the jewish task in an age of trump

For a long time, my favorite line from the liturgy has been a reference to God as every day renewing the work of Creation. There was a hopeful to it, a promise that nothing had to be simply because it had always been but that each day we had a chance to start again.

What is only now becoming clear to me is what that actually meant, that nothing exists on momentum alone. Even the most basic civic commitment, even the most rudimentary ethical standard, even the most elementary consensus as to standards of rational discourse, all of these have been shown to be if not illusory at least astonishingly fragile. Rather than taken for granted, they must be rebuilt every day, tended and protected.

This rebuilding, this regular maintenance of the fundamental pillars of a just, kind, and healthy world is both an urgent need, and the responsibility of everyone who wants to live in such a world. And that suggests that a Judaism worth engaging in must be actively participating in this work.

I’ll put it this way:  Everything we have seen about the president-elect, from his early career to the beginning of his candidacy to his first acts following the election suggest that a his election and the forces his election have unleashed pose an existential threat to the American experiment and to global society. Any institution that pretends moral authority, that claims to present eternal truths, that presents itself as important, must be engaged in fighting this threat. The only question for Jewish institutions is to determine what our role in this struggle will be.

At the very least, those of us involved in Jewish education can resolve that our greatest role is to nurture wise, kind, and caring students, students who will use what tools we can give them to help build, every day, those pillars of society we took for granted for too long. Students who will be call us to be their partners, every day, in renewing the work of Creation.