The Future Is Spiritual

I remember my rabbi, Ron Aigen, of blessed memory, once asking our congregation: what is spirituality? Is it God? Is it ritual? Is it tradition? Is it sacred texts? Is it a belief in certain precepts?

His answer was that it is all of these things—but something more basic. He said the essence of spirituality can be summed up in one word: connection.

Most people today don’t necessarily identify with a particular religious tradition, or even with God. And yet many still insist they are spiritual. What do they mean?

They mean that they feel a sense of connection—to the world, to other living things, to something larger than themselves. They feel part of a whole, and that feeling carries a kind of timelessness.

For most of human history, that sense of connection was expressed through religion. Religion, at its core, is a framework—a language developed to give form to the ineffable.

Some argue that religion is a path to absolute truth, and that some traditions are therefore more “correct” than others. But that strikes me as misguided. It’s like arguing that jazz is superior to reggae. These claims often reveal less about truth than about identity—tribal, cultural, ethnocentric.

All music expresses a shared range of human emotions. And all religious traditions, at their base, attempt to grapple with the same fundamental mysteries of existence.

Which brings us to a strange and telling moment: the recent circulation of an AI-generated image depicting a prominent political figure as Jesus the healer—and the backlash that followed.

The reaction was striking not because outrage is rare, but because of what triggered it. In a time saturated with provocation, vulgarity, and spectacle, something about this crossed a line—even for those otherwise tolerant of excess.

Why?

Because it touched something that still feels sacred.

Not necessarily in a strictly religious sense, but in a deeper one. It wasn’t just offensive; it felt like a violation—a boundary crossed. An unsettling fusion of ego, technology, and symbolism.

But more than that, it revealed something political.

It showed how far the logic of power has drifted into the realm of the sacred.

When a political figure is rendered as a divine healer—especially through the tools of mass digital reproduction—it is not simply satire or flattery. It is part of a broader pattern: the personalization of power, the elevation of leaders beyond institutions, and the slow erosion of the boundary between authority and reverence.

This is not new. Politics has always borrowed from religion—rituals, symbols, mythologies. But liberal democracies, at least in theory, drew a line. Leaders were meant to be temporary, accountable, replaceable. Not objects of devotion.

That line is blurring.

In an age of social media and algorithmic amplification, politics is no longer mediated primarily through institutions, but through personalities. Authority is no longer grounded in process, but in attention. Legitimacy is no longer earned through governance alone, but through spectacle.

In that environment, the transformation of a leader into a quasi-religious figure is not an accident—it is a feature.

And the public reaction—the discomfort, the backlash—suggests that people instinctively recognize the danger, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

Because when the sacred is co-opted by power, connection is replaced by submission.

And that anxiety is not emerging in a vacuum.

We are living through the aftermath of decades defined by material aspiration—by faith in endless growth, rising affluence, and personal advancement. The promise was that prosperity would deliver stability, and stability would sustain democratic norms.

But the 21st century has disrupted that faith.

The 2008 financial crisis exposed how unevenly prosperity was distributed. The pandemic revealed how fragile our systems were—and how much more vulnerable the poor were than the rich. Institutions many trusted were not simply imperfect; they were structurally tilted.

Disillusionment followed. And into that vacuum stepped a different kind of politics—less institutional, more personal; less procedural, more emotional; less about policy, more about identity and belonging.

In other words: politics began to take on the role that religion once played.

It offered meaning. It offered community. It offered a sense of participation in something larger than oneself.

But without the humility that traditionally accompanied the sacred.

At the same time, technology has transformed our sense of connection. What was once abstract is now immediate. We are linked constantly, instantly.

Now that the novelty has faded, we are beginning to ask: what does connection actually mean? Is it the frictionless consumption of content? The performance of identity? The surrender of attention to systems designed to predict and influence us?

Or is it something closer to what my rabbi described—a felt sense of belonging within a larger whole?

There are signs that a shift may be underway.

Younger generations, materially less secure than their predecessors, are not anchoring their identities in possessions as we did, but in a shared sense of vulnerability and fragility.

They are more attuned to interdependence—social, economic, environmental. But they are also navigating a world in which connection is constantly mediated, curated, and commodified.

So the tension remains.

But moments like the backlash to that image suggest something important: the capacity to recognize the sacred—however we define it—has not disappeared. It has been suppressed, distorted, redirected—but not erased.

I think about the contrast across generations. My grandfather and father were preoccupied with building stability—with putting down roots, with financial success. I was raised in material comfort, but with a sense of spiritual absence.

My children will not inherit the same material certainty. But they seem to carry something else more intuitively: a sense that they are part of something larger—and that this connection is not optional, but essential.

They understand something we are only beginning to relearn:

If the future is to be democratic, it cannot rely on material promises alone.

It must also restore a sense of the sacred—not in our leaders, but in our relationships to one another.

Joe

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My turtle is a lonely fellow,

Green with spots of red and yellow,

He moves like me, deliberate and slow,

His temperament is shy and mellow.

Thirty years I’ve watched him swim to and fro,

Seen his carapace shed many times and regrow,

Cleaned the filter so the tank water flows,

Constant as a stream he might otherwise know.

Basking on his rock in the artificial glow,

He’s too lost in thought to even nod hello,

As if he’s got some special place he has to go,

Other than this algae-coated rock, the only one he’ll ever know.

There’s so much he’ll never know:

The sound of trees when the winds blow,

The smell of wildflowers, the call of the crow,

How it feels to brumate under ice and snow.

Without exaggeration his life is shallow,

Boring as a cancelled TV show,

By the way, I call my turtle Joe,

Just one more thing he doesn’t know.

The Best Case Scenario

Putting on my political analyst’s hat again. Here’s what I’m thinking might happen.

Trump’s and Netanyahu’s boneheaded war has shown Iran that it has a nuclear option they can actually use effectively without much cost: Closure of the Straight of Hormuz.

That’s a good thing. 

Because now they don’t actually need to pursue a real nuclear weapon, which was Israel’s greatest concern. 

So Iran agrees to give up on their nuclear ambitions for some extended period of time, say twenty years (longer than Obama’s deal), and in return the US allows Iran to collect a toll from passing ships for as long as it takes them to cover reparations for the war damage that was inflicted on them.

Other issues that I cannot see being resolved in any case would be Iran’s missile capabilities or funding of proxies. Giving up the means of self defense, which is the right of every sovereign nation, is a non starter for Iran.

But I do think they might consider giving up their enriched uranium to a trusted third party. 

Hizbollah will not be part of this deal in any case. 

So Israel doesn’t get everything it wants, but crucially it gets a non nuclear Iran for the foreseeable future. 

Trump gets out of this quagmire and can declare victory because he gets a longer deal than Obama’s.

Iran has a non-nuclear ‘nuclear’ option providing a sense of regime protection, and reparations. 

This to me is a best case scenario at this stage. It sucks because the only party that truly comes out way ahead is Iran, as a revived regional power, but one that will not directly threaten Israel. 

And there’s always a chance, in the long run, that the Iranian people will tire of their hated leaders and take them down, in the natural course of events, as they might have before trump and Bibi foolishly tried to hasten the process, and instead set it back a generation.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

It was always projection.

I’m thinking of those trump supporters who spent years insisting that the people warning about his irrationality were the irrational ones—dismissing critics with the pejorative “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

The phrase has somewhat respectable origins. In 2003, conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer coined “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” describing it as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people” in reaction to George W. Bush. Later, another commentator David Horowitz invoked “Obama Derangement Syndrome” to criticize what he saw as over-the-top hysteria from parts of the right.

But with trump, the phrase evolved into something else entirely. Not just a critique, but a reflex—a way to deflect criticism while shielding one’s own emotional investment.

It echoes a childhood defense: if someone calls you stupid, you fire back, “I know you are, but what am I?” Or, “I’m rubber and you’re glue—whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

Admittedly, I was a sensitive kid.

And here we are, back in the schoolyard.

Now some of the loudest voices who praised trump while hurling “derangement” at his critics, are suddenly changing their tune—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Theo Von. Like the cowering kids who cheered on the bully, only to realize they might end up in the principal’s office along with him.

So what changed?

Was it the profanity-laced Easter message?

The image of the orange messiah as the healer Jesus?

His praising Allah after threatening to destroy an entire civilization?

Too much Epstein?

Who knows.

The explanation now offered is convenient: age, decline, something neurological—he’s not the same man he once was.

I’ve always rejected the idea that trump is suffering from dementia. That was never the issue.

What he has consistently displayed are traits associated with sociopathic, malignant narcissism: impulsiveness, grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a profound lack of empathy. Those traits aren’t new.

What’s changed isn’t him—it’s the willingness, or ability, of some supporters to ignore them.

Now that those same traits are harder to overlook, and the stakes have increased with the US at war, the story shifts. Not “we misjudged him,” but “he has changed.”

It’s a more comfortable narrative. It preserves the past at the expense of the present.

Projection is a powerful thing.

The Cultural Barometer

I watched an interesting talk this weekend by David Brooks titled How America Recovers From All This. It’s worth watching—if only because it ends on an optimistic note. And we could all use a bit of that.

Still, I was left unconvinced that his optimism is entirely justified.

Brooks’ central thesis is that it is not technology, economics, or even politics that ultimately shapes society—it's culture. Politics, in his view, follows culture, which itself reflects what we collectively value. Change the values, and you can change the direction of society.

To make his case, he sketches a sweeping cultural history of postwar America. Following the mass trauma of WW2, the 1940s and 1950s, he argues, were defined by the values of humility, self-effacement, and trust—in institutions, community, and church. The 1960s were a reaction: a culture of liberation that rejected conformity in favor of authenticity, experimentation, and social upheaval. The 1970s consolidated these trends into what he calls "chaos," it was characterized by egocentrism, social fragmentation (family breakdown), distrust in institutional authority (think Watergate), personal excess and rising crime rates.

The 1980s brought a neo-conservative “bourgeois backlash”: a return to self-discipline, order, and free-market faith and excess. The decade of "Greed is Good," but also the end of the Cold War. 

The 1990s attempted a synthesis—reconciling the bohemian ethos of the 1960s with the bourgeois values of the 1980s, as the former counterculture youth had grown into the educated professional class. But by the 2000s, Brooks sees a collapse of that synthesis: not just a loss of trust in institutions, but in one another—a fraying of the social fabric and what he characterizes as a loss of moral knowledge and  ethos.

It’s an elegant narrative. But it rests on broad generalizations that raise as many questions as they answer.

Most notably: what actually drives cultural shifts?

Brooks largely sidesteps the role of anomalous major events, technologies, and personalities—factors that seem less like background noise and more like catalysts. It is difficult, for instance, to understand the 1960s without the Vietnam War, or without powerful figures like JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. Likewise, the shocks of 9/11 or the financial crisis loom large over the cultural mood of the 2000s. Today, it is impossible to ignore the impact of the Covid pandemic, social media and the advent of artificial intelligence.

If anything, the forces he identifies as symptomatic of the age, act more like the engines of change. To my mind there is a complex interplay between politics, economics, social phenomena and unforeseaable events that shape our times. Culture does not determine where we are—it expresses it.

There was one part of Brooks’ talk that resonated with me. His discussion of humiliation as a driver of political behavior. Humiliation, as he defines it, is the sense of being denied the dignity or status one believes they deserve. It is a powerful emotional force—one that can easily turn into resentment and hatred.

That dynamic is clearly visible in contemporary American politics. The rise of trump tapped into something real. The anger, the intolerance, the sense of grievance—these are not inventions. They are expressions of lived experience, however distorted and politicized.

Where I part ways with Brooks is in his faith that we will naturally gravitate back toward higher values—that we will tire of division and rediscover meaning, justice, and humanism.

Perhaps. But it is far from clear why or how that turn would occur.

If anything, our culture today seems to reflect something else: disconnection, narcissism, and a certain emptiness. Much of popular music feels repetitive and inward-looking. Increasingly, it is even generated or shaped by AI. The broader cultural landscape often feels less like a shared conversation and more like a fragmented echo chamber.

Brooks believes that most people instinctively understand that a life of meaning is more valuable than one devoted to pleasure. That may be true in the abstract. But it sits uneasily alongside what our culture actually rewards and amplifies.

It is entirely possible that we break the cycle, as he suggests. But it is just as plausible that we continue down a different path—one in which technology, especially AI, further erodes agency, deepens isolation, and amplifies cynicism.

If Brooks is accurate that the cycles we experience tend to swing from a decade of change to a decade of consolidation and back, then the worrisome social and political trend of the last decade may well consolidate in the next one. 

That would take us further from pursuing the humanistic 'higher values' that he predicts than ever, and there is no telling where that takes us.  

American Exceptionalism

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I heard the term my whole life

and wondered, 

what's that all about?

I knew

a few things: Elvis, 

The Supremes, 

Charlie Parker and Monk, 

the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix,

the Yankees vs. the Dodgers,

Ali vs. Frazier,

the lights of Times Square 

and the Hollywood sign,

Gilligan's Island and The Beverly Hillbillies, 

Laugh-In and Carol Burnett,

The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels,

and Fantasy Island,

Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry

and Luke Skywalker:

One small step for a man...

JFK, RFK, MLK and Vietnam,

D-Day,

The Bomb,

and the Marshall Plan;

a decision not to humiliate 

the defeated

but instead

to invest in them -

for the first time in history

someone understood,

together 

we live in freedom

or die in chains,

it was called 

American Exceptionalism

and it belonged 

to all of us.

Facing The Reality of Israel's Project

This post was inspired by an important recent discussion on the Ezra Klein show. Highly recommended.

Many of us staunchly supported Israel's right to defend itself after the attack of October 7th 2023. 

It's now clear that the current Israeli government has chosen to leverage its response to October 7th to launch another project: The one state solution.

A decision - intially implicit but now largely explicit - was made to not just destroy Gaza in every functional way to make it unlivable, but also to kill the Oslo Peace process once and for all. This means an effort to render the Palestinian Authority completely ineffectual and to annex the West Bank by building settler communities at a rate that would make any hope of a Palestinian State impossible.

From 2020 to 2023 no new Jewish settlements in the West Bank were approved by the Israeli government. In 2023 nine new settlements were approved. In 2024 it was five. In 2025 the number is fifty-four. 

This has deep roots. Netanyahu has been laser focused throughout his political career on two main goals. The first was to eliminate the terrorism that has plagued Israel. The second was to eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran. 

The terrorism came in two forms: Palestinian terrorism that emanated from the West Bank, and Iran-backed proxy terrorism that came from Hizbollah based in Lebanon and Hamas based in Gaza.

Netanyahu viewed the post-October 7th response as a strategic opportunity to advance his long-term agenda. Trump’s reelection provided the final tool—total military carte blanche with U.S. backing—and that is what we are now witnessing.

He could now, not merely attempt to set back the threat of Iran's proxies (the so-called Axis of Resistance) and their nuclear program, but equally important (and much less discussed) end the two-state solution. 

Which begs the question: Assuming Netanyahu is successful in his military objectives, where does that leave Israel with respect to the Palestinians?  

There seems to be only two possibilities: 

1. The West Bank and Gaza are formally annexed and the Palestinians become full citizens of Israel. Any Palestinians who don't want Israeli citizenship will either leave voluntarily and/or be forcibly expelled. 

It seems pretty clear that the Palestinians won't want this result under any circumstance and won't ever accept it. Israelis won't want it either because it would threaten the Jewish majority.

2. The West Bank and Gaza are controlled but not legally annexed and the Palestinians are subjugated permanently.

In other words, ethnic cleansing or apartheid.

The unworkability of this situation is one thing. The immorality and illegality is another. In either case, it puts Israel in a terrible bind both domestically and internationally. 

Previous Israeli governments made it a policy to remain non-partisan as far as the United States is concerned. Netanyahu tied Israel inextricably to trump, which was a risky move that offered short term benefits but other dangers. 

Those chickens are already coming home to roost. We are seeing Israel's support in the US plummet to historical lows, even among the 'America First' evangelicals.  

So what is the endgame?

At best: Israel secures a period of dominance, under conditions of simmering resistance, growing international isolation, and deepening moral compromise.

Whatever this is—it isn’t a just peace.