We live in times that have so far eclipsed “interesting” as to make a mockery of that very concept. We in America are divided in ways that seem to harken back, somehow, to the moment of our greatest fracture, the Civil War. But then we had Lincoln, we had a leader who mattered, whose existence nurtured this world with something better, something noble, even. I don’t know what Congress was like then, but ours now is feckless and harmful in ways too numerous to count. We have no Lincoln among us. And none on the horizon. And if we did, too many of us would tune him out, turning instead to curated listening lists of podcasters, hucksters, haters, and other assorted dregs on the internet, telling us what we want to hear, rather than what we might actually need to know.

Why am I going on about Lincoln? In a world that seems to be teetering, with worthy leadership lacking on every continent of this struggling world of ours, I landed on him in a grab for some nostalgic notion of what could be. Which is kind of crazy, given how gruesome the Civil War was, and how cruelly Lincoln’s life ended.  But maybe looking back is the only way–at least for me–to continue to try to move forward. Because this moment, the one we are dragging, cursing, alienating, horrifying, and disappointing our way through, is not one providing much positive inspiration.

There is rage in abundance, on Right and Left. There is lying, deceiving, scapegoating and worse, on both sides. I am profoundly UNinterested in who is more to blame. Score-keeping of that sort is a special form of narcissism that solves nothing, helps no one, and adds to the general idiocy of our times.

I live in America. We have Trump. Enough said. But my purest, most unadulterated rage is felt toward a leader whose country I don’t live in, but whose people are where my soul resides. America is where my father, Z”L, landed after ten years in a German DP camp outside Munich. It was not a chosen place. It was an available one. I don’t know what my father’s deepest feelings were about America; I never asked. But my father was a wise critic of a bruised and unwise nation, and he died twenty years ago, before we became dumber, crueler, and more battered. He understood America better than America understood itself. But our national arrogance would never have admitted his incisive critique.

I hope we wake from our national nightmare in America wiser, more thoughtful, able to solve real problems with a seriousness of purpose that has been lacking for far, far too long. But I’m not terribly hopeful. I am more deflated and resigned.  Neither is good for civic purpose. I stopped being angry because I started before Trump was elected in 2016, and I just got tired. The rise of a heinous, vicious, Jew-hating Left has further alienated me from and in my own country.

My alienation inside America is compounded by my bone-deep rage at American Jewish “leaders” who at every turn made the wrong choices about Israel. Again, re-winding the clock, I knew when Bibi came to Congress and chastised Obama that he’d driven a gigantic nail into the coffin of American Israeli allyship. And he just kept going, with the enthusiastic endorsement of too many in the upper echelons of American Jewish life, and with the silence of too many others.

Fast-forward to recent years, pre- and post-October 7th, and Bibi’s endless attacks on Israel’s democracy, its rule of law, its judicial system, its military leaders, and most shameless and disgusting of all–his attacks on his own citizens–who had the audacity to march and shout, and protest over and over again to protect Israel from Bibi’s staggering onslaughts against it. And in America, crickets. The big shots at their big shot organizations and synagogues in the American Jewish world failed to stand up for the people fighting FOR democracy in Israel. They stood by a Prime Minister who should have been persona non grata in every salon, synagogue, board room, etc. in the American Jewish world. He should have been a pariah. And after October 7th, with his blame-shifting, despicable attacks on hostage families, and other assorted offensive actions and statements, he should have been roundly condemned. Not quietly. But openly, loudly, and with the conviction that doing so was the only way to show actual love toward Israel and its citizens.

Bibi has been wrong about everything. Full stop. And he has lied with confidence about everything else. The harm he has caused in Israel, the nation he has traumatized, the sons and daughters who have died fighting and been slaughtered due to his duplicity, sears the soul. And in America? Still mostly crickets. I am a committed Jew. I am a Zionist. I have never in my life and hope never to be again as furious as I am about the failures in my community. The rabbis who stood for privilege, access, and a false sense of solidarity. The other community “leaders” who can find their voices on so many issues but were rendered mute when shouting to the heavens mattered most. I have stepped back from synagogue life because I just can’t go there–literally and figuratively. I could not bear the routine prayers for the hostages from the bimah in our synagogue, coupled with the silence about the man who claimed he bought peace on the border, but as always, let others pay for his stupidity and arrogance with their precious lives.

I am lost in a community whose values confuse and confound me. I don’t understand the choices, the silence, the “pro-Israel” stance that continues to embrace the destroyers from within. I don’t understand the hypocrisy, the cowardice, the unwillingness to do the right thing when the right thing is screaming, pleading, begging for support. And I hope I never will.

I was in a WhatsApp group of women from a post-October 7th volunteer trip I took to Israel. They were discussing who is planning to participate in this year’s Israel parade in NYC. Several women mentioned a group they’d signed on with. And I left the group, silently. Because to march with representatives of a government that is destroying a nation I love, the heart of my Judaism, is to commit a kind of idolatrous act, one that legitimizes evil with flag waving and banners. It insults those who have suffered, struggled, and died for a nation that now treats them as expendable, that dishonors them with its every utterance and policy. Standing up for any of that, marching proudly with it, is a kind of ethical contortion that should be anathema to everyone in the American Jewish community. Alas…

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)