Someone’s young son? A visitor from outer space? A dog? No clue.

I could go on and on. At times, I have vowed to correct this insufficiency, but have always failed. Then, sometime last year, I thought I might have found a way to do this. I saw that you could get a master’s degree in “popular culture” from Bowling Green State University. Then, I realized that not only would this be impractical, but that I might have to spend a year in Cleveland and even thinking about that brought a black cloud over my head that I knew would not go away until sometime in May. Plus I probably would not be eligible for a full scholarship.

I needed something different. And that’s what led to my Rosh Hashanah resolution.

We are among the few subscribers to the New York Times who still actually receive a printed newspaper every day. (Statistics that I have seen put us in a category comprised of only about 10% of Times subscribers.) Each day there is an Arts section. Yes, perhaps it is New York centered and a bit high-brow, but I can deal with that. And clearly, it’s a start. So my New Year’s Resolution was to read (or at least read through) the Times’ Arts section every day. And so far I have.

Of course, I have discovered (as you might suspect) that I hardly remember anything I read – after all, at 81 and 5/6 it is getting harder and harder to remember names of people, or books, or films and so forth. So I have to live with that, and assume that – as I look every day – things will begin to add up in my mind. We will see.

I find that the articles that mean the most to me, not surprisingly, are those from the classical music critics and, since I always have a phone or computer by my side, I make it a point to sample parts of what I read about. I have discovered already new composers, and recommend you go to YouTube and listen to music by Gabriela Ortiz, Mark Andre, and Osvaldo Golijov. And the articles about ballet, something I have had little contact with, are also interesting, and you can then watch parts of the dance.

As to less highbrow music, often the stories are biographical, which is always interesting. For example, there is a story about Van Halen today and how Alex dealt with the death of his brother Eddie. It was interesting (and probably forgetful), but at least today I know that Van Halen was a family name and the name of a hard metal rock group (I really don’t know what that means) that came to prominence about 40 (is that right?) years ago. And that Alex and Eddie Van Halen were brothers, one sort of the lead singer and the other the bassist and writer (if I have that right).

I will admit that I don’t have enough curiosity to play an Van Halen music (maybe I should drum up my courage), but there are some young musicians that I think are pretty good. What comes to mind is Chappell Roan, a 25 year old fellow Missourian, whom of course I had never heard of, and whose music I find really enjoyable. And, by the way, although she isn’t a singer, I found reading about another almost-Roan, actress Saoirse Ronan, very interesting. What a serious and adaptable actress she is. (And I learned how to pronounce Saoirse.)

I see, today, that Lin-Manuel Miranda and someone I never heard of are putting out a new album (I don’t know what that means today) called “Warriors” that is based (I don’t know how) on a 1979 film (which I have not seen) also called “Warriors”, which was “about a group of gang members fighting their way home from Brooklyn to the Bronx”. The article, which talked extensively about the film, said it was based on the ancient Greek book “Anabasis” by Xenophon. Aha! Now we are getting somewhere close to something I know a little about. And I know that “Anabasis” is a surprisingly enjoyable book about a Greek mercenary army enticed to come to Persia to help fight off the barbarians, only to discover that they were really expected to fight a civil war against the king’s brother, who wanted the throne. At least that’s what I remember. And they refused to get involved, and had to get back to Athens, which took them on adventure after adventure. Just like going from Brooklyn to the Bronx.

So, there is one more thing to add to my routine. I give myself a year to see what it does to me. If I find myself becoming an expert on American popular culture, I just may apply for a position to teach at Bowling Green. As long as I don’t have to move to Cleveland.

I think Part 5 of this series was a bit confusing in that I organized the tour by type of building, not by address. I won’t do that again.

We start today at 16th and Q and walk north.

The Chastleton contains 300 units, opened as a rental, and is now a co-op. It has had several lives, including at times being partially or fully occupied as a hotel, and was almost seized by the federal government during World War II to house female government workers. It was originally opened in 1920, and was most recently renovated in 2007. It appears that recent 1 bedroom unit sales average about $450,000.

Next to the Chastleton is the masonic Scottish Rite Temple.

This building was completed in 1915. If it reminds you of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, don’t be alarmed. That was the model, and the architect was John Russell Pope, who also designed the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Jefferson Memorial and more.

You can go through the Masonic meeting rooms, the library, the archives, the Robert Burns collection, and more with tours given three or four times daily. The building was built on a deep lot going all the way to 15th Street. The back lot is now home to a large, new, attractive apartment development, still in its initial leasing.

We continue walking and pass on our left the Universalist National Memorial Church, built to be the main Universalist church in the country, as I understand it, and now a standard Unitarian Universalist church. It opened in 1930. Its architect also designed the Riverside Church in New York,  although you can’t tell by looking.

Continuing to walk, up from the church, you find elegant townhouses, most of which are now broken into apartment units, some rental and some condo.

There was one for sale sign in front of a very nice building. I looked it up. It was a $400,000, 525 square foot, one bedroom unit.

Continuing, we see high rise buildings interspersed between groups of townhouses, and one small hotel, the Windsor, whose website pictures look a bit austere.

We then see two unusual buildings. One is an art deco apartment house, built rather late for the neighborhood in 1952, and looking out of place, but intriguing. There are only ten units in the building, and they may be the least expensive in the neighborhood. The building is named the Stanford.

Across the street from the Stanford, there is a modest building with an awning with the initials ICUA prominently displayed.

The ICUA is the Interdenominational Church Ushers Association.  Its mission is to provide training for church ushers and networking opportunities, but its website has no upcoming events listed, so whether or not it is functioning, I do not know.

We are now at the intersection where 16th, New Hampshire and U Street meet. U Street is a major commercial street, and this gives us one of the few opportunities to see anything commercial on 16th Street. We look to our left at this corner and see a building housing a Starbucks. We do not go in.

In part 7, we will explore two more blocks. And then, the neighborhood changes.

There are several very important buildings to look at on this two block stretch of 16th.  First, the churches.

Let’s start with the Church of the Holy City (1611 16th). The Church of the Holy City dates from the 1890s, and was built by, and is still owned by, the Swedenborgian Church, something that may surprise you, since nothing on the outside sign identifies it that way. In spite of its long history, the congregation no longer needs a church this size (that may not surprise you), and the building has recently been put up for sale (that may surprise you because there is no “for sale” sign). ln the meantime,  it appears there is little activity in the building itself, and most events, including Sunday services, are virtual. The website points out that Helen Keller, a Swedenborgian, spoke here several times.

The second church is the Foundry Methodist Church (1500 16th).

I have been in this building several times, not to attend services, but to attend small theaters’ performances in the church social hall. The inside is as gray and heavy as the outside, and I always feel that I have stepped back in time a few centuries. The building dates from 1904, the congregation from 1815. The church has hosted many presidents.

There is only one embassy on this stretch of 16th Street, that of the Republic of Congo. (Let’s recall that Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are two separate countries, even though their capitals, Brazzaville and Kinshasa, are directly across the Congo River from each other, and could almost be considered one city).

The Congolese embassy (1720 16th) is in a large house built in 1894 for Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown, the justice who is known for authoring the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal decision, and perhaps not much else. It has housed the Congo for 12 years, and has had other owners before that, including Iran (then known as Persia) and, for a period of six years ending in 1848, the Zionists of America.

I said there is one embassy. Perhaps I should have said there are two. But one is the embassy of a country that does not exist – Kurdistan.

Now to the Carnegie Institute of Washington building (1407 16th).

In 1902, Andrew Carnegie created the Carnegie Institute as a scientific research organization.  He housed its administrative offices this building. Its research facility is located on Broad Branch Road NW, about a half mile from our house, in a park-like setting. I don’t think anyone really has any idea what goes on there.

But the 16th Street building no longer houses the Carnegie offices, I don’t think. The building was sold to Qatar about three years ago, with the expectation that it would become its embassy. The current embassy is on 25th Street NW in DC’s West End, and I don’t know where the move to 16th Street stands. But maybe I should have said there are three embassies.

There is no sign referencing Qatar in front of the building. Around the side on P Street, there is a modest entrance with an even more modest sign that says Embassy of the State of Qatar. If memory serves, a decade or more ago, that side entrance took you into a separate suite, then occupied by Ralph Nader. The building also has a large formal auditorium, seldom used for public events.

There are residential buildings, as well, on these two blocks, including the art deco building, Hightowers, where our cousin Alison lives. She can tell you about the ghost of Hightowers.

Three more buildings, and then we will stop for the day.

This converted residence, complete with an anti-circus circus elephant in front, is the DC headquarters of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), standing at the corner of 16th and Q.

Directly across the street is the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, a building we have been in hundreds of times and where daughter Michelle has for years and years taught pre-schooler music classes.

An entire column could be written about this building, which houses two theaters (this is where the professional Theater J is housed), a gym, a swimming pool, a basketball court, meeting rooms, etc, and from time to time, a restaurant.

The building was opened as the JCC in 1926. When a new JCC was built in Rockville MD, the DCJCC was closed in 1968 and the building sold to the DC government. In 1997, the building was sold back to the Jewish community, totally renovated and reopened once again as a Jewish Community Center. Of course, the Rockville Center is still thriving, and a third active Jewish Community Center is now operating in Fairfax County VA.

The last building is another old red brick house with a sign in front and another around the side.

We will continue our slow walk up 16th Street soon. In the meantime, I should tell you that this is the 700th consecutive day when I have published a post. Perhaps I will break the Cal Ripken record yet.

This one will be a little different, but bear with me. I know you will learn something.

Edie’s first cousin, once removed (the son of her first cousin, Ted), Steven Tepper was inaugurated as the President of Hamilton College about two weeks ago. Before taking on this enormous responsibility, Steven had occupied senior level positions at Princeton, Vanderbilt and Arizona State. We watched the impressive inauguration ceremonies on YouTube last night.

Hamilton is located, as you may know, in upstate New York, in the “village” of Clinton. I was on the campus one time, about twenty five years ago, when Hannah was looking for schools and she and I did a New York/New England trip. I was very impressed with Hamilton then (we had a very good tour leader), and thought that it would be a very good place for Hannah. She, as I recall, had no interest in the place, and the second she stepped on the Sarah Lawrence campus, said “this is where I want to go”. She made a good choice.

I had not focused on the obvious. Hamilton College was named after Alexander Hamilton. It was founded, I learned last night, by a Presbyterian minister named Samuel Kirkland with the active cooperation of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s, and officially chartered in 1812 and named after Hamilton eight years after he was killed by Aaron Burr in 1804. Kirkland also was no longer alive when the school was formally chartered as Hamilton College.

The ceremonies began with a reference to the College being established on the land of the Oneida Indians, and with a further reference to the work that Rev. Kirkland had done with the Oneidas. It was proudly stated that the school was started as a school for both “White” and native boys, and that this was unique and something to be proud of. I was intrigued and decided to look a little further.

Well…….

Samuel Kirkland spent decades among the Oneidas and other Iroquois tribes. But it wasn’t because he loved them; it was because he wanted to civilize them and convert them to Christianity. In this, I believe he was somewhat successful. But he was also a negotiator who convinced the Oneidas to sell their land, or a part of it, to the State of New York, and to the federal government, and in the process he himself wound up to be a landowner. And he started the school (as you would expect in those times) as a Christian seminary, and (as Wikipedia tells it), none of the Oneidas who enrolled in the new school lasted more than a year. None of this was mentioned during the inauguration ceremony.

I am not necessarily being critical of the ceremony planners (I really don’t know enough to be critical), but as I have listened to several classes of the eleven class series involving Yale and its relationship to slaves and slavery by Professor David Blight, and how Yale has had a special project to dig into this touchy question, I wonder whether Hamilton has done the same, and if they will under Steven’s leadership.

Samuel Kirkland died in 1808. He and his wife had six children, only two of whom survived into full adulthood, a son and a daughter. His son, John Thornton Kirkland, became a Unitarian, not a Presbyterian, minister and more importantly became president of Harvard, where he served from 1810 to 1828. He was an important Harvard president, liked by all. Not that I have searched hard, but I haven’t found anyone who had anything to say about Kirkland that wasn’t good, as a teacher, an administrator and a human being. Kirkland House at Harvard, one of the Harvard residential houses, each of which is named after an ex-president, was (I guess, obviously) named after John Kirkland. I lived in Kirkland House for three years (Suite B-22, overlooking Boylston Street), and never once thought to look to find out anything about John Kirkland. I don’t even think I knew President Kirkland had a first name.

Samuel Kirkland’s daughter married a man named Lothrop, and her daughter (Samuel’s granddaughter) confused things completely when she, a Lothrop, married a man named Lathrop, John Hiram Lathrop. John Hiram Lathrop was also a university administrator in the mid-19th century.

Ready for this? Lathrop became the first President of the University of Missouri at Columbia (the first state land grant college west of the Mississippi), and then became the first Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then became (not the first) President of the University of Indiana, following which he became, for the second time, the President of the University of Missouri. Before his administrative career, he had graduated from Yale, taught high school, become a lawyer, become a professor of mathematics, a professor of philosophy, and a professor of English literature. Oh, yes, one more thing. Before he took the Missouri job, his professorial work was at Hamilton.

So, you can’t say you didn’t learn anything today.

As Steven begins his career as the President of Hamilton College, we wish him nothing but the best. I think Hamilton and Steven both made a very good choice, and am sure they will both go from strength to strength.

At Adas Israel, the Conservative congregation we belong to, Yom Kippur is an extravaganza. In fact all holidays are. Located about a mile from our house, just off Connecticut Avenue, the latest statistic that I have seen shows Adas with about 1900 membership units (a membership unit can be a family of 12, or a single individual). On Yom Kippur, for the most part, Adas holds three simultaneous services, a service in the sanctuary (which holds about 900), a more traditional service in a smaller room (which holds about 300), and an outdoors service under a large tent (which, according to one of the rabbis yesterday, has been set up with 2500 chairs). So, all in all, about 4000 people attend Yom Kippur services at Adas Israel.

We spent Friday night and Saturday in the tent. Throughout the day yesterday, the tent was pretty well filled. Yom Kippur at Adas Israel is also an all-day affair. Services begin at 9 a.m. The published schedule showed the services primarily ending with the blowing of the shofar (the only blowing this Yom Kippur, since the shofar is not blown on Shabbat) at 7:18 p.m. In fact, the shofar was blown at 7:18 p.m. Like clockwork.

Over Yom Kippur, we heard two sermons, one by each of the two senior rabbis. I thought they were both good. (I don’t always feel that way, of course). My very short descriptions of the sermons here won’t do them justice, and (in fact) may not even be accurate, but it is what I remember.

Rabbi Holtzblatt’s sermon was on being true to oneself in recognizing who and what you really are, something that she says is often hidden as you put up an identity for the public (and often private) that may not be your true self at all. She hears this as a rabbi when she counsels people and discovers that they may not, deep inside, be anything like what they appear to be. And she talked about herself. Her message was that Adas Israel was a community, and in this community, you should not be afraid to express and be your true self and, as a community member, you should be accepting and encouraging to those who let you in on who they really are. That Adas Israel should, in effect, be a safe space.

Rabbi Alexander’s sermon was on what happens after one’s life ends. No, not heaven and hell, or gehenna or any of those things. Not about resurrection of the dead, either. But about how the presence of people who have passed away continue to permeate one’s life. His prime examples related to his mother, who died eight years ago. When Rabbi Alexander and his brother were playing music together, he felt his mother’s presence. When he met the grandmother of a newborn (the grandmother not a member of the Congregation) and they both learned that she had worked with Rabbi’s Alexander’s mother in Florida for years and that they were very close, he felt his mother’s presence in the conversation. He elaborated from there, and went on to other things, but frankly I don’t remember where he went with the sermon, although I do recall that it was very passionate. Someone will remember this better than I, and tell me what I have already forgotten.

During the quiet time between the end of the morning service (which doesn’t end until close to 2 p.m., and the start of the afternoon service (about 4:30 or 5:00, I think), there is usually a prominent guest who gives an informal presentation. Last year, it was Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, who is a congregant and was back as a congregant this year. This year it was Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father Luis. I didn’t attend the talk (I am not that interested in the Mirandas), but I understand that the tent was packed and it was well received. The Mirandas, of course, are not Jewish, but there has been a fair amount of Jewish connection in their lives. One of the other Adas rabbis, the education director, was a college classmate of Lin-Manuel’s at Wesleyan (I think, Wesleyan) and they sang together in a Jewish acapella group at college. And, it turns out, that he has connections with a number of Adas congregants (who knew?).

Coincidentally, a law school classmate of mine who attends a synagogue in Los Angeles sent around a recording of a guest lecture from his synagogue yesterday, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Booker is someone else who is not Jewish, but who has been surrounded by Jews his entire life, and whatever he says is, in my opinion, always inspiring.

At any rate, it was a very successful day at Adas Israel and, of course, when you attend, you do have a chance to greet and talk with many people you have known forever, but don’t necessarily see that often. And, yes, our daughters, son-in-law and grand children were there for part of the day as well. 9 year old Joan spent most of the time with her friends – neither her parents nor we had any idea where she was much of the time. And 3 year old Izzy got his glo-stick (is that what it is called?) to be able to join his sister and the other young children on the bima during the shofar blowing. Of course, he left the bima before the shofar blowing, heading into the crowd, and giving his sister (who was in charge of him) a panic attack. Naturally, all was well.

A break-fast at our house for our entire family (including those who are not Jewish or were unable to attend services) finished the day with equal success. Only two bagels remained uneaten – I thought that was almost as efficient as holding the 7:18 shofar blowing at 7:18.

As was the case last year, I post on Yom Kippur only to keep the consecutive streat alive. For those who fast today, may your fast be easy.

I have been saying it over and over, and as far as I know, I have been the only one. Until last night. Last night, someone else said what I have been saying. And I must admit he said it better than I did, and certainly said it to more people. The speaker was Barack Obama, talking last night in Pittsburgh. I am not going to get the words exactly as he said it, but basically it was: “Donald Trump boasts of his great economy in the first years of his presidency. He did have a good economy in those years. But the economy that he had was MY ECONOMY!”

Yes, the second Obama term is the basis of the early Trump economy, just as Donald Trump’s governing was the basis of whatever problems the economy had under the early years of Joe Biden. Why, I keep asking, don’t all the Democrats keep saying this?

It reminds me of the other thing the Democrats should be saying, but aren’t. Knowing that Joe Biden’s oft perceived shortcomings (accurate or not) are giving some nominally independent voters a push to vote for Trump, why don’t they push back when the Republicans call the current administration the Harris administration, and not the Biden administration? They hint that a vice president can tell a president what to do, or at least veto a president’s decision that could have been better. Or they hint that Joe Biden, from the day he was inaugurated, has been mentally unable to lead his administration and that he, internally and somewhat secretly, told Kamala to take charge. But the Democrats do not push back on this, either.

Just yesterday, Tim Walz had to take back his very reasonable opinion that the Electoral College should be abolished because it is not “the opinion of the campaign”.

For a minute, I want to get back to Liz Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, which I finished and really appreciate. I wrote a few days ago about her discussion of the events of January 6 and their buildup, and how I felt every Republican voter and independent voter in the country should be given a copy of at least that part of the book to read. The remainder of the book was about the reaction of members of the House and Senate after January 6 (and particularly the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the Republicans, and about the House investigatory committee on which she and Adam Kitzinger were the only Republican members.

After doing its preliminary work, the committee held seven public sessions, as you may remember. One interesting point she made is how the focus of the sessions were established, how each was made to focus on one topic and each differed from the one before. What I did not know and now do, if I read everything (somewhat quickly, I admit) accurately, is that Liz Cheney and her husband Paul Powell, both lawyers, developed the outline of the seven sessions, which the committee adopted.

And, while the first part of the book made Trump and his GOP crew appear dangerous, this second part added to the first and made them appear downright villainous. Because now, in addition to the events as they appeared leading up to and on January 6, we had sworn testimony of many involved on the inside.

An abbreviated description of the seven sessions:

1. How Trump tried to persuade the public that the election had been stolen and that he was still the president.
2. How Trump tried to persuade state officials to “flip official certified electoral votes to Trump”.
3. How Trump created fraudulent elector slates
4. How Trump tried to politicize the Department of Justice to force states to flip votes or certify votes of fake electors.
5. How all of this was done to permit Vice President Pence to count the false Trump electors, rather than the official Biden electors, on January 6.
6. How Trump promoted a massive turnout of his supporters in Washington on January 6 to further apply pressure on Pence.
7. How, when it became clear that Pence was not going to cooperate, Trump instructed his supporters to break into the Capitol, disrupt the proceedings and stop the count, keeping quiet even after the invasion of the Capitol when he was begged to call his rioters off and to tell them to go home.

Obama, in his typically excellent speech in Pittsburgh last night, said that he understood that there were a lot of people in the country who are hurting, and would like to see some change in the direction of the country, in the hope that the change would help them overcome their current problems. But, he said, that he could not understand how anyone can think that Donald Trump is the vehicle that could bring about that type of change.

Clearly, anyone who has the opportunity to, and who takes the time to, read Liz Cheney’s book would agree with him.

Today, the DC public schools have a parent conference day, so there is no school, and we have the grandchildren. This means that I have less free time than usual to write a post.

So what could be interesting and quick? Let’s try this….

Of my 700+ Penguin paperbacks, only a small number are of primarily Jewish interest. I have read these six. Each is of interest.

The Allegro book is a classic, Parkes was a philo-Jewish English writer, and the Epstein book is a really good one volume synopsis of Jewish history.

Now, to grandchildren…….

Three year old Izzy is interested in baseball. Here is what he brought out.

Between weather and holidays, there has been a gap since the first three 16th Street posts, on September 23, 25, and 27. We had started at the White House, and moved first through Lafayette Square,  and four blocks up 16th Street to Scott Circle. In those short four blocks, we saw four or five hotels, three small museums, the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, the NEA, and the American Chemical Society, the home of the Russian ambassador, two churches and more.

Now, we continue up the next two “only in Washington” blocks. We can’t look at everything, but we can see and learn a lot.

For example, there are four embassies on these two blocks, our first of many. Right on Scott Circle, we see the new Australian embassy, first occupied about three years ago. I find it quite undistinguished on the exterior, but the interior tells another story.

Then, we see the Serbian embassy, located in a 110 year old commercial building, bought by Serbia only two years ago.

Up the street from Serbia, we run into Kazakhstan’s embassy, in an 1888 house which had been home to a Vice-President, a Senator, and a publisher, among others. In front of the embassy, you see a replica of the Golden Warrior Monument, the larger original of which stands in Republic Square, Almaty. Its story is interesting. You may want to look it up. Or not.

The fourth embassy is that of the El Salvador. It is different from most because it is not located in its own building, but is in rented space in a new office building located at 1400 16th Street NW.

This building houses more than this embassy. Among its many tenants are CTIA (the powerful, if little known, trade and lobbying association for the wireless communications industry), the Washington affairs office of the University of Notre Dame, and the Avesta Ketamine Clinic, among other tenants. The ketamine clinic interests me most. I really only know about ketamine through Matthew Perry’s tragic death, but  apparently, it can be quite useful in treating depression and anxiety if controlled. This clinic seems to know what it is doing.

Of course, we don’t want to forget the churches. There are two on these two blocks. The First Baptist Church is located just up from the Australian embassy. The building was completed in 1955 on the site of the congregation’s 1890 church structure. The previous church was apparently architecturally important, with a 140 foot high tower, and controversial when proposed for demolition. But even this building was not the congregation’s original. Established way back in 1802, First Baptist has had several locations, including one on 13th Street which it sold to one John Ford, who converted it into Ford’s Theater.

One trivia point about First Baptist, and one question. Trivia: during the two years that the present building was under construction, the church conducted services a few blocks up the street at the Jewish Community Center (we aren’t there yet). The question: what 100 year old former U.S. President worshipped at First Baptist?

The other church is the Founding Church of Scientology of D.C. its building is unchurchlike and I don’t know if there are other tenants as well. It was originally built as an apartment house, with one luxurious apartment on each floor. But that was long ago. It has been many things since. Just have not checked today’s uses out.

Ine final point for the day. There is a nice upscale hotel, with a very appealing restaurant and outdoor cafe, on 16th Street at Scott Circle, just across from the Australian embassy. I did not get a good photo.

It is the Banneker Hotel, named after the same Benjamin Banneker that DC named its academic magnet high school after. The hotel is called the Banneker, because he was the surveyor who first laid out 16th Street moving north from the then proposed  White House in the late 18th century. And 16th Street was laid out as a meridian. I don’t really understand what that means, but we will learn more when we get further up 16th Street to Meridian Hill Park.

Moving on to my next scheduled activity. Will proofread later. But I did try to be careful.

I have an important suggestion to make. Read on …….

Last night, I read the first third (100+ pages) of Liz Cheney’s recently released memoir, Oath and Honor. I call it a memoir, and in a way it is, but this book does not tell you the story of Liz Cheney’s life. In fact, so far (and I would guess this is true for the rest of the book, as well) I have learned virtually nothing about Cheney, except that she has a strong moral compass and the strength and willingness to act in accordance with it. There is nothing in this book about growing up in Wyoming (after being born in Wisconsin, as I heard her say last week), about being the daughter of a vice-president, of marriage and children, running for Congress, or any other such thing. There is also nothing in this book whatsoever about policy.

This book is about honesty, and loyalty to the concept of the United States as a country of laws, under a constitution. It is not about which laws are good laws, or about whether the Constitution is perfect or flawed. She is not arguing for any sort of revolution. She is arguing against all revolutionary concepts that require the breaching of that Constitution. I don’t think this is a conservative trait. It’s a moral stance.

Following a prologue, the book is divided into five parts. I have read the first two, titled “The Plot Against America” (homage to Philip Roth?) and “The Attack”. Still to be read are “A Plague of Cowardice”, “No Half Measures” and “The Relentless March of Evidence”. This book is about Donald Trump and his attempt to remain the President, irrespective of the results of the 2020 election, his failure to succeed and the impeachment that followed.

I read the first two sections of the book with my mouth open. It didn’t even occur to me to close it. The story Cheney tells is (a) very readable and intelligible, (b) remarkably concise, and (c) puts all those things that you have heard a thousand times and have become numb to in once place, so you can see them as a whole, and shudder at their implications.

The book, so far, is not only damning of Trump, and of some of his White House staffers. It is damning of his personal attorneys, from Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and John Eastman on down. And it is particularly damning of virtually all Republican members of the House and Senate of whom she speaks. So far the only House exceptions seem to be Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger and Texas’ Chip Roy. On the Senate side, so far (I expect this might change), Mitch McConnell is given, I would say, a grade of C-/D+, much higher than the grades she would give to most of her Republican colleagues.

The problem, as I glean from her writing, is simple. Trump, to stay in office, was making outrageous claims, even after 60 judges had rules against them. And, she says, most (virtually all?) of her colleagues either knew that his claims were bogus the day he made them, or that they had been unanimously show to be wrong by the courts and that once the legal challenges had been played out, they should be dropped. Yet, she said, virtually every Republican, irrespective of what they thought or even of what they were willing to say to her privately, publicly continued to give Trump’s false claims support and credence. This, she found surprising, disappointing and outrageous.

While she paints with a broad brush, she does single out three of her fellow members of Congress as being perhaps a step worse than the others. One is Kevin McCarthy, who she describes (my words) as a liar, a hypocrite, and as someone who knows right from wrong, but is too much afraid to act upon what he knows. The second is Mike Johnson, now the Speaker of the House, and the third is Jim Jordan, whom she seems to believe is completely worthless. Perhaps I should add Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom she paints (my words, again), as a clown.

I am looking forward to the remaining three parts of the book, to be sure. But having said that, the first two parts, one of which deals with the planned and executed attacks against the November 4 voting and the naming of alternative electors and presenting them for approval, and the other of which deals with what happened on January 6, both the rioting, and the actions of House members to certify, or fail to certify, the electoral college votes that had been presented to the House by the various states. And it should be remembered that 139 Republicans, and a half dozen or so Senators, voted against the certification of the constitutionally valid electors.

So, and although this is at the end of my post, this is what is important, and I am going to write part of it in capital letters because of its importance, just to make sure you look at it.

I understand that Cheney must have had a number of reasons to write this memoir. One is to preserve what she experienced for history, another is to get it off her chest, perhaps a third is to extract a little revenge against the villains of the piece, and fourth is to make some money. Whatever the reasons, the publication of the book took guts, just as her actions supporting the investigation and then impeachment of the President took guts.

But I think the first two parts of this book are so important that, money and copyright and all those good things have to be sublimated to making the text available to everyone. And, in this day and age, when you don’t have to pay to bind and distribute hard copies of material, when you can just push a button and circulate material to millions of people, I think that is what should be done now.

I THINK THAT THIS MATERIAL SHOULD BE CIRCULATED TO EVERYONE ON ANY LIST OF REPUBLICAN DONORS, OFFICIALS, AND PROSPECTIVE VOTERS, YOUNG AND OLD, THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY. AND I GUESS TO DEMOCRATS AND INDEPENDENTS, TOO, TO ENCOURAGE THEM TO COME OUT AND VOTE.

Of course, most won’t read it (even if it comes with an introductory paragraph or two showing why they should read it), but we don’t need big numbers. If 5% of those who receive a link to this by email read it and if it changes the vote of even a portion of those people, it could sway the election. And if it circulated widely, its circulation will be reported widely, and it will become news in itself, perhaps leading others to give it a look.

Now – how do we go about this? We don’t have a lot of time.

I must have pushed the wrong button. The photos did not get published. Here they are, if you are interested.

Many (read: most) of you know that one of our activities (not quite a business, not quite a hobby) is selling used books on line. We sell about 250 a year, averaging about $30 a book (except for those which sell for many times that). We pay an average of $4 or $5 for each book, and we have about 7,000 on line for sale. We are very lazy about this non-business/non-hobby. We have our inventory listed in one place only, and we sure don’t try to promote. Maybe someday all that will change.

The books are all second hand. The majority are signed or inscribed by the author. Many relate to politics. Many relate to Jewish subjects. The others relate to about everything you can imagine. We have learned that the signed books that sell, sell because it is hard to find signed copies. In other words, although many people would like to own a book signed by Tom Clancy, there are so many available that someone is bound to undercut your price and the chance that someone would select the copy you have as opposed to copies held by 50 or more other booksellers is not very likely. On the other hand, if you have one of the only copies of a book signed Author ben Author, even if the demand is not very wide spread, it is more likely that yours will be acquired.

How do I price the books? Not very scientifically, I am afraid. I go to the Abebooks website (www.abebooks.com) and look to see how others have priced the book, comparing condition, edition and so forth. It gets tough when you can’t find out how others have valued the same book, or when there is something that makes your books stand out from others that are being sold.

Let’s take some examples. Nathan Glazer was an American sociologist who passed away at 95 in 2019. He taught at U Cal Berkeley and at Harvard. His best known book, among many, was Beyond the Melting Pot: the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, which was published in 1963. There are two signed copies of this book for sale on Abebooks, one offered at $350 and one at $950. Sure, these prices seem high, but it seems that Nathan Glazer did not autograph many books over his long career.

Nathan Glazer had friends named Joe and Millie. That’s all I know about them, except they were friends over many years, and Glazer inscribed at least four books to them over those years. The books are Beyond the Melting Pot, Remembering the Answers: Essays on the American Student Revolt, Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964-1982, and The Limits of Social Policy.

Either Joe and Millie, or their children, decided it was time to depart with their books, and they were donated to the Montgomery County library, and put up for sale at $5 for three of the books and $10 for the Melting Pot. (Remember, we are not “profiting” by the sale of the books, which go into an account for grandchildren education)

When I said that Glazer didn’t appear to sign books, I meant it. The two Melting Pots on sale are the only ones listed on the website. So the question is: how should I price these books? The answer is: I have no idea. So, they will just sit here a while longer.

A few other examples. I have a copy of a book titled Years of Content, 1858-1886, written by Sir George Leveson Gower, K.B.E., and published in London in 1940. I know you have never heard of Gower. Gower was born in 1858, and at the age of 22 became the private secretary to British prime minister William Gladstone, a job which he held until 1885, ending when the period covered by this book ended. He later entered Parliament as a Liberal, ending his career as Commissioner of Woods and Forests (I don’t know what that entailed, but I bet it was fun).

This book is not signed by Gower, but that is okay, because accompanying it is a six page letter written by Gower (I have not had the energy to read the entire thing) in 1940 to his friend “Florence”. (I assume Florence was a friend; maybe a relative.) And I have a copy of another, somewhat shorter letter, written to Florence by Cicely Gower, his wife, in 1951, shortly after Gower died, giving Florence the news.

I don’t know if Gower himself was “important” as far as British history goes, but the fact that he spent five years as Gladstone’s secretary is quite important, and it is this period that the book discusses. And clearly these letters, being originals and one of a kind, add to value to historians and perhaps others. There are only three copies of this book available on the Abebooks site, and one of them is signed. You can have it sent from England for about $45. But how do I price the book with these letters included?

Do you know Benedict Sarnov? He was a very prominent Soviet (and later Russian) literary critic and intellectual who died in 2014. I have a copy of his books Perestante Udivliatcia (yes, it’s in Russian), which he inscribed and signed (also in Russian). The title means something like “Don’t be Surprised” and the subtitle is “unpublished history”. Nobody has anything signed by Benedict Sarnov for sale. And not that many Americans read Russian. How do you price something like this?

One more example (out of hundreds). Speaking of the High Holy Days, I have the first volume of a Machzor (the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), covering the first of the two holidays. Hard copy. Very nice condition. I don’t have a date. It was published in Warsaw. The editor was named A. Kahan and the publisher G. Piment. It contains not only the full liturgy, but much commentary, with each level of commentary written in a different font.

There are many liturgical books from pre-war Poland available, so most are not priced too high. And while there are experts on pre-war Jewish books, I am not one of them. I would guess that this book was published between 1920 and 1938, but I can’t get more specific than that. I have no idea how to price it, even if I wanted to sell it.

Let’s see if I can do this quickly. Before I have to leave for a memorial service for a friend who passed away last year. Actually, last night I put together a post about certain of the books we have in the house, but I am going to let that go for another day.

This morning, I am concerned about a few things. Okay, about a lot of things. Prime Minister Netanyahu, according to CNN, gave a speech saying “Israel faces war on 7 fronts”, and it seemed to me that he said it with a degree of pride. War against “Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, West Bank terrrorists, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria”.

As I have recently said, it is getting harder for me to judge Israel’s actions, because I just don’t know what is right anymore. Yes, this may be the “time” to try to change the paradigm once and for all. Tomorrow may be too late. And, yes, maybe a war on seven fronts is just one war, not seven and if you don’t do it all at once, it is bound to fail. And perhaps doing it now and doing it all at once is so essential that the extraordinary collateral damages that results from the military action (death, injury, property disruption, economic dislocation, etc.) is a cost that must be paid and, if that cost is not paid today, it will be paid with even greater numbers tomorrow.

But can Israel do this alone? Can it do it with help from the United States, but not elsewhere? At what point does Israel run out of bombs, or drones, or ammunition, or even personnel? At one point does the war(s) come back so strongly to Israel that Tel Aviv’s high rise luxury office and residences wind up like the Twin Towers?

And what is the plan after the war is over? Are there back room conversations that we just don’t know anything about? Are the moderate Arab states, the members of the EU, the United States, involved in coming up with plans for modifications of foreign policies for Israel’s neighbors, and the rebuilding of their countries? Or are there not?

The threat to Israel is enormous, of course, and Netanyahu’s policies real show what happens when you have a gambler in charge. This is an enormous gamble.

And – yes, it may be secondary, but it is real nonetheless – what is its effect here in the United States? How does it affect antisemitism? How does it affect American Arabs? How does it affect the teachings at American universities? And how does it affect politics.

The Trump side, so far, has it pretty simple. They support Israel. Period. Full stop.

The Harris side, not so simple. Harris has so much to worry about. First, can she take a position that is different from Biden? Second, how can she keep the overwhelming majority of the Jewish vote? Third, how can she keep the majority of the Arab vote, so important in Michigan and, I think, in Pennsylvania as well. What should she say? What should she not say?

Let me segue a bit here. The problem Harris has is not limited to the Middle East. She has to become Mike Pence, and not remain Hubert Humphrey? Know what I mean? The Democrats celebrate Vice President Mike Pence, who broke with Donald Trump to certify the 2020 presidential election. They mourn the fact that Vice President Hubert Humphrey did not win the 1968 election, but lost to Richard Nixon, in large part because Humphrey did not separate his position on the Vietnam War from that of President Lyndon Johnson’s.

Harris has to separate herself from Joe Biden, and state her own positions, whatever they may be, clearly, even when they differ from her current boss. That reminds me of another question. Are Marcus Johnson and I the only Americans who understand that a Vice President has limited power?

In his comments after the Walz/Vance debate, university student Johnson made it clear that the vice president’s job is to do what the president asks them to do, not to set their own policies or priorities. This should be obvious. But the Trump/Vance campaign wants us to overlook this distinction. They want us to assume that the current administration is as much Harris’ as it is Biden’s. In fact, because they want us to think that Biden is non compos mentis, they portray the Biden administration as the Harris administration or at best the Harris/Biden administration.

Okay, that may be good politics on their side. But why didn’t Walz, for example, counter this in the debate by saying: “Hey, this isn’t the Harris administration you are talking about. This is the Biden administration. Was the 2016-2020 administration the Pence administration?” But he didn’t, and the campaign doesn’t. They let the current administration be named the Harris administration without complaint, falling into the hands of Trump, just to be loyal to the president. Big mistake.

I gotta go. I wanted to say something about Elon (“I am dark MAGA”) Musk. What happens when a billionaire who is more than a billionaire, but someone whose business are are REALLY IMPORTANT, goes completely nuts. But no time now. No time to proofread. Happy Sunday.

We watched the first five episodes of “Nobody Wants This” last night. There are ten altogether, so one more night should do it. Don’t congratulate us for watching 5 episodes; they are each only about 25 minutes long.

You may have read about the show. Adam Brody is a rabbi and, by the way, is Jewish. He has to be Jewish – for one thing, he’s a rabbi (one day, there will be gentile rabbis, I am sure, but not yet – as far as I know). For another, his mother is Tovah Feldshuh. She could not have gentile kids if she tried (and who knows? perhaps she has tried).

He falls in love with Kristen Bell. Now, I don’t know Kristen Bell (never met her), and I don’t know Adam Brody (never met him), but they make a cute couple, so I wish them luck. The problem is that Kristen Bell is not only not Jewish (this gives Tovah Feldshuh enormous problems, as you might imagine), but she is a sex podcaster. What is a sex podcaster, you ask? A sex podcaster is a podcast host who talks about her personal sexual and dating experiences (the worse, the better for the podcast) and interviews experts in the subject. Kristen’s character’s name, by the way, is Joanne, but Kristen fits a sex podcaster better, I think, so I will stick with it. Adam’s character’s name is Noah. I see little difference between those two names.

Adam is the associate rabbi at Temple Chai. It is somewhere in southern California. The senior rabbi, of course, is Rabbi Cohen. Adam is in line for a promotion (if we know what that promotion is, I missed it, and he didn’t tell that to Kristen, who found it out by accident and didn’t seem to care one way or another). But, truth be known, at 44, Adam is a bit old to be an associate rabbi under Rabbi Cohen. Although his congregation seems to like him, he seems to lack ambition. Kristen at 41 is a bit old to be a sex podcaster, too, but they both looks ten years younger than they really are, so we can get beyond this.

In case you are wondering, it seems that Adam is concerned that his congregation might not accept a rabbi with a shiksa girlfriend, much less wife. He knows that his mother Tovah won’t and he knows that his father will never say anything to make it seem that he has an independent mind. If you are married to Tovah, you tow the line. Clearly.

But Adam promises he will never hide Kristen and he spends half of the first five episodes hiding her in plain sight. At his temple, at the Jewish camp where he gives a class, in a very public restaurant with the Grand Poobah of the podcast world. You get the picture.

Oh, yes. Adam has a brother. Now they are nothing like each other, so one of them must be adopted. I vote for the older brother. His name is Sasha since Tovah and Adam’s dad are Soviet refugees. He is the “loser sibling”, and Kristen has a “loser sibling”, too, who shares her podcasts. The difference is that Sasha is really a loser and whats-her-name (she made a great impression on me) is not. But that’s a detail. Don’t worry about it.

And, oh, yes, there is another complication. For three years, Adam has been with Esther, who is as Jewish as Kristen is not, but he breaks up with her, shocking the entire Jewish world. Especially shocking Esther, her parents (also Sovietniks) and his parents and, probably, even Rabbi Cohen (although he doesn’t show it).

It’s a cute show (with some of the situations purely ridiculous, like when Adam brings Kristen to the camp in Ojai and then tries to hide her in their cabin, but has to deal with her escape and her joining a candle making class and confiding in a bunch of 13 year old girls), and we will watch the other five episodes, I am (somewhat) certain.

Rabbis with unusual girl friends must be the thing in show biz, these days. You might (I know you don’t, but you might) remember the film we saw live at the JCC several months ago, called “The Two Temples”. That was another rabbi, also an overage associate rabbi, but a guy with some emotional issues, who worked at a different temple in a different time zone, and who fell in love with his old music teacher from high school. I don’t remember the names exactly, but she was something like Mrs. O’Connell, and after some emotional get-togethers, she decided she wanted to have a bat mitzvah.

He, too, was supposed to marry a Jewish girl, the daughter of the senior rabbi, who had been living in “the city”, but was willing to return to this upstate town to be a rebbetzin, and they had a ten minute affair, but his heart was with O’Connell (probably 20 years older than he), and everyone – including of course his parents (not from the USSR) – were shocked.

Then, it turned out that O’Connell was her married name and she was really Susie Schwartz (or some such thing) and that might have helped for twenty minutes of the film or so, until it turned out that her father might have been Sidney Schwartz, but her mother had been Angelina Santa Maria, or some such thing, and everything was off.

While “Nobody Wants This” has ten episodes, and makes you make a minyan of choices, “The Two Temples” hit you all at once as a 90 minute film. Which is better is hard to say.

For centuries or millennia, perhaps, rabbis have had to marry Jews. But inspired by media such as this (or perhaps the other way round), in June of this year the Reform Movement announced that it is acceptable for rabbis to be “in relationships” with non-Jews. So, when I say that one day there will be gentile rabbis, who can say I am wrong?

This is part of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy (and the Leonard Cohen songbook), and it is true, of course. We know nothing about the future.

I was listening to a podcast the other day (just a part of it, although I would like to finish it). Anne Applebaum was interviewing Yuval Harari, the Hebrew University professor who seems to have invented himself as an expert on virtually everything and, although I am suspicious of people who are treated with such great respect, including Harari, I did think he had some useful things to say. The podcast was filmed about two weeks ago.

Don’t take what I say as literally what Harari said (after all, it has been about three days since I listened to it), but basically he said that we have been living through extraordinary times, we of the “west”. Things have by and large been peaceful, and things have by and large been prosperous. And to think that this will continue this way throughout the measurable future is probably pie in the sky (not his term).

There are some things that seem certain from a study of human history, and one of those is that things change, that good times do not last. And he thinks that one of the reasons that the current “good times” won’t last is that we think that they will probably go on forever.

He talks about time he recently spent in Toronto, which he describes (not his words) as perhaps the most successful city in the most successful country of recent times. What interested him (at least for the purpose of this interview) was not so much the success of Toronto per se, but the fact that everyone who lives there just takes Toronto’s success for granted. Like it was always this way and always will be. To him (and I think he said it; if not, he could have), this may be a recipe for future unrest and disaster. And Canada is at this time having its share of internal disputes, and concerns about its short term future direction, as I understand it.

In addition to talking about how change (and negative change) is inevitable, Harari talks about how it can come about. Sure, it can come about slowly, and you can be the toad in the pot with the water slowly coming to a boil, so slowly that at first you don’t notice it. But change can also come with remarkable abruptness. Can take you by surprise and totally upend your life.

This session was obviously before Hurricane Helene tore the idyllic community of Asheville to pieces, but after – say – so much of Ukraine, or Gaza were hit with unscheduled (and to an extent unmerciful) warfare. Or even when Springfield Ohio was so strongly affected by allegations that Haitians were eating their neighbors pets. Who expected that to happen? For Springfield schools to have to close, for death threats to come in from all quarters to many segments of society? And who expected, 30 or so days before our presidential election, for all the east and southern coast longshoremen to go on strike, threatening both supply chain shortages and more price increases? And, for that matter, who expected that strike to end two days after it began?

Yes, the Unetannah Tokef prayer of Rosh Hashana (“who shall live and who shall die?”) makes it appear that all of this is in God’s hands. I must admit to not understanding the entire prayer. Things are in God’s hands, but yet humans can repent and do good deeds and that will help, even if it doesn’t change things, etc., etc. I see the spiritual strength of the prayer (just like Leonard Cohen obviously did), but I don’t see it as anything more. Other than, perhaps, that as bad things happen to you, it can give you some perspective that you might otherwise not have and, with this additional perspective, allow you to accept what happens with more equanimity than would otherwise be the case. And that is something.

But it does ignore one important thing: change can also be the result of human action. If I kill you, you die. Presumably, nothing to do with a God.

They say it was Heraclitus (yes, I looked it up) who said that the only constant in life is change. And those of us who do not like change that much have to get used to the idea.

Which takes me back to Yuval Harari and the attitude he found in Toronto about taking current peace and prosperity for granted. And that, of course, takes me to how easy it is to think that, no matter how much mischief you may seek to bring about, the world around you really won’t change that much. And that brings me to Donald Trump and to today’s Republican Party, which believes that the circulation of lies and untruths for the benefit of exalting your own position is simply a game you can play, with the hope that you will be the winner, and that the negative effects on the greater world will be minimal.

If those with influence continue to believe that their actions do not have the ability to bring about not only change, but sudden change, and destroy what we have been so lucky to experience, Yuval Harari will be proven correct. And, although I don’t accept him as a source of knowledge on all subjects, on this one, he will be proven to be spot-on.

Spoiler alert. This will be depressing. I suggest you don’t read it and come back tomorrow.

Today is the first day of Rosh Hashanah,  and this post will be shorter than usual. There is a lot going on in the world, and I feel much more like observing Yom Kippur than celebrating Rosh Hashanah. I have a lot on my mind,  services seem remote and limited in importance, and do I really need another sermon.

The situation in Israel and the Middle East  is so fragile, and it is getting harder and harder to tell Israel to restrain itself. Its power seems strong at the beginning of 5758. It may be less strong in the future, and this may really be the time for a “let’s end this once and for all” solution.

Here, we face a very dangerous election in just over a month. It may be hard for those of us with common sense to understand it, but the majority of electoral votes could easily bring Trump back into power. That could cause untold harm to pregnant women, lead to deportation disruption throughout the country, see Ukraine defeated, and Europe placed in very volatile circumstances  and see the United States in trade wars around the world and facing new inflation pressures. Natural disasters are increasing in severity, large due to climate change, and a new administration may accelerate climate change. We don’t need any of that, but American voters are both so easily misled and so lazy. And faced with potential economic problems as a result of the potential bombing of Iranian oil facilities and potential supply disruptions caused by the dockworker strike, I am afraid that the Trump vote might grow.

None of these worries should be on one’s mind as we enter a new year. We should look forward to only good things and be thankful for what we have. And we have so much. We have lived through rare times.

No God will straighten all of this out. It is up to us. And we may not be up to it.

Van Jones, J.D. Vance and I are all graduates of the Yale Law School. Jones was one of the pundits on CNN last night after the Walz-Vance debate. He commented on Vance’s performance in the debate, basically saying that Vance did a great job as a debater, if you assume that it makes no difference whether you are giving factual or misleading answers. Okay. I think that is right. But then Jones went on, and said that he and Vance were trained at Yale to debate just the way Vance debated.

Say, what? Now, I went to Yale about 25 years before Jones, and Jones went to Yale about 15 years before Vance. Different teachers, and different teaching, I am sure. But when I went to Yale Law, I don’t remember any training whatsoever on how to debate. In fact, the training that I received was virtually all academic training. You know, a course on torts, a course on contracts, and so forth. I did participate in one appellate moot court (I actually reached the finals), and one mock trial. But both of those exercises, as I remember, were voluntary, not required.

Now, every lawyer is bound to defend his/her client. I did that through my career. But I never stood up in any trial or administrative proceeding and lied. I never presented false facts, or – as far as I know – facts so far out of context that they were misleading.

I have said this before about the first time I was ever in an actual court room. It was when I was doing post-graduate work at Washington University. I was already a member of the Missouri bar, and one of its requirements (I think it was a state requirement; maybe a St. Louis bar requirement) was that a new lawyer had to participate as a co-counsel in a criminal proceeding. The reason that this requirement existed is that there was a practice, in the 1960s and in St. Louis or the entire state, that lawyers could be called upon, I think once a year, to represent an indigent criminal defendant.

I was working with an experienced lawyer. A government lawyer was prosecuting. The defendant was a young man accused of going to a high school dance while armed with a rifle. In fact, he had hidden under his overcoat part of a rifle. He came with a friend who hid the other half under his own overcoat. The friend had the barrel and trigger mechanism. Our client had the stock. Our client did not have a firing weapon; his friend did. Our client could only have hurt someone with the stock if he bopped him on his head. The facts were clear. There was no argument as to the facts. The question was: under Missouri law, was carrying the stock of a rifle considered carrying a weapon (or whatever the precise term used in the law was). There was no precedent in Missouri on this question. There were precedents in some other states. I had done a fair amount of research on the precise facts and the applicable law.

I was sitting at the counsel table, when the prosecutor was presenting his case. He cited something from Corpus Juris Secundum , a multi-volume compilation of legal principles, that I had just read a day or two before, during my preparation.

The prosecutor quoted CJS with great confidence. Like he had found the key to why this defendant should be found guilty. But I immediately realized that he had left something out. The citation he read had an introductory clause that he had left out. The sentence started with the words: “The minority opinion is……”

Our client was found not-guilty.

In quoting CJS, there was nothing in the confident tone of the prosecutor to let you know he was trying to trick the court. He sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about.

Why did I think of him while I was watching J.D. Vance yesterday? It should be clear. We saw a very smooth J.D. Vance telling things that were wrong, misleading, needed context, and exaggerated.

If you look at the media fact checking today in the New York Times, Washington Post and the various TV networks, you will see how much of Vance’s performance fit into these various dangerous categories. Of course, most people watching the debate are not fact checkers, and do not look at the fact checkers after the debate, dismissing them (if they pay any attention at all) as biased.

So, back to my take on the debate, for a minute. J.D. Vance was smooth, confident, and deceptive. He did not look “weird” and, with one major exception (having to do with whether Trump lost the 2020 election), Walz did not effectively call him out for his misstatements.

Most pundits seem to feel that, if anyone won the debate, it was Vance. For sure, his debating skill is stronger than Walz’s. But that’s only if you ignore facts, and you can’t blame that on Yale Law School.

It was, by and large, a very civil debate, and this is something that is probably welcome by many voters. But you can remain civil in a debate while, at the same time, calling out your opponents effectively when they veer away from the truth. This is something that Tim Walz was not able to do.

Let’s see how much sense this makes to you.

I was listening to a Haberman Institute program yesterday. The presenter was the Haberman Executive Director Matt Silverman, and he gave a class centered on different approaches taken to matters of Jewish rabbinic law by varying individuals, including Jesus, during the latter Second Temple days.

Part of his discussion involved strictness and leniency in breaking the laws of the Sabbath. As you probably know, today traditional Judaism prohibits working on the Sabbath and has a complex set of standards as to what constitutes work and what does not. To someone who is not familiar with these varying rules, some may seem counterintuitive.

But throughout history, they have been most often taken quite seriously. I was listening to a lecture yesterday on the history of the Jews in Ukraine, giving by Fairfield University Professor Glenn Dynner, and he showed an old drawing of a Jew who was imprisoned by a chain around his neck, and connected to a building (presumably a synagogue) as punishment for violating the Sabbath. Dynner said that, in most instances, payment of a fine could forestall physical punishment, however, but that the failure to submit to one or the other could lead (but perhaps never did) to excommunication and banishment from the community.

But there were exceptions. There were certain times when you could violate the limitations of Sabbath activity without punishment. The most common of these situations was when you act to save a life. Saving a life is more important that avoiding “work” on the Sabbath.

During the time of Jesus, there were disagreements as to what types of activities would be allowed to save a life. Jesus was the most liberal of the cited sources. (This is opposed to, say, the rules on divorce, where Jesus was the least liberal.) Today, many of these disagreements are avoided in Jewish practice, because, after all, there have been 2000 years to work these details out.

Everything I have seen on this subject focuses on what types of actions are appropriate in saving a life, and I think the years have expanded permitted activity. Nothing I have seen has focused on how you know that a life needs to be saved. It seems (and since I really have never looked closely into the subject) that determination of whether action is needed to save a life is left in the hand of the actor.

So I began thinking about the states which have enacted (or will enact) strict laws prohibiting abortions, except in those instances where the life of the woman carrying the fetus is at risk. These laws have already ended in tragedy a number of times, and are causing tremendous anxiety, turmoil and confusion. They are worrying not only the pregnant woman (and her loved ones), but the doctors and health professionals, who might get in legal or financial trouble performing an abortion if they wind up being accused of performing an illegal abortion. The result is that doctors might wait until death is imminent, and then it turns out to be too late.

Maybe the thinking is wrong, and (if these terrible laws have to exist), the focus should not be on whether the medical professional wrongly guessed that the woman was in danger of death. Maybe that should be considered a professional judgement to be viewed with as much leniency as possible, and the focus should be on whether the actions taken were themselves medically appropriate actions (a type of judgement made in every malpractice case).

By the way, in Jewish law regarding abortion, this question also exists, although in a more liberal context. In Jewish law, the life and health of the mother outweighs that of the fetus, so a professional never has to get to the question of whether the patient is going to die. But, nevertheless, someone has to be the final judge as to whether the mother’s health is at risk, and here again the Jewish tradition, as far as I know, lets the health provider make that decision.

After running all this through my mind yesterday, I was innocently sitting watching CNN, when once again someone mentioned Haitians eating cats and dogs and defending J.D. Vance’s comments. And the conversation went on to show the total disruption being caused to the city of Springfield OH as a result of this beyond silly accusation. Death threats, schools closed, fear of some native Haitians to even leave their houses.

Then it occurred to me. This is exactly analogous to ritual murder accusations made against Jews throughout the ages. The oft recurrent claim is that Jews kidnap and kill Christian babies in order to use their blood in the making of matzohs for Passover. Of course this has never been an ingredient of a single matzoh, but that hasn’t stopped the accusations at the time of rampant antisemitism, and hasn’t stopped many people from believing them, or at least giving them some credence. (Google the Beilis case if you want a good example.)

The thinking here is just the same. Jews kill Christian children. Haitians kill their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Kamala Harris caused inflation and designed and implemented an open border policy. It used to be, as Hitler supposedly said, if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it. That was obviously true. But today, maybe things have changed. You don’t have to tell a lie often; you only have to tell it once. As long as the lie reaches the ears of gullible people (you know who they are), those people will believe it the first time they encounter it.

And there seems to be no cure, even when the life of a nation or a planet is threatened.

The New York Times yesterday reported the death of Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, who died at age 103. I didn’t recognize his name at all, but it turns out he was a native of Senegal, who became the first African director of a United Nations agency, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in 1974, 50 years ago.

I read that in the first few paragraphs of his obituary, but the obituary took up a full half of a page. So there must be more to it than that. And there was.

I am not going to repeat everything in the Times (you can read that yourself if you want), but will focus on part of his legacy that is quite controversial.

From the article: “Criticism of Mr. M’Bow centered on his promotion of what came to be known as a “new world information order”, a vague body of recommendations that many in the West regarded as a threat to freedom of the press…..an international “code of conduct” for journalists; proposed that they carry identification cards, which governments could withhold if they were dissatisfied with the news coverage; and backed ‘the notion that governments have the right to control information for their own ends’.”

This sounds like (and probably is) a wholesale attack on free press, right? M’Bow would respond to that, I think, by saying that there is really no such thing as a free press. Or to put it differently, someone will always decide what is news, and how the days events should be portrayed. That “someone” can be the journalist (or the boss of the journalist), or it can be the government. The government is responsible for order in the community, for establishing the direction of the community. The journalist is responsible for nothing, other than satisfying their boss, or maximizing their profit. Why should the unelected journalist, lacking any official responsibility, make the determinations as to what constitutes news?

I am extrapolating a bit here – the article does not state that M’Bou actually said all of this in this manner. But this does express his thinking. And he came upon this as an African leader during, or just after, the end of European colonization of much of the continent. And he did a lot of complaining about the nature of the news coverage of emerging independent Africa. He declared that the news that was selected to be published was being selected not by Africans, but by what he called people from the North, who had their own agendas, and whose agendas were much different from the agendas of Africans, themselves.

Okay, you can argue with this, of course. And you may be correct. But it does raise a perspective that is not normally raised by the journalism I see.

My assumption here is that he is not necessarily talking about what you see in opinion pieces, whether opinion pieces by established journalists, or op-ed pieces or letters to the editor by others. I assume he is talking about what purports to be straight news, the kind of straight news that purports to be factual and unbiased. And about which news articles are published or aired, and which are not.

Let’s for a minute compare, say, MSNBC and Newsmax. You know, tuning in, that these two networks have very different political biases, and you expect this to be obvious from what the commenters say. But, beyond what you see on the air, there is what you do not see – what subject matters a network chooses not to cover. For example, as we are in the middle of an election campaign, one network can choose to cover the policy statements of one candidate and cover the verbal gaffes of the other candidate, even if they give them equal time. Or, to put things more in M’Bou’s thinking, there may be very important things going on in Senegal, but American TV networks may not even mention Senegal. In each case, someone will make that decision.

There are plenty of countries that don’t have a free press. Russia today certainly does not. Nor does China. Neither country will permit journalists to say things against their national interest. Russians don’t come close to getting unbiased articles about the “military action” in Ukraine. The Chinese don’t hear what is going on with the Uyghurs.

On the other hand, in countries where there is a free press, like the United States or, say, Israel, you have other problems. You still have subject matter ignored, but you also have articles that are meant to be provocative. You have journalists who stand in the tradition of investigative journalists, who like to prod, to uncover secrets, to find weaknesses in those who appear strong, and so forth.

In the countries with controlled journalism, you can have a controlled society – for better or for worse. In countries with free journalism, you can have a chaotic society – for better or for worse.
I am not arguing for a controlled press. But I think we should be cognizant of the risks and dangers of an unregulated press. They are real, as well.

Let’s go back to M’Bou for a minute. As a leader of an emerging society, the one thing you want to avoid is social chaos. If you are part of a group not just governing a nation as a temporary shepherd, but creating a nation out of a subservient colonial society, chaos can be fatal. So you don’t want investigative journalists running around uncovering all of your skeletons and encouraging your political opponents. This is true for journalists who are citizens of your aspiring country, or journalists who are reporting on your activities for foreign interests. Particularly, where those foreign interests may serve your former colonial overlords, or serve those outsiders with deep commercial interests in your country.

Free press may only work in democracies. And may only work in stable democracies. We have a greater challenge today than before. With the easy ability to spread falsehoods, and with the ease with which false news seems to be believed by so many, will we one day find out that a free press endangers the stability of our democracy and no longer works? And if we do (understanding the constitutional ramifications), how will we react?

Yes, a free press can certainly help in overturning dangerous or harmful governmental policies, or even dangerous or harmful governments. But today, a free press can also help destroy governments which are neither overly dangerous or harmful. This is a conundrum, to be sure. This is also a topic about which I knew nothing – has anyone come up with the best path to follow in the year 2024?