June is the new November.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the last election cycle, it is this. Because of how our election system works, because of New York's political demography, because democracy is, at its core, a get-what-you-vote-for, garbage-in-garbage-out proposition, we now know what we wish we had known then. The elections that matter most for our community are not in November. They are in June. The primary is where New York is won and lost.
Election Day is June 23. Early voting runs June 13 through the 21. Now is the time to know the issues. Now is the time to know the candidates. Now is the time, if need be, to request your mail-in ballot. There are races that demand our attention. New York's 12th Congressional District – our district – where Jerry Nadler is retiring after more than thirty years. Assembly District 73 here on the Upper East Side. Assembly District 69 in that far-away place called the Upper West Side. New York's 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. These are not abstractions. These contests will shape the landscape in which we live for years to come.
You can feel it in the air. You can feel it right here in this sanctuary. Last month we hosted the governor. The month before, Speaker Julie Menin. Last night we were visited by a candidate for New York State Attorney General. This coming Friday night, June 5,, as part of UJA's Civic Engagement Shabbat, we will welcome Comptroller Mark Levine. This very morning, there are candidates for public office here in the pews.
In Chicago, where I lived for about a decade, we had a saying: "Vote early, vote often." In New York, we now say, “Vote early – in the primaries – because come November, it will be too late.” June is the new November.
Tempted as I am to tell you whom to vote for, I have no intention of doing so this morning. It was much easier identifying leaders in biblical times. God appeared at a burning bush. A shepherd boy felled a giant with his slingshot. A woman was chosen by a king in a kingdom-wide beauty contest. Nowadays it falls to each of us to research the principles, platforms, and policies of the candidates before us, and then vote accordingly. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires the work of an informed citizenry. And if you can't be bothered to do that work, you forfeit your right to complain about the leaders you get.
One need look no further than this morning's haftorah to see both the promise and the pitfalls of leadership. We read of the birth of Samson, the most tragic of ancient Israel’s judges, made famous to this day by the lyrics of the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen, among others. Samson is destined to lead Israel before he takes his first breath: announced by an angel, consecrated as a Nazirite, and endowed with superhuman strength – so long as he keeps his vows, chief among them never cutting his hair. The promise could not be clearer. And yet, Samson never fulfills it. He never translates his gifts into purpose. His downfall comes when Delilah extracts the secret of his power and delivers him to his Philistine enemies, who gouge out his eyes. And in his final act, our champion in chains – Samson Agonistes – blinded and mocked, brings the Philistine temple down on everyone, himself included.
Samson’s story is not just the story of one flawed man. It is a morality tale, if not a political allegory whose lessons extend well beyond the Bible. Unlike the other judges – Gideon, Jephthah, or my personal favorite, Deborah – Samson never leads Israel into battle. He never shows the slightest interest in the spiritual life of his people. He is a boastful rogue, a man of appetites, constitutionally drawn to foreign women – a failing, in biblical speak, that is not just personal but theological. He has a proclivity to stray toward foreign culture, foreign values, and foreign gods. How does a person blessed with so much arrive at such ruin? Scholars have been wrestling with that question for thousands of years, producing a cottage industry of biblical commentary on Samson's psychological profile, which, for the purposes of today, I will call the “Samson syndrome.”
At its core, Samson is a man who could not stop seeking the love of the very people who wished him harm. The Delilah exchange is the culmination of a pattern that began much earlier, in Samson’s youth. His first act of human agency was going out to find a bride from the Philistines, Israel's sworn enemy. Foreshadowing Samson's ultimate fall, Samson's first wife, at the behest of her Philistine kin, tries to coax the answer to his riddle from him, inflaming Samson’s rage and prompting her father to give her in marriage to one of Samson's very own wedding companions, a betrayal that is the first of many lessons from which Samson refuses to learn.
Showing no capacity for self-correction, the next chapter has Samson once again seeking companionship from a woman in the enemy territory of Gaza, where, predictably, the residents lie in ambush. And then, a third time, and most famously, Samson falls for Delilah the seductress, who, at the behest of the Philistine chieftains, seeks out the secret of his strength, which the reader knows to be his uncut hair, the mark of his Nazirite vow. “How can you say you love me when you don't confide in me,” Delilah pleads. “You haven't told me what makes you so strong.” Delilah sees it. The Philistines see it. Even the reader sees it. Samson, for some reason, does not. Soon enough, his hair shorn and himself in the hands of his captors, his blindness will go from a psychological condition to a physical one.
The story of Samson is a story about betrayal, about a womanizer, a flawed and failed hero. It is about all those things. But it is also about something deeper. It is about the narcissistic need for acceptance and universal validation, about the abandonment of principle and peoplehood in search of the approval of the other, about the short-term craving for belonging even when it comes at the expense of long-term safety and survival. And it is the insight of my teacher Professor Ed Greenstein that Samson's story is not just about one man. It is about us. About the Jewish people's recurring need to seek legitimacy from those who do not wish us well. About a people born into covenant, blessed with gifts that have outlasted empire after empire — and yet are still somehow drawn, generation after generation, toward the Delilahs of the age. To those who ask, with a smile, to be let in on our secret, and then do us harm. A single flaw that undoes everything else: Samson’s need to be loved by others more than he needs to be faithful to his own people and principles.
And if you think that flaw died with Samson in the ruins of the Philistine temple, think again. I think of Shakespeare's Shylock, a Jew who lent money to the very merchant who had spat upon him in public, not because he needed the business, but because he wanted to be seen as an equal, and who, in the end, was stripped of his wealth, his faith, and his dignity. I think of the great German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who submitted to baptism at age twenty-eight – in his words, the ticket of admission to European civilization – whose conversion bought him nothing he was promised. Most of all, I think of what Amos Elon called “the pity of it all,” describing German Jewry before the Holocaust, who had given Germany everything and could not bring themselves to believe that Germany would take everything in return. Different centuries, different Delilahs.
And now, what about today? Who are the Delilahs of our generation? Sadly, they are coming from all sides - the right, the left, domestic, and international.
The Mishnah teaches: kol ahavah she-hi t’luyah b'davar, any love that is dependent on something – when that thing is gone, the love is gone. It is the oldest warning against the transactional embrace. And yet we keep falling for it. We are well familiar with the pro-Israel right of the Victor Orbán variety. Leaders who peddle in antisemitic language and yet are welcomed by segments of the pro-Israel community, perceived as reliable allies against other enemies. Never mind the Soros campaigns. Never mind the rehabilitation of wartime collaborators. The transaction feels too useful to refuse.
This transactional logic has now taken root here at home, and we are paying the price. On the right, antisemites of the non-interventionist/nationalist variety, whose rhetoric would have been considered unspeakable a generation ago, have been normalized, platformed, and increasingly mainstreamed, in ways that embolden hatred and risk spilling into violence. kol ahavah she-hi t’luyah b'davar, when the thing they need from us is gone – the votes, the moral cover, the political utility – the love will be gone too. It was never love to begin with. A Delilah by another name.
And from the left? Here too, there is no shortage of Delilahs. I have, now with some regularity, expressed my concerns regarding Jewish anti-Zionism. For its rejection of Jewish peoplehood and the eight million Jews who live in Israel. For its anachronistic longing to inhabit some pre-State world detached from present reality. For its willingness to cede the definition of Zionism to the most extreme voices, the “river-to-the-sea” extremists beyond the Jewish fold and, painfully, within it.
What I will add today is the Delilah aspect of it all. The willingness to minimize, rationalize, and explain away hostility to Jewish statehood in exchange for a seat at the table. The fantasy that if we are sufficiently self-critical, sufficiently distanced from Israel, if we go along to get along, they will finally love us. I have never been, and will never be, a rabbi who calls out another Jew as self-loathing or guilty of betrayal. Nobody can read my heart and I cannot read anyone else’s. What I can do is warn and caution and share my sincere belief that any politician or person who accepts you as a Jew only insofar as you check your love for Israel at the door is not accepting you as a Jew at all. Israel is only the beginning of what they want you to forgo. The asks will keep coming. The price of belonging will keep rising. They will leave us blinded and bound – shorn of everything that makes us who we are – and they will call it justice and inclusion.
So where does this leave us, other than with the self-evident fact that being Jewish today is not all ponies and rainbows? Two things. First, to be clear: the Samson story matters. Not because we are bound and blinded, or God forbid, because we are Jews in pre-war Germany. Samson matters because he is the paradigmatic antihero, placed in our canon precisely to teach us what not to do. It is a warning, not a verdict on what happens when we forget who we are. I did not ask to be Jewish, but to be a Jew is the greatest badge of pride I know, a badge of dignity, self-respect, responsibility, and accountability. It means accepting the conditions of my birth as an invitation to lead, to care for my people, my neighbor, and my common humanity. Jewish pride not just because I am proud to be Jewish, but because I believe with every fiber of my being that the only Jew the world will ever truly respect is a proud one. Not an apologetic Jew. Not a performatively self-critical Jew. Not a Jew who checks their Zionism at the door in exchange for a seat at someone else’s table. A Jew and a proud one.
Second, and here I return to where I began. When you engage in the democratic process, and I implore you to do so, take your Jewish pride with you. Take your unapologetic love of your people into your conversations, into your activism, and into the voting booth.
Tomorrow is the Celebrate Israel Parade on Fifth Avenue. It is not a secret. And it is happening on the eve of the primaries. If there were ever a moment for a public official to signal that they stand with the Jewish people, tomorrow is it. Barring a cataclysmic personal event which I wish upon no one, there is no defensible reason why anyone deserving of the Jewish vote would fail to show up on Fifth Avenue tomorrow and post the fact of their attendance on their website and social media for the world to see. A pre-primary sunny Sunday in Manhattan. It is rare that the good Lord provides us with such a clear and unambiguous litmus test. Based on pre-registration, Park Avenue Synagogue will have our largest-ever delegation marching tomorrow. I hope you are part of it or cheering from the sidewalk. But whether you march or not, find out who was there and who wasn't. And then take that information into the voting booth with you. You don't need me to tell you who stands with us. By tomorrow evening, the candidates will have told you themselves.
Of all that Samson is known for, the most enigmatic is his riddle. “Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.” Nobody can solve the riddle. "What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?" The answer is not honey. The answer it is not a lion. The answer is Samson. The answer is us.
Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the nations that have sought to consume us we emerged with the Torah, the prophets, and the tradition that has fed civilization for three thousand years. Out of the strong came something sweet. Out of persecution, exile, and wandering, the most embattled, most resilient, most tenacious people in human history emerged with a vision of justice, human dignity and pride – the sweetest honey from the remains of history itself. The same riddle stands before us today. The question is not whether we understand it, but whether we will act on it.
That is who we are. Walk proudly tomorrow. Vote proudly next month. Live proudly as a Jew, today and every day.