Democracy, it would seem, has spoken. On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani will become the one hundred and eleventh mayor of New York City. While the electoral outcome is not what I hoped for, I wish Mayor-elect Mamdani and his administration every success in leading this city we love. As the prophet Jeremiah instructed the Jews of his time, “Dirshu et shlom ha-ir . . . ki bi-shlomah yihyeh lakhem shalom, Seek the peace of the city . . . for in its peace you will find your peace” (29:7). Voting, not unlike prayer, is a sacred duty, to be exercised regardless of whether it yields the desired outcome, and I am encouraged by how many rallied to action and made their voices heard. Our community will, as it would with any mayor, work with the Mamdani administration on matters of shared concern and common cause. Our community will, as it would with any mayor, hold the Mamdani administration accountable for ensuring that New York City remains a place where Jewish life and support for Israel are protected and can thrive. Should this mayor seek audience with our community, he will be welcomed, as would any mayor – a welcome, as would be the case with any mayor, that will take place with the backdrop of Israel’s national flag. As the late Senator Ted Kennedy famously reflected after suffering his own political disappointment: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
This past week, these past few weeks, have been a whirlwind. And this morning I want to reflect on what I believe to be an important takeaway as we move forward. I stand by the words I shared a few weeks ago, though it is not those words upon which I wish to focus. Nor is now the time to discuss next steps: how to leverage the burst of recent activism into sustained, long-term engagement that supports political leadership capable of championing the values we hold as New Yorkers, as Americans, as Zionists, and as Jews. Nor, for that matter, do I wish to debate the freedoms and limits of the pulpit, the signings and not signings of public statements, and the responsibilities that come with both speech and silence. There will be a day, though today is not that day, to address those elements in both formal media and social media who, rather than deploying their energies to fight the good fight, chose instead to spin an imagined narrative, pitting rabbi against rabbi, turning our Jewish community against itself, and attacking the servant leaders of our people. Yom Kippur is a long way away, but it is never too early for our community to engage in reflection, introspection, and for some, teshuvah, repentance.
Important as these conversations are, these are not the subjects I wish to discuss today. This morning, I want to speak more parochially, and more personally, about our Jewish community – perhaps members of this synagogue, but really our Jewish community as a whole. Elections are important for the leaders they produce, but also as mirrors to hold up to ourselves – snapshots of the values we cherish and the fault lines we contain. To use but two recent examples: 2016, when so many woke up the morning after the election bewildered not just by the results, but by the realization that there was a “Hillbilly Elegy” America that they did not know; and 2020, when our nation found itself divided not simply along political lines, but across differing realities of truth, trust, and belonging. Elections reveal not only the state of our politics, but the state of our souls, forcing each of us to confront questions of who we are, what we value, and how we can live together despite our differences.
It is that same sort of disoriented feeling that I felt and continue to feel, as I register the fact that over a third of New York City’s Jews voted for Mamdani. For me, and I say this both personally and vulnerably, it is a totally bewildering data point to wrap my head around. I am not unaware of the bigger political trends, the shortcomings of the other candidates, and the systemic challenges our city faces; I understand why Mamdani won. But for me, and I need not repeat everything I said a few weeks ago, his anti-Zionist rhetoric, his intent to shut down research and economic partnerships between Israel and New York, and his expressed desire to defund or disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group – to name but a few of his promises that would negatively impact our community – disqualified him from receiving my vote. Every day, the safety and well-being of the Jewish people – here in New York, in Israel, and around the globe are at the forefront of my concern. My North Star is ahavat yisrael, my love of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. All the more so in a post October 7th world, as the threats against Israel stand laid bare, and the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism grows more porous and more perilous. A post-traumatic October 8th Jewry must stand shoulder to shoulder against the those who would do us harm; as the book title goes, “For Such a Time as This.”
For me, Mamdani’s rhetoric is a red flag. To state it in rabbinic terms: in Jewish law there are some things that are batel b’shishim, rendered harmless within the larger mixture, and some things that are davar she-eino batel, that spoil the whole pot. In my mind and heart, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is of the latter, not former category. And it is not a close call.
And yet, it would seem that what is so self-evident to me is not so self-evident to a sizeable percentage of my kinfolk. I am faced not with an America that I hardly knew, but with a segment of the Jewish community it would seem that I hardly know. Jews who live in my city, who are members of our collective community, even of our own synagogue who don’t feel the same way as I do. Thoughtful, caring, introspective Jews. Jews wise enough to interrogate their own views. Jews who, most importantly, fall into that sacred subset of humanity called mishpachah, family, and who disagree with some or all of what I believe in. Mayors come and go. I haven’t the foggiest idea whether making buses safe and free is a good idea or a bad idea, never mind if it is a plan capable of being implemented. All I do know, is that I live and breathe the Jewish people, and this election has brought a fault line within our people into full relief. This, as I am wont to say, is the thing beneath the thing, the thing which we must name, the thing we must talk about and contend with. The conversation which we, as a New York and national Jewish community, must have.
The rabbis of old understood that members of the same family could participate in the same experience and emerge with two very different realities. It happened to our founding first family in this week’s Torah reading, where we read the story of the akedah, the binding of Isaac. Abraham is called on by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. Not just once, but twice, the text says of their ascent of the mountain: “va-yeilkhu shneihem yahdav, the two [Abraham and Isaac] walked together” (Genesis 22:6, 8). The rabbis understand the repetition as deeply important, the choice of words signaling not just physical proximity, but shared understanding, purpose, and faith. By all accounts, whatever actually happened on top of that mountain was a moment both dramatic and traumatic for father and son alike. Yet as charged with emotion as the ascent and the scene atop the mountain were, it is the journey down that has elicited the most rabbinic commentary. The text describes that Abraham returned to his servants and they returned to Be’er Sheva together. No mention is made of Isaac. Where did he go? What happened to him? Abraham and Isaac may both have returned from the harrowing test on that mountain, but they went their separate ways and would never be the same. So betrayed was Isaac that he never spoke to his father again. By a certain telling it was the relationship between father and son that was sacrificed at the top of Mt. Moriah. The selfsame akedah that defined Abraham as our hero and knight of faith was the experience that prompted Isaac to go in an altogether different direction.
And our story does not end there. In a later scene, the text notes that Isaac settled in the region of the Negev Be’er l’hai ro·i, which, it turns out, is the home of Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arab nation, who together with Ishmael was marginalized by Abraham years earlier. It is a revealing and heartbreaking turn in the family dynamic. Abraham is the founder of our faith, a man of such magnanimity that our Torah reading begins by describing how, in the heat of the day, he sat at the opening of his tent to greet every stranger – an exemplar of hospitality to which we all aspire. And yet, Abraham’s spiritual posture was such that he did not or could not make room for his own son, who could then find refuge and common cause only with Hagar and Ishmael, the only other two people who could relate to the rejection he felt.
It is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily human, turn of events – one that hits close to home as I reflect on the 70/30 split within our New York Jewish family today. The analogy is, of course, imperfect. The akedah is not October 7th, and the fractures within our community long predate that day. But the story reminds us that trauma, while shared, can send members of the same family in opposite directions. Though tragedy may have been averted on the mountaintop, there was tragedy on the way down, when those who went up together walked down and went forward alone.
We need a reset on what we mean when we speak of October 8th Jews – a thesis that recognizes that while many of us rose and continue to rise to defend the faith, an unintended consequence is that other Jews, Isaac like, felt and continue to feel left outside the tent. A new thesis that stops acting surprised when the Isaacs of the world find themselves more at home in the tents of others than our own. Most importantly, we need to learn to walk and to talk and to live and to love together. If, as I have repeatedly claimed, ahavat yisrael, love of the Jewish people is my North Star, then it is a principle I must uphold even and especially when it is uncomfortable to do so. It is a love that must extend to Jews whose views I neither share nor understand. As I said a few weeks ago, it means not wagging one’s fingers or rolling one’s eyes when encountering opinions contrary to one’s own. It means refusing to demean, diminish, or shame another’s viewpoint by labeling it or recasting it as a misbegotten freak-out, “un-Jewish,” a form of hysteria, a derangement syndrome, or otherwise. It means spending time, as I have done on multiple occasions these past weeks, speaking with people who have shared why my remarks served to push them further from, not closer to, the Jewish fold. It means calling out, with equal ferocity, the threats to the Jewish people as they appear on the Mamdani left and on the Nick Fuentes/Tucker Carlson right. It means me resisting my urge to “rabbi-splain” the views another holds, rather seeking to stand in authentic dialogue, meeting difference not with defensiveness but with a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, and spending more time listening than speaking. And yes, it means a willingness to publicly apologize –not for my convictions, on which I stand firm, but for the times I have failed to uphold the spirit of dialogue and freedom of conscience and expression that I have spent my adult life championing and believe must be defended today more than ever.
Finally, while I have no specific program to announce, it means modeling these values publicly and communally by inviting peer rabbinic colleagues to our community for respectful, substantive exchanges of views. And while I am not quite sure how best to do so, I would gladly accept a likeminded invitation for dialogue in another community. I know what I believe in, that is not the interesting part. What is interesting, what is urgent, is the need to understand what thirty percent of New York Jews believe in and for them to understand us, the need to turn the temperature down, to build bridges of dialogue, and to strengthen the bonds of Jewish New York even as we maintain our diversity of thought. I do not have the precise answer; I only know I cannot do it alone. I encourage and implore you, in your own sphere, no matter where you fall in the political spectrum, to contribute to the mood and the generosity of spirit that will strengthen our people.
We must not let the tragedy of our first family, a father and son going their separate ways, become our own. Next week, the Torah will offer a redemptive path forward, albeit too late for Abraham. Isaac, having established himself on his own, comes upon the wells his father dug, stopped up following Abraham’s death. Isaac digs them anew, claiming them as his own, yet giving them the very names his father had given them. It is an image worth meditating on, praying for . . . and not waiting for. A Jewish family seeking life-giving waters of dialogue, yearning to understand each other, aspiring for unity without uniformity, and the strength and humility to walk together again.