In the Miklat

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for Kelp

I'm not in the miklat;

but I imagine

if I were in Jerusalem

with you,

I'd have my guitar

and you'd have yours.

Or if there was no time

because the alert

went off again at 3am,

and we dragged ourselves

down in pjs and slippers,

we'd at least

have our blues harps.

While we waited

for the all clear

we'd fill the silence

with Dylan and Cohen,

between tunes

debate

who was the better songwriter.

I'd tell you Dylan was a poser,

always wearing

someone else's costume,

while Cohen dug deep

into the darkness

of his own

emotional rubble.

When we got tired of that

I'd pull out

my bilingual copy

of Shirei Ahava

and we'd read aloud —

you first in Hebrew,

me next,

from the facing page

in English —

all the biblical allusions

lost in translation,

(hiding inside the words,

as it were),

milot miklat,

you'd joke alliteratively—

words of shelter

from the storm.

We'd listen

for the boom of a strike

above our heads

the crash of collapse,

and wonder

if ZAKA

had already been 

dispatched.

The Big Picture

What you see always depends on what you are looking at.

Me, I'm a big picture guy, not someone who focuses on details.

Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not.

It's good because I tend not to sweat the small stuff.

It's bad for detail-oriented work, like writing or art-making, where getting the details just right matters so much.

Even before trump was first voted into office, from my big-picture perch I saw the potential for disaster.

Disaster because he was so obviously inexperienced, and so clearly temperamentally unfit to wield so much power.

Disaster because he had no appreciation for institutions or the international alliances he was inheriting.

Worse than indifference, his instinct seemed destructive. He appeared to want to tear down the foundations of American democracy and dismantle the network of alliances and organizations that had maintained global stability since the end of WWII.

The fact that he was new to the job — and not particularly competent or disciplined — limited the damage he could do in his first term.

Having experienced trump version 1.0, I never imagined Americans would choose him a second time. Especially after January 6th.

I was wrong.

It turns out Americans have very short memories.

The second term has confirmed my worst fears. This time, with a compliant and subservient Congress, he is largely unleashed to use the powers of the presidency according to his whims.

My sense was that his first priority in a second term — now that he understood the levers of power — would be to enrich himself, his family, and his friends.

And Americans would pay for it in spades.

The tariffs fit under that heading. So do the lawsuits against corporations, law firms, and universities aimed at extracting settlements. The “gifts” from foreign leaders. The cryptocurrency ventures. The project-fundraising grifts. The selling of pardons. And most recently, the war profiteering — seizing Venezuela’s oil and the kids launching a drone business.

The second priority would be the only other thing he truly craves: attention, fame, legacy.

Hence the constant television appearances, sometimes twice a day. Dominating headlines. Putting his name and face on prominent government buildings. Erecting monuments to himself — the ballroom, the victory arch. His obsessive pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it also extends to more ominous gestures: the abduction of a government leader in Venezuela, the war with Iran, and talk of taking over Cuba or even Greenland.

Trump cares above all about appearing strong. His worldview is simple: might makes right.

And the more easily he can deploy the military, the easier it becomes to use it again.

Trashing international law, alliances, and global institutions is not really the goal.

It’s simply collateral damage in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Most of the political arguments I end up having with people come down to a difference between looking at the big picture or the small picture.

People who focus only on Israel’s immediate security, for example, are happy with the war with Iran. They see weapons depots destroyed, military infrastructure damaged, leaders assassinated — and they count those as victories.

But that’s the small picture.

They’re looking at the battles, not the war.

They aren’t thinking about the broader ramifications for regional stability, for international alliances, or even for Jews living in the diaspora.

Big picture, bombs are replaceable. Leaders are replaceable. Even armies are replaceable.

What isn’t easily replaced is stability.

Or trust.

Or credibility.

Once those are gone, they take generations to rebuild.

Actual Community

I want to share a word about my experience yesterday — a breather from political commentary, which will probably come as a relief to many of you.

Suddenly I feel like I’m part of a community. A real one.

This comes thanks to my wife.

For the last couple of years she’s been building a small hobby-business called Montreal Vintage Kitchenware. Check it out. She sources vintage dishware, glassware, cookware, and other beautiful household items, cleans them up, and resells them online. She has a great eye for value and style. And the wonderful thing about dishware and glassware is that they don’t really wear out. It’s amazing how often you find older pieces in pristine condition.

Over time she’s built a nice following on Instagram and her sales and inventory have grown steadily. But she’s kept the business deliberately small and manageable. She sources locally, sells locally, and fits the work around her regular routine — including caring for the affairs of her ailing mother.

Other vintage sellers have been encouraging her for a while to participate in public vintage markets, which have become very popular recently. Vintage style is having a moment, it’s eco-friendly, and it’s often far cheaper than buying new — which helps in uncertain economic times.

She resisted for a long time. Not least because selling glassware and dishes means hauling heavy boxes of fragile merchandise. It’s not quite the same as selling clothes or jewelry.

But this week she finally agreed to try one market — on the condition that I would act as her assistant (read: shlepper). Which I happily did.

The venue was beautiful: a former suburban church with vaulted ceilings, heavy wooden beams, and painted glass windows, now converted into a community events hall. There were about twenty-five vendors selling mostly vintage clothing, jewelry, craftwork, and small tchotchkes.

My wife was the sole vendor selling only housewares.

This turned out to be both good and bad. Good because there was no competition. Bad because there’s a reason no one else was selling it.

Housewares aren’t really impulse purchases. People usually buy them when they’re looking for something specific — to complete a set, replace a missing glass, or find a particular piece of cookware. Market shoppers, on the other hand, tend to want something they can wear home immediately. And most come expecting to spend somewhere between $10 and $25.

My wife often sells sets — dishes, glasses, teapots, serving trays — typically priced between $25 and $60. Still a great deal, but not quite the market sweet spot.

Still, we did fine. More than enough to cover the costs and put a few extra dollars in our pocket. And it was a valuable learning experience. We’re already thinking about what might work better next time: fewer full sets, more individual pieces, and more items priced closer to that impulse-buy range.

But what I enjoyed most had nothing to do with the sales.

It was the atmosphere.

The organizer — herself a vintage seller — was energetic, welcoming, and clearly delighted by the little community she’s building with these events. The music playlist was so good it had me humming along most of the day.

The vendors were friendly and supportive. Of course there were moments of quiet jealousy — glancing over at the next table wondering why they had five customers while we had one — but the overall feeling was that everyone genuinely wanted everyone else to do well.

What struck me most, though, was simply being around strangers. Friendly strangers.

They weren’t from my cultural, religious, or socio-economic milieu. They probably didn’t share many of my political views — and for once that didn’t matter in the slightest.

For one afternoon I stepped out of my usual bubble and into a room full of people of different ages and backgrounds who had very little in common except that we were all there selling pre-loved stuff. And it felt surprisingly good.

I realized how rare that has become — to share a space with people you don’t know, don’t categorize, and don’t argue with.

I enjoyed people simply passing by our table perusing our wares, maybe picking up a plate or a teacup, chatting for a minute or two, and then saying thanks and leaving without even buying anything.

War, What Is It Good For?

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

So sang Edwin Starr in the 1970 protest anthem War.

Starr was singing about the Vietnam War, a conflict that proved as senseless, misguided, and ideological as any war undertaken by the United States. Decades later, the lessons of Vietnam are still being learned.

Among them:

First, it was fundamentally an ideological conflict. While it had military objectives, its political goals were vague and shifting.

Second, ideological wars are notoriously difficult to win. Territory can be captured, armies defeated, and infrastructure destroyed. But beliefs cannot be bombed out of existence. More often they harden under pressure.

Third, Vietnam demonstrated the dangers of escalation. What began as a limited commitment gradually expanded into a full-scale war. The phenomenon would later be called “mission creep,” a term popularized during the United Nations Operation in Somalia.

Fourth, Vietnam showed the limits of overwhelming military superiority. The United States dominated the air and possessed vast technological advantages. Yet these advantages proved insufficient against a determined adversary employing asymmetric tactics.

Finally, it was a war of attrition. In such conflicts, the weaker side can prevail simply by outlasting the stronger one. Time, more than firepower, becomes the decisive factor.

The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.” His insight was that war, at least in theory, is rational. It is a tool used by states to achieve political objectives when diplomacy fails.

But Clausewitz’s observation contains an implicit truth: wars end by agreement. Military victory only matters if it produces a political outcome accepted by the parties involved.

Which raises the question: is the war against Iran winnable?

The United States and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority. They can degrade Iran’s military capabilities, damage its infrastructure, and weaken its ability to defend itself. These are achievable objectives. But they are also temporary ones.

Only a political settlement—one accepted by Iran itself—could transform military defeat into a durable outcome. Yet the Iranian regime defines itself in ideological opposition to the United States and Israel. A regime that frames resistance as martyrdom cannot politically survive capitulation.

Washington and Jerusalem appear to have hoped that sustained military pressure would weaken the regime internally. Perhaps popular unrest would topple the government, or factions within the military might stage a coup.

So far, neither scenario has materialized, and there is no reason to believe it is likely.

Popular revolt is unlikely while the population is under bombardment. External attack tends to consolidate national unity, even among citizens who dislike the regime.

Nor has there been any visible fracturing within Iran’s security apparatus, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

If the past is any guide—from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan—the most likely outcome is a familiar one. At some point the United States will declare its objectives achieved and bring the conflict to a close.

Iran, having survived, will declare victory as well.

And in doing so it will strengthen the very regime the war was meant to weaken, while deepening its determination to obtain the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon.

Bad news for Washington.

Worse news for Israel.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

Please don't write

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Please don't write 

any more poems about death. 

I've read too many already, 

and let's admit it,

they come too easily. 

War. Grief. Sorrow. Loss: common 

as poppies in spring

when it's still chilly outside, 

the bright papery blooms 

fading quickly. 

Write the elusive  

difficult poems 

about love - 

ones you know by heart

when words 

fail; 

A poem that stands on a riverbank 

watching the flow— 

a poem that surprises,

like a fish leaping out 

from the turbulent darkness, 

with all its might, 

going upstream  

with vigour and purpose,

and you know,

only because it moves 

against the current,

it's alive.

The Golem of Mar-a-Lago

Based on the Jewish folktale The Golem of Prague

Once upon a time, in the city of Jerusalem, there lived a leader of the Jewish community. He was not a humble leader, for he had ruled almost without opposition for many decades.

All his life, the leader of the Jews believed it was his sacred mission to protect his people from their greatest avowed enemy: the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by the Ayatollah and his mullahs.

The Ayatollah dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate and called for the destruction of the Jews in Israel. For many years he spent the treasure of his people building an army and acquiring powerful weapons, and placing them in ways that threatened the Jews.

The leader of the Jews possessed a mighty army too—indeed the mightiest in the region. But it was not mighty enough to defeat the Ayatollah on its own.

He needed help.

And so good fortune seemed to fall upon the Jews.

In a distant land there existed a being said to command vast treasure and unimaginably powerful weapons. The being was large and orange—the colour of desert clay baked too long in the sun. 

The being was vulgar in demeanour. Many said it was without a soul, because when it spoke, which it did often and loudly, only strange and incoherent noises emerged.

The being lived in Florida, inside a palace of gold and mirrors called Mar-a-Lago.

When the leader of the Jews in Israel heard about this creature, he conceived a clever idea. He believed that if he traveled to Mar-a-Lago and whispered certain mystical words into the being’s ear, he could transform it into a golem—a powerful creature that would obey his commands.

And so he crossed the ocean and did exactly this.

He leaned close and whispered into the creature’s ear.

Instantly the being’s eyes glazed over, and its orange skin began to glow. The leader of the Jews knew that the creature had become a golem and would now follow his every instruction.

He said to the golem:

“You are the strongest man the world has ever seen.”

“You alone can destroy our enemy.”

“The Ayatollah and his mullahs mock you. Iran is your enemy. You must destroy the Ayatollah.”

The words were repeated again and again—until they became an incantation.

The golem of Mar-a-Lago stirred. It pounded the table and released a great, incoherent roar. The golem’s minions understood what the noises meant, and soon an armada of warships was launched against the enemy of the Jews. From their decks, fighter jets dropped bombs upon the Ayatollah’s lands, and missiles rained down across Iran.

At first the leader of the Jews smiled. The golem had done exactly as he commanded.

But, as the ancient legend foretells, a golem does not understand limits.

Missiles rose from deserts and mountains all throughout the region. Armies mobilized. Oil fields burned. Exploding drones struck hotels, apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.

The streets of large cities were set on fire, a toxic rain burned the skin of residents, many people died and economic markets crashed like towers of glass collapsing in the wind.

The Middle East shook. Yet the golem did not stop.

The creature thundered across the world stage—threatening, striking, shouting. Fear spread wherever it turned. Former allies became mistrustful, and enemies multiplied.

Even many among the Jewish people who had first cheered the golem began to fear it. And soon the leader of the Jews who had activited the creature, realized in horror, that he had made a terrible mistake.

He had forgotten the one thing required by the ancient legend to control the golem. He had never placed the word Emet—Truth—upon its brow. For if the master of the golem needed to stop the creature that was how he did it. He could simply remove the first letter, leaving only Met—Death—and the golem would instantly turn to dust.

But now it was too late.

This creature could not be restrained by truth. Truth had no meaning to it at all.

And so the golem of Mar-a-Lago marched onward—louder, stronger, and more uncontrollable with every step—while the world wondered who, if anyone, still possessed the sacred word that could make it stop.

Evil

This weekend I started watching the Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. I was obviously drawn to it because of the war now unfolding in the Middle East and the demented, soulless, brainless orange golem currently controlling the levers of power in the White House who appears to be steering the world toward ruination and catastrophe. Play with fire and get burned.

History rarely repeats itself in the neat and tidy ways we imagine, but it does have an unsettling habit of echoing when political systems grow fragile and grievances become political fuel.

“Evil” is a word I dislike and very rarely use. It has too many religious connotations. It belongs to a universe of absolutes, and we don’t live in absolutes — or at least we shouldn’t.

Through archival footage and dramatizations, interspersed with commentary from historians, the series tells the story of the failed Austrian painter Adolf Hitler, his rise to power in Germany, and the world’s attempt after the war to seek justice at the Nuremberg Trials, where twenty-four of the regime’s most senior surviving figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop — were prosecuted.

The story is told in part through the eyes of the American journalist William L. Shirer, who had a front-row seat to events. Shirer reported from Berlin during the Nazi period, covered the trials, and later wrote the monumental history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The question at the heart of the story is whether there is such a thing as evil.

The answer, I think, is no — at least not as something distant, mythical, and grandiose. Its source is far more mundane. It lies in ordinary human weaknesses: resentment, humiliation, cowardice, opportunism. Not even as interesting, perhaps, as the word “banal” that Hannah Arendt famously used when writing about the bureaucratic mediocrity of Adolf Eichmann.

Watching the series, what strikes you most is how ordinary and unremarkable Hitler himself appears as an individual. His character was shaped by personal failure, grievance, humiliation, and resentment — hardly unique qualities in politics.

His rise from a marginal extremist with a radical agenda and a relatively small following to someone holding the balance of power in parliament was enabled by conservative and moderate politicians who believed they could control him, harness his popular support, and neutralize his more dangerous tendencies.

They miscalculated.

In the fractured political landscape of the Weimar Republic - divided very much along rural/urban lines - elites who feared instability more than extremism opened the door to him, convinced that the institutions of the state would ultimately contain him. It was a door they later discovered they could not close.

Hitler understood how to exploit the situation. His nativist and romantic vision of German greatness appealed to an economically struggling population that was humiliated by defeat in the First World War and by what many perceived as betrayal by a feckless political class who had accepted the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Once in power, Hitler’s first objective was to avenge that national humiliation. The symbolism of forcing France to accept surrender in the Compiègne Forest — inside the same railway carriage used for the 1918 armistice — was no accident. It was revenge made theatrical.

The regime’s genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews did not emerge all at once as a single master plan. It was radicalized over time, particularly after the Blitz failed to defeat Britain, and the military campaign against the Soviet Union in the east hit a brick wall. Military success had emboldened the regime, while later desperation hardened its brutality, and the plan was codified at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

But if evil exists at all, it is not the product of some diabolical plan, like in the movies. It's a more organic process, and often improvised. It flourishes in weakness, grievance and opportunism, and feeds on apathy, fear and cowardice. 

Then it festers and spreads like an untreated disease in the body politic - hiding in plain sight, behind words like patriotism, security, loyalty, greatness.