Thank you, Donald! You've quelled all the animosity toward Jews at campus rallies. Because it’s now all directed against you!

A "comprehensive national civic uprising" requires dropping grudges and forming new alliances. Protests opposing the Trump coup, including on campus, are assembling a coalition of strange bedfellows.

On this sad day of Pope Francis’s passing, I begin with the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi, by the Jerusalem Youth Chorus - the words can give us so much strength and purpose during these difficult times, especially when chanted by such a perfect blend of angelic Jerusalem voices.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The Vatican statement following Pope Francis’s meeting with JD Vance:

“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”

See: Pope Francis’ Last Act Was to Give JD Vance a Lesson About Migrants (Daily Beast)

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And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming…

I was rummaging through Twitter so you don’t have to (and why should I call it X simply because some demented Tesla dealer wants me to?) and came across some memes by the group Jewitches. The memes are so on-point that I decided to lead this posting with them. So here they are:

Now I’m about as into witchcraft as Darrin Stephens of “Bewitched” (and I was very disappointed when Dick York was replaced; he was the better Darrin), but I also believe in having the biggest possible big tent.¹

Politics makes strange bedfellows, like a Conservative Jewish rabbi (me) sharing memes from a group of witches.

But we don’t have the luxury of choosing allies right now, and certainly not the luxury of leaving anyone out.

The necessity of a whole-of-society approach was described by David Brooks in his New York Times column this week, and also on PBS. Brooks, who never will be mistaken for Che Guevara, called for “a comprehensive national civic uprising.”

• See David Brooks, What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal (NYT)

He wrote: It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

We’ve seen massive protests in every state and overseas, grassroots all the way, with impressive coordination by 50501. Each rally might have a slightly different focus - and Trump’s first three months n office have given us many grievances to choose from. The Atlantic gave us a nice laundry list of the calamities we’ve had to endure - it’s already longer and more insufferable than Job’s².

We can see the creative, grassroots vibrancy of this movement in the mostly homemade signs displayed.

• See some here (BBC)

• And some more here (Meidas) - And more from Meidas from this week.

• From Newsweek: Photos Show Massive '50501' Anti-Trump Protests Across the Country

• And 47 signs from Reuters (my fave is below)

• And see them also on front pages from Lebanon, New Hampshire and Columbus, Ohio (and I threw in Philly for its headline on Pope Francis).³

  

Thousands are rallying on college greens and city squares in New Haven, Cambridge. Providence, Princeton and New York City, and amazingly, Trump has succeeded in quelling all the animosity toward Jews. What a guy! But that’s because now all the passion is directed against him. Thank you, Donald!

You can pick your favorite Trump-era grievance, whatever motivates you most, and pick one of many hundreds of places to protest over the coming days. The list of locations is staggering. ⁴

And it all matters.

Because everything Trump is doing is aimed at a singular goal: amassing power and dismantling those American democratic institutions that normally check the executive. It’s all or nothing, so we need to come together - all of us, or nothing.

The protests on campuses have taken on a very different tone from what we saw after October 7. There is a different enemy, who is now attempting to destroy America’s institutions of higher learning. The Trump ultimatum with Harvard was so over-the-top that a Harvard administration bent on negotiating its way out of the mess couldn’t even consider that option, and even some from Trump’s crew have since admitted that the extremist letter was never supposed to go out.

That letter, mistaken or not, set off a wave of protests that buoyed Harvard to take a courageous stand and has turned the tide of American protest in a number of ways. For one thing, Israel and Zionism are no longer the focus, and this at a time when an offensive is taking place in Gaza that even Israeli soldiers are protesting.

But now, the fight is against this mortal threat to universities, freedoms, and the rule of law. It’s coming to a head, and grudges be damned. Everything else needs to be set aside for the moment.

An attack on universities by the administration that was aimed at fostering division has instead united those very groups Trump wanted to divide. ⁵

For those who insist on aligning with this corrupt administration on the issue of antisemitism, read this warning from an op-ed in Ha’aretz by Naftali Kaminski:

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became. The Trump Administration is not weaponizing antisemitism to suppress pro-Palestinians on campus, as I had previously thought. They are weaponizing the discomfort experienced by some Jewish students amid mostly peaceful pro-Palestinian protests to suppress academic freedom, freedom of speech and independent research at America's most prestigious institutions. And when they succeed, they will indeed blame us, the Jews. And the horrific truth is: they will have a smoking gun.

I do not agree that what Jewish students felt was mere discomfort. It was often worse. But destroying American democracy is worse than that.

So I’m asking Jews who rightfully have been concerned about antisemitism, to understand that the battle has shifted, and even though some of the accusations made against places like Harvard need to be addressed, they can only be addressed after the greatest challenge to American democracy since the Revolution itself is defeated.

The same goes for those harboring other grievances - however legitimate. Or illegitimate. It’s hard to forget how Jewish feminists were marginalized at women’s protests during the first Trump administration. I hope we are done with such foolishness. There is simply no room for that pettiness now. As my mother used to say, “Things are tough enough.”

Now is the time to come together in support of the institutions that we cherish and the country that was birthed nearly 250 years ago. If we don’t hang together,” as Mr. Kite ‘n Key is quoted as having said (though scholars dispute that Franklin was the one who said it), “surely we’ll hang separately.”

So now is the time for coming together. And with unity comes a newly discovered strength.

As an example, Jewish alumni have rallied in support of their alma maters that have been in the antisemitism crosshairs, including dozens of rabbis and cantors from Brown in a letter I was honored to sign.⁶ We care about antisemitism, but we understand that Jews do not do well in places where the rule of law is disregarded and academia dismantled.

Those who feel that we should focus on one issue more than the rest, be it immigration, justice, academia, the economy, trans rights, abortion - the fact is that, as Brooks states, it is all the same fight. “These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.”

Only an expansive, whole-of-society approach can succeed. There is strength in numbers.

And unity can also help quell fear.

The World is a Narrow Bridge

The model of the Israeli protests against the judicial coup attempted by the government in 2023 is a good one for us. With overwhelming numbers and constant repetition, week after week, and broad grassroots support transcending political differences, the movement was relentless and fearless, and it had the government on the defensive. The photo here from a rally in Tel Aviv contains a sign with a line from a famous saying by the 19th century rabbinic visionary, Nachman of Bratzlav, who said the world is a narrow bridge, a terrifying place, but the heart of the matter is never, ever to succumb to fear. The Hebrew words state it clearly - “no fear.”⁷

The song is known to practically every Israeli.⁸ In fact, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav is one of the most popular people in all of Israel, rather amazing, considering that he died in 1810. All over the country there are signs invoking his name and the place of his burial in a magical incantation designed to bring good luck. The Bratzlaver Hasidim are extremely and increasingly active in outreach, even though they have never found a successor to their original leader, and Nachman’s wisdom has caught on among the general public, because he spoke directly to our own fears.

The image of the narrow bridge actually comes from a much older Jewish source, the 13th or 14th century Jewish philosopher Yedayahu of Beziers, who wrote in his book Behinat Olam, "The Nature of the World":

This world is a deep, broad, angry sea and time is a shaky bridge built over it....no wider than a human being and with no railings. And you must, whether you wish to or not, pass over this bridge daily from the moment you come into the world. When you regard its narrowness and the peril on either side of you... when you stare into the abyss of death upon your left and upon your right, will your heart be steadfast? Will your arms be strong?

What Yedayahu wrote 600 years ago still rings true today. What will we do when we stare into the abyss of hate and fear. Will we be brave or will we shrink away?

The Jewish strategy for survival in such a world is essentially the difference between living in fear and living with fear.

A Milwaukee doctor describes the difference.

Those who live in fear are completely paralyzed by that fear. Those who live in fear have CNN on in the office all day, or the weather channel during a hurricane seventeen hundred miles away.

Those who live with fear find a place for the news somewhere on the periphery of our real world, and we are honest with our children as to the dangers, but that we don’t burden them or ourselves with our anxieties.

We need to learn how to live with fear.

When amulets and the rituals of folk religion don’t calm us, with a touch of witchcraft thrown in for good measure, and when we are having trouble facing the fear alone, there is one other choice.

“V’ha-ikar lo lefachad clal,” has a double meaning. We’ve heard one: “The heart of the matter is not to be afraid at all.” Clal means “at all,” but it also means “everyone together.” Clal Yisrael means “all of Israel.” The Talmud states (Shevuot 39a), “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh ba zeh.” All Israel are responsible for one another.

What is essential, then, is “lo le’fached,” to be unafraid, “Clal,” “by coming together with the community, by being part of the whole, by joining as One.”

If we all come together, in unprecedented numbers and with unlimited frequency, we will be unafraid.

The world is indeed a narrow bridge, and we can only cross it one at a time. In the end, we act on our own, we decide on our own, but we can conquer the fear together.

"Lo lefached!” – Don’t be afraid! “Clal.” “We are all here with you!” All of us are crossing the same narrow bridge.

Pope Francis was never afraid to cross that narrow bridge of fear. Let the memory of his courageous compassion for the weakest in society inspire us.

It’s time to toss aside past differences and fight for a transcending, transcendant purpose.

May we all cross that narrow bridge in safety, as we navigate the path through a dangerous world. May we confidently do whatever it takes to maintain sanity, whether it be an amulet, a letter, a meme, or of all things, prayer. May we maintain our courage and pride, even as we make the necessary compromises and adjustments. And most of all, may we understand that the true source of our strength is in our ability to come together to confront the fear – the fear of fear itself.

Here’s another meme from this week, from Jewitches:

1. If you do a little research, you’ll find folk magic to play a big role in Jewish history, and Judaism has often flirted with paganism, even as it has simultaneously recoiled from it. Interesting topic for another, less existentially challenging day.

2. See America’s Mad King, The Atlantic:

Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions. Some examples:

• The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well.

• Trump’s press secretary said that the tariffs were not a negotiation—until Trump and his secretary of the Treasury said they were. His commerce secretary said there wasn’t any chance that the president would back off from his tariffs—until Trump backed off from his tariffs the following week. Last Friday, the administration announced that it would exempt iPhones, computers, and other electronic devices from the tariffs—and on Sunday, Trump announced that this did not count as a tariff exemption.

• In his mania to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. One wit on social media said, “Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.”)

• Another order by Hegseth led to the removal of Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library but left copies of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, on the bookshelves.

• Hegseth, during a February press conference at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, unilaterally conceded a major Ukrainian negotiating position before anyone had even met with the Russians. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he was “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments, calling them a “rookie mistake.” The Mississippi Republican added that everyone knows that “you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to.” Wicker added, “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”

• In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia’s totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda that “the overwhelming majority” of people in four Ukrainian regions that have been occupied and annexed by Russia want to be absorbed by Russia. (During the interview, Witkoff, a wealthy real-estate developer, struggled to remember the names of those Ukrainian regions.)

• The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat that included senior Trump officials who were coordinating an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

• In its mass firing of federal workers, the Trump administration dismissed—and then had to rehire—people with highly sensitive jobs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal. The people who ordered the firings had failed to grasp the nature of those responsibilities.

• Employees who were working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian-flu outbreak, which is decimating poultry flocks and spreading to humans, were fired. The Department of Agriculture scrambled to reverse the firings.

• The single biggest line item on the DOGE website claimed a savings of $8 billion from one canceled contract. The actual contract was worth $8 million, much of which had already been spent.

• The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism.

• Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated.

• The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting. Progress in cancer therapies such as cell-based immunotherapy is being threatened. Active clinical trials are being disrupted. Decades of research are being undermined.

• Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued some waivers for PEPFAR, but they are a mirage. The waivers have done very little to restore funding or provide distribution of medication. One expert told The Dispatch that aid groups that do qualify for waivers have been unable to draw down funds from the USAID payment system. “A waiver is kind of useless without the ability to have some cash flow,” Chambers Sharpe, who previously worked in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, told The Dispatch. “You can’t ship a waiver to a clinic as an antiretroviral medicine.” There have been massive disruptions in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services. Clinics continue to close, and people are beginning to die at an alarming rate.

• In February, an inspector general wrote that about a half billion dollars in food aid that had already been purchased was at risk of spoilage. That inspector general was fired the next day. In addition, the Trump administration has “dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world’s most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries,” Apoorva Mandavilli reported earlier this month in The New York Times. “Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department.”

• DOGE cut almost $900 million from the Department of Education’s effort to collect national statistics and track the progress of American students, eviscerating one of the genuinely valuable things the federal government has done in the area of education. The cuts threaten to leave us in the dark when it comes to determining school effectiveness, where gaps exist, and what works. Many of the projects being canceled were near completion, making the decision even more mind-bogglingly stupid.

• The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. (Later claims by the White House aide Stephen Miller that the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was lawfully sent to El Salvador were undercut by the facts of the case and court rulings.) The judge presiding over the Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said on Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration. Xinis previously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that portion of her order last week. “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” Xinis said on Tuesday.

• According to their lawyers, some Venezuelan migrants are being falsely accused of gang membership and deported to that same prison in El Salvador based on their tattoos and high-end urban street wear. “In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man’s favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” The New York Times reported. “Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.”

• Yesterday, federal judge James E. Boasberg said that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.

3. Today’s front pages: Lebanon, NH, Columbus, OH and Philadelphia, PA

4. Here are just a few random pages - a small sampling - from the list of protest locations. It’s endless.

5. It’s a mean feat to undo years of delegitimization and hate fueled in part by millions of Qatari dollars and Hamas propaganda. But Trump’s over-the-top attack on free speech and academic independence did just that. No wonder they wanted a take-back

• See: Pro-Palestine protests are generously funded by donors promoting radical Islam studies - analysis (Jerusalem Post)

6. Here is the open letter:

We Jewish clergy, alumni of Brown University, are troubled by the federal government’s threats against Brown which we believe are not rooted in good faith toward the Jewish community. President Trump’s attack on Brown and other universities has nothing whatsoever to do with combatting antisemitism. It weaponizes antisemitism and could, ironically, evoke classical sentiments of resentment toward the Jewish community, whose name is being scapegoated as a conduit for an ulterior motive. That motive is to destroy institutions of higher education and to crush dissent through fear and threat.

We urge Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, and her administration to condemn Trump’s assault in the strongest terms and not to cede any control over academic decisions to his administration. As Brown’s leadership grapples with this evolving situation, we and many other Jewish leaders who are alumni stand in solidarity with those most impacted by these cuts and attacks.

During this season of Passover, we remember the story in the Book of Exodus about the brave midwives Shifra and Puah who defied the command of Pharoah that all Hebrew baby he murdered at birth. Because of their willingness to resist the Pharoah, Moses– and countless others– survived. Our people were redeemed from slavery because of the courage of these women. That story reminds us of the urgency to stand up to the threats that we are now facing.

Rabbi Dr. Howard L. Apothaker
Rabbi Avram Arian ‘71
Rabbi Renee Bauer ‘96
Rabbi Sharon Anisfeld ‘82
Cantor Rebecca Carmi ‘84
Cantor Jack Chomsky ‘77
Rabbi Rose Kowel Durbin ‘02
Rabbi Serena Eisenberg, '87.
Rabbi Sue Fendrick ‘84
Rabbi Laura Geller ‘71
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman ‘78
Rabbi Myriam (Marian) Klotz ‘86
Rabbi Steven A. Lewis ‘86
Rabbi Annie Lewis ‘05
Rabbi Ellen Lewis ‘74
Rabbi Andrea Coustan London ‘86
Rabbi Ari Lucas ‘05
Rabbi Emily Mathis ‘89
Cantor Emily Wigod Pincus ‘88
Rabbi Lex Roferberg '13
Rabbi Sienna Lotenberg '18
Rabbi Laurie Rutenberg ‘75
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg ‘97
Rabbi Dr. Jenny (Sherling) Solomon ‘97
Rabbi Shira Stern ‘78
Rabbi Mia Simring ‘80
Cantor Meridith Stone ‘80
Rabbi Ma’ayan Sands ‘71
Cantor Sarah Sager ‘70
Rabbi Lawrence Silverman ‘65
Cantor Lizzie Shamash ‘91
Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, ’78.
Rabbi David S. Widzer ‘94
Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel ‘74

7. More on Nachman and narrow bridges and fear:

In the original, Rebbe Nachman said, “She’lo yitpached klal”—the Hebrew verb is reflexive, and it literally means, “he shouldn’t make himself fear at all.” A reflexive verb is used when you want to express that you’re doing something to yourself. Not that someone else does it to you, or that you do it to someone else, or that it just happens to you. But that you do it to yourself.

8. Here “Narrow Bridge” is sung on Israeli TV by Dudu Fisher