By now, every pundit in America has their own 2024 election take, mostly confirming their prior opinions. Every Republican has a take, too, which is that Americans voted resoundingly for — well, for whatever policy that Republican cares about, from opposition to transgender rights to support for prayer in schools. And of course, progressives, especially younger ones, have every right to feel afraid, angry, or alienated. But the data tells a specific story, not a choose-your-own-adventure. And that is that swing voters voted mostly out of economic insecurity and discontent. They actually liked Kamala Harris more than Donald Trump (Harris’ favorability was 48 percent, compared to 44 percent for Trump). But Harris was the incumbent, and incumbents don’t win elections when people think the economy is bad. This is not just an American phenomenon. As the Financial Times reported, in every developed country in the world, the incumbents lost this year. This is unprecedented. If, like me, you’re being kept awake at night thinking about this election, this explanation helps. Yes, people were willing to put up with Trump’s criminality, coup attempts, and extreme xenophobia, and that is still terrible. Many were also on board with scapegoating immigrants for our economic woes, which is as factually preposterous as it is morally offensive.  But they didn’t vote for MAGA. They didn’t vote against women, or wokeness, or coastal elites, or climate regulation, or government regulation in general, or queer people. Not directly, anyway. They voted against the incumbent party, like every other developed country in the world this year. The shock waves from the Covid-19 pandemic — inflation, empty shelves, housing prices — are global, and this is a global trend. Everywhere in the world, voters have chosen to throw the bastards out because of the economy.  In fact, if you look closely at the Financial Times data, Trump actually did worse than most other non-incumbents. Yes, he won a clear victory. But it was not as big a victory as parties in France, Italy, or even New Zealand.  [...] So what happens when the emperor is revealed to have no clothes — or even worse, the garb of the same financial “elites” he claims to be against? Obviously, the MAGA faithful will stay with Trump no matter what — after all, his failure to bring about revolution in 2017 spawned the QAnon conspiracy theory, which said he was really about to do it, any day now. But the economic voters that gave him his victory could abandon Trump if he can’t deliver results. And he cannot. While Trump is busy trying to throw his enemies in jail, he has no plan — not even “concepts of a plan” — for the kitchen-table concerns that actually put him into office. Maybe, just maybe, voters will see they’ve been conned. That is the best we can hope for.

The Heresy of Jacob Frank by Jay Michaelson

If we only perform those rituals that give us a certain feeling, then we are guilty of a form of idolatry: mistaking a certain feeling for God. But God transcends our feelings. God is in the fire, in the wind, in the still, small voices that nurture us at night—and in the physical body as well.

There's no path to liberation that doesn't pass through the shadow.

Much of the problem stems from a certain misunderstanding about the purpose of religious belief. Believers and disbelievers alike seem convinced that religious beliefs are about explanations of how things are: the age of the Earth, what happens after we die, etc. Yet this is obviously not the case. A believer doesn’t become convinced of the existence of the afterlife because of philosophical argument — she becomes convinced because of grief. Eventually, more and more ideas accreted, and more and more solace, meaning, community, and perhaps even experiences of the sacred became attached to them. But it was never about the ideas; it was about the pain of living and the healing one finds in religion. This is why it is so difficult to talk about religion in America today, why we fight wars about it, why we condemn and even kill one another about it: because it gets us in our guts, and stays there. Religions do offer theological doctrine, but what they really offer is solace, love, sanctity, and value — all of them inchoate, all of them dear.

Leftist: civil disobedience is for protesting illegal immigration, not abortion

Rosh Hashanah: Come to Shul!