For those not interested, don't read it. But for those who are, this is a powerful post by Rabbi Shai Held a teacher from mechon Hadar in NYC. JTS ordained, but hadar is non denominational--conservadox. He is highly regarded and if there is a struggle ahead he may be the Abraham Joshua Heschel of our time.
I too will not be deterred and I know that goes for others here.
Phoenix
This is from his facebook feed:
Some thoughts, five days later:
1. Many people have asked me what I think they/we should be doing at this moment. I would start with this: be very clear about what your red lines are, and about what you are willing to do to uphold them. And make those commitments public, so that you will be pressured to live up to them.
An example: If Mr. Trump actually pursues children of illegal immigrants with the intention of deporting them (which he has promised to do), I will readily go to jail to fight him, and I hope many students, friends, and colleagues will join me.
If Mr. Trump creates a registry of Muslims, I will register as one, and I hope you will join me.
2. My watchword for right now is vigilance. We need to watch what the president-elect does, and know that we may be called to place out bodies on the line to defend civil and human rights. If your instinctive reply is that you are not an activist, well the time may have come to become one.
But I personally do not think that massive protests right now are the best idea: first, people of good will will exhaust themselves before the most important battles have even begun; and second, they run the risk of alienating people who may otherwise become allies.
3. I am growing increasingly weary of the "we lost, let's move on" posts that I have seen. I used to be very skeptical of the language of white privilege, but this seems like an amazing expression of it. Muslims, who have been threatened with a registry, cannot move on; gays and lesbians who fear having their long-delayed and hard-won rights stripped away from them, cannot move on; people of color, who are understandably terrified of the racial animus Trump has directed at them, cannot move on. (If you don't know about Trump and the Central Park 5, consider learning about it.) The list goes on and on; we are not talking about a baseball team here, we are talking about people's safety and well-being.
4. Posts that say "your side lost; deal with it" willfully ignore what many of Trump's most impassioned critics have been saying all along: This is not about Democrat v. Republican. It's about decency v. indecency. I am grateful to the Republican thinkers and leaders who saw that and have not backed down. (God bless you, David Frum.)
5. Journalists: please please please do your jobs right now. No more false equivalencies, no cheap normalization. Document everything he does. The creep of authoritarianism is a real danger here, and we need you.
Everyone else: if you can afford it, now is the time to pay subscription fees to newspapers that do serious investigative journalism. We need large and robust newsrooms at precisely the time when they are shrinking.
It is an extremely bad sign that a mere few days after he won the presidency of the United States of America, Donald Trump is still firing off hostile tweets at the New York Times.
6. To people who inhabit the same socioeconomic and cultural universe as I do, yet who voted for Trump: many of you have put forward a steady stream of indignant posts about how you are not racist, bigoted, homophobic, or misogynistic. That may well be true, but the fact is that in this election you decided that racism, bigotry, homophobia, and misogyny were not significant enough issues to cause you to vote for someone else. At the end of the day, although our thoughts and feelings do matter, we will be judged on our actions, and whether or not this was your direct goal, the fact is that you did help place a dangerously bigoted man in the most powerful position in the world.
If you want to take responsibility for the bigotry your candidate has unleashed, you could demand of him that he condemn all assaults on minorities without equivocation. It seems to me your indignation would be better directed there.
And yes, of course violent attacks on Trump supporters are totally unacceptable and must stop.
7. There is so much pain in this country, and as I have been saying for many, many months, we have to find a way to separate out economic anxiety from racial hatred. The first can be dealt with; the second must be condemned and rooted out. American jobs have been lost (though as Thomas Friedman notes, more to microchips than to Mexicans) and we have immense work to do with and for those feeling left behind by a globalizing economy. But as far as race goes: A purely white America is gone, and it is never coming back. Diversity is our reality, and if we rise to the occasion, it can be our strength.
8. I never thought I'd see the day when Jews on the left would need to remind Jews on the right that antisemitism is a real and present danger. In the United States, more acts of violence are committed each year by White Supremacists than by Islamist radicals. Please stare the threat in the face: The president-elect has winked at white nationalists, re-tweeted them, and had one of them run his campaign. There is no reason at all to think that he has your back. (And please stop with the nonsense about a Jewish daughter and grandchildren; that was not enough to motivate Trump before, so there's no reason to assume that it will motivate him now.)
9. Torah tells us to love our neighbors, and the vulnerable immigrants among us (that's what the word ger means in biblical Hebrew). There is a mandate to love, but there is no mandate to be loved. Sometimes we have to speak the truth even if it means losing friends and being attacked. I don't enjoy being assailed (to say the least), but I will not be deterred. Nor, I trust, will thousands and thousands of my fellow Americans.
Author
Topic: 
Election thread #3