Like a lifelong Dodgers fan watching the Milwaukee Brewers celebrate their first World Series championship, I found myself of two minds about this week's American midterm election. On the one hand, who could begrudge the winning team its moment of glory? After a run of disappointment, a scrappy, small-market, underdog team reached the pinnacle of baseball, and I could relate to the joy of their fans. On the other hand, I know their road to victory came at the expense of my team – the Dodgers – swept by the Brewers in four straight playoff games. I am happy for the winners but not entirely pleased about their victory. That, more or less, is how I felt waking up Wednesday morning to the results of the elections. A blue wave. A blunami. A hard-earned victory for a team whose joy I should share, that I should embrace, and yet, for reasons I will explain, I find myself strangely unable to celebrate.
To be clear and on the record: God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. That said, there is no denying the magnitude of Tuesday's Democratic victory: a sweeping triumph that returned control of both the House and Senate to the Democrats. Jewish voters have historically leaned Democratic, seeing the party's commitments to civil rights, reproductive rights, and immigrant rights, among other commitments, as an expression of Jewish values. Exit polling suggests that roughly seven in ten Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates this week. Among the victors were prominent – and moderate – Jewish public servants: Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois. As Jews, we also celebrate the election of Muslims to Congress. It was not so long ago that Jews faced barriers to full participation in American political life. Representative democracy should be just that: representative. Again, I am describing, not endorsing, a political party. But for those who welcomed these electoral outcomes, who see in Tuesday’s results an affirmation of longstanding commitments, this election offered ample reason to celebrate.
And yet, for many American Jews, celebration was muted. Even as one set of values emerged victorious, another set appeared to take a hit. Most prominently, there was the election of Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan to the United States Senate. The concern, again, is not El-Sayed's faith, but his politics. El-Sayed's refusal to affirm Israel's right to continued existence as a Jewish state. His remark, following the terrorist attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel synagogue, that “hurt people hurt people,” for which he subsequently apologized. But more troubling than El-Sayed himself is the knowledge that he is not an isolated case. At least five members of the Democratic Socialists of America, all advocating an end to military aid to Israel, won seats in the House. Several longstanding congressional supporters of Israel were defeated. Even within the Democratic establishment, America's relationship with Israel is increasingly being reconsidered. To be sure, Israel's own policies and rhetoric have contributed to this shift, as has the American Jewish establishment's longstanding and self-defeating conflation of support for Israel with support for its government's policies. But for many Jews who champion the relationship between America and Israel, who believe there to be a porous line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, for whom Israel is no less integral to Jewish identity than God or Torah, and who hold that Jewish self-determination and progressive values need not be in conflict, Tuesday's blunami was a source not only of celebration, but also of considerable concern and consternation.
And if all this were not disorienting enough, it is not as if the other party – the Republican party – offered any comfort. On Election Day, it was not some freshman representative but the president himself who declared that the United States would end its nearly $4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel by year’s end. Whatever the merits of the decision, the election day timing of the announcement was unmistakable. American support for Israel was being treated as a political liability. And if there was any doubt about the shifting winds within the Republican Party, Vice President JD Vance dispelled them in his day-after reflection on his party’s defeat. Vance attributed his party’s defeat to the war in Iran, declaring, “The reason we lost is the war,” and pointing to voters’ demands to put America first and, in his words, “change our relationship to Israel.”
Different parties, different ideological premises, but an increasingly similar conclusion. The horseshoe theory of politics: the far left and far right bend toward one another in a growing willingness to distance themselves from the Jewish state and, in some cases, from the Jewish people themselves. The result of it all? For me, a profound and unsettling feeling of political homelessness. Where does one turn when neither side of the political aisle offers comfort? How does one remain faithful to one’s Jewish fidelities without surrendering an inch of one’s stake in the American project? How does one remain a committed participant in a political community while feeling increasingly like a stranger within it?
The opening scene of this morning’s Torah reading, Ḥayyei Sarah, finds our founding patriarch Abraham seeking to purchase a burial plot for his beloved late wife Sarah. Approaching the inhabitants of the land, Abraham introduces himself: Ger v’toshav anokhi imakhem. “I am a stranger and resident among you. Sell me a burial site that I may bury my dead.” There is much to be said about the verse, not least its significance as a foundational biblical text for the Jewish people's ancient claim to the land. Consider the strangeness of Abraham's self-description. Sixty-two years have passed since he first arrived in Canaan. He has built a life, raised a family, acquired wealth, forged alliances, and earned the respect of his neighbors. After more than six decades, why does Abraham need to introduce himself at all, much less as a stranger? And what are we to make of the apparent contradiction in his words? Ger, a stranger; toshav, a resident. Which is it? The medieval commentator Ibn Ezra explains that ger, standing alone, describes a transient stranger, whereas ger v’toshav describes one who, though an outsider, has settled in the land. Abraham seems to be, or at least sees himself as, both: a man who has put down roots and established a place among his neighbors, yet never entirely shed his status as a stranger.
The dean of twentieth-century Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, saw in Abraham’s seemingly contradictory self-description something essential about the perennial condition of the Jew. In his classic essay on the subject, Soloveitchik explains that Abraham’s words capture the dual identity of Jews living in a non-Jewish society. Abraham was a toshav, a resident, fully engaged in the life of his community: digging wells, forging relationships, contributing to the common welfare, and demonstrating loyalty to its institutions. As Soloveitchik writes, “Abraham was clearly a fellow citizen, a patriot among compatriots.” But Abraham was also a ger, a stranger. His civic belonging did not require him to surrender his religious distinctiveness. He was bound by a covenant, guided by beliefs and obligations that set him apart from the surrounding society. To be a Jew, Soloveitchik teaches, is to inhabit both identities simultaneously: to be a loyal and engaged citizen, invested in the welfare of the society one calls home, while remaining answerable to a set of convictions that no society, political party, or prevailing consensus can fully encompass. Ger v’toshav. At once an insider and an outsider, belonging and yet standing apart.
From Abraham in ancient Canaan to the Jews of medieval Europe navigating the tensions between communal autonomy and political dependence to Moses Mendelssohn in enlightenment Germany to Soloveitchik and America, Jews have continually sought to remain faithful to their particular commitments without surrendering their stake in the societies they call home. The circumstances have changed, but the underlying tension endures. How to be fully Jewish and fully engaged in the world around us; how to preserve our distinctiveness without retreating into isolation; how to belong without surrendering who we are. Different in every generation, yet arguably the most enduring feature of Jewish existence. Ger v’toshav. A stranger and a resident, at one and the same time.
I recognize that I have solved nothing. Identifying a condition is not the same as resolving it. Whatever comfort there may be in discovering that Jews have confronted this tension before does not make our present circumstances any less disorienting. So where does that leave us? Where do we go from here? This morning, I want to suggest three interrelated principles – guideposts, if you will – to consider as we wake up to this changed political landscape.
First, resist the temptation to surrender either side of our identity. We must not abandon our Jewish commitments for the sake of political belonging, nor abandon our civic commitments because political belonging has become uncomfortable. An ancient teaching in the Talmud compares the way of Torah to a path running between two extremes: fire on one side, snow on the other. Veer too far in one direction and you are consumed by flames; veer too far in the other and you freeze. What is a person to do? Y’halekh ba-emtza, teaches the Talmud, walk in the middle. Not because the middle is easy, but because the alternative is to lose something essential. It isn't easy. But as the movie line goes: “It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” Our calling is to be both ger and toshav - unapologetically Jewish and unapologetically invested in the American experiment, even when the path between the two is narrow, uncomfortable, and difficult to navigate.
Second, take the long view. As the election results rolled in, I kept thinking of the scene near the end of the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” in which the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character tells a story about a boy who receives a horse for his fourteenth birthday. Everyone in the village celebrates his good fortune. “How wonderful!” they exclaim. But the Zen master responds, “We'll see.” Two years later, the boy falls from the horse and breaks his leg. “How terrible!” lament the villagers. Again, the Zen master responds, “We'll see.” Then war breaks out, and all the young men of the village are called off to fight - except the boy, whose broken leg keeps him home. “How wonderful!” rejoice the villagers. And once again, the Zen master responds, “We'll see.” The lesson is not that nothing matters, or that we should be indifferent to what happens around us. Elections matter, policies matter, and Tuesday's victories and defeats are consequential. But no election, no political realignment, no single moment in the life of a democracy is the final word. Who imagined that Trump would be elected president in 2016? That in 2020, Biden would defeat him, only for Trump to return to the White House four years later? If the political fortunes of the last decade teach us anything, it is the folly of believing that today’s reality is tomorrow’s destiny. The point is not that we should sit back and wait for history to unfold. Quite the opposite. Nothing just happens; things happen in this world because people make them happen. History is still being written, and rather than merely wondering what the next chapter will bring, we must do our part to write it.
Third, finally, and most importantly: live proudly and publicly as Jews. When Abraham was first called to leave his ancestral home, God promised V’heyeh b’rakhah. “You shall be a blessing.” Not just that Abraham would be blessed, but that he would be a blessing to others: a covenantal identity not merely an inheritance to be preserved, but a charge to be an exemplar to others. And so, too, us today. We cannot control the direction of every political party, the positions of every elected official, or the shifting winds of public opinion. But we can control how we conduct ourselves. We can speak with conviction, engage with courage, build relationships across difference, relate to each other with civility, contribute to the common good, and live our Jewish lives with confidence rather than apology. To paraphrase Louis Brandeis: To be better Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, better Zionists. For our own sake, for the sake of our country, for the sake of Israel, and as an example to all Americans navigating the tensions between their particular identities and civic belonging. Our status, our distinctiveness, is not a liability to be managed but a blessing meant to be shared.
For some in this room, this has been a week of celebration. For others, quite the opposite. For me, it has been a jumble of emotions, most of all an unsettling feeling of political homelessness, of not being quite sure where I belong. My late, great teacher Rabbi Louis Jacobs was fond of quoting a Hasidic saying: “One who has no place anywhere has a place everywhere.” It is the paradox of Jewish existence, from Abraham to this very day. Ger v'toshav, strangers and residents, rooted in the societies in which we live, yet never wholly at home in them. It is a tension we did not create and a challenge we cannot escape. It is also an opportunity we must embrace. As have generations before us, may we find the courage to be firm in our convictions, the fortitude to remain engaged, and the confidence to be a blessing to all. Not waiting for a political home in which we can comfortably settle but making our home wherever we stand – and take a stand – as we journey into the unknown.
Besdin, Abraham R. Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought Adapted from the Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Vol 1. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1993.