Bob Schwartz

There are thousands of people, from undergraduate students of foreign relations and political science to world class experts and statesmen, who know more about the complexities of Israel and the Middle East than the president. But we’ve got what we’ve got.

Most nations think that Israel is on a wrong path. Most Americans think Israel is on a wrong path. Most American Jews think Israel is on the wrong path.

On the other hand, the Israeli administration thinks it’s on the right path. Many, not all, American Republicans think Israel is on the right path. A major American lobbying group thinks Israel is on the right path, and puts it’s money where its position is.

Then there’s the president, who knows little and cares little for the complicated big picture. He generally sides with Israel, and thinks he can be known as the historic one who solved the Middle East. Quixotic hardly describes it. He is Don Quixote without a horse or an able assistant.

Netanyahu sees the president’s ignorance and uncertainty. So when the president came up with a 15-point peace plan, Israel found it unacceptable.

The official Israeli response was no, but the implicit response is: pick a side. If you, Mr President, try to lean even a little way away from unconditional support, we will unleash holy hell on the American political scene, and you will be caught up in it.

We appreciate that you and those loyal to you have been on our side. But you must have realized that once you are with us you are with us. That is precisely the standard you have set for your own  followers. If you are not with me, 100 percent, you are against me. I am saying the exact same thing. Pick a side.

There are a lot of adjectives we attach in describing people, some commonly, some not so much. The same applies to our description of the American president.

Watching his obsession with prosecuting a decent man, a former Olympian, for the made up crime of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, brought another word to mind.

Petty. It doesn’t have the harsh power of so many other descriptions of the president. It is something we might toss at a friend or loved one, when they’ve made something big out of something that didn’t deserve it.

Many don’t consider the president a friend or loved one. Another difference is that with this obsession comes the power to prosecute and potentially jail a demonstrably innocent person, so innocent that the prosecutor dropped the bogus charge.

This is where petty becomes a useful word. Petty plus power is an apt description of one aspect of the situation, though far from the only one. Petty people with power are nothing new, but in every case contradict our basic sense of fairness. The legal system for one, since that is the topic here, is built to prevent unsupported pettiness, a very human trait, from having dire effect. That is the guardrail that keeps personal obsession and vengeance from becoming vendetta or policy.

The most petty president is also the most powerful person. An unfortunate combination.

The upcoming Jewish New Year 5787, which begins with Rosh Hashanah on the evening of September 11, 2026, is declared the Jewish Year of Compassion.

This obviously has no formal or official effect. I have no position and very limited influence. It is just urging the Jewish communities to focus more on compassion this coming year.

I’ve posted regularly about the High Holidays. Here is a post from 2024:

Confession for the Jewish High Holidays 5785/2024

I have been reticent to publicly and widely express my views about the positions of Israel and Jewish communities on the current Israeli war on Gaza. Not that expressing divergent views is discouraged. But it is frequently the source of dispute with little movement. So my views have been expressed in small circles. I have posted about Gaza, urging support for extraordinary work of the International Rescue Committee, which seems to me humanely neutral.

By 2024, a year after the Gaza war began, I had a growing sense that more focus on compassion—great and unconditional compassion—might be beneficial. The 2024 post above was about a central part of the High Holidays liturgy: confession. Was I suggesting, obliquely, that among the matters that we confess on the holidays—we all have lots to confess—maybe the treatment of the Gazan people was one of them?

The point of the Declaration is to increase the Jewish focus on compassion. This is not in any way to suggest that compassion is not a significant element of the tradition or that the Jewish communities and their members are uncompassionate. The only point of the Declaration is to promote investigation this New Year, as communities and as people, into whether compassion has been conditioned and qualified in ways that subvert or contradict the most basic—the most central—principles of the tradition. Whether human compassion, not just God’s compassion, should play a greater role in the High Holidays and in Jewish policies and positions.

5787: The Jewish Year of Compassion

The best remedy is a sense of humor. Don’t take your self-centeredness so seriously. Undermine the whole process by laughing at yourself. Recognize the irony: “I want happiness so badly, but my self-cherishing just makes me suffer. Even though I know this, I still can’t abandon my attachment to this self!” It’s very funny, when you think about it. Life is full of irony. Samsara is full of irony. Mind is full of irony. So try to be witty enough to see and appreciate this irony. Laugh at all your contradictions, especially the contradiction between your intentions and your counterproductive ways of fulfilling them. There’s no point in being heavy-handed and feeling so serious about your self-importance. When your habits are so strong that your thoughts and feelings are beyond your control, what else can you do but laugh? Humor is very important in the process of dismantling the ego. Without humor, it’s hard to be a practitioner.
–Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart

In 1947, Readers Digest launched a popular humor column called Laughter, the Best Medicine, which is still running. Science has confirmed the positive effect of laughter, but it is only half a story.

Laughing at yourself is both a remedy, as Dzigar Kongtrul says, and an effect of a realization. It will help lighten up and get you to the realization of what the self—your self—actually is. Or is not. The more you realize that, the more people and things will seem funny.

“What’s so funny about _____?”, you say, pointing to some suffering and horror, yours or anybody or everybody else’s.

As a rhetorical question, that seems to make sense, since we can list circumstances and situations that defy the slightest bit of humor. But if you treat it as a real question in all situations, you might find out something about yourself. You might find, as Dzigar Kongtrul points out, that whatever you are planning or doing has no hope of making things better and easing your suffering. In fact it might be making your suffering worse. Not only might there be a better way, but if you take the right path not driven by your own thinking, you already know what that way is.

“I am going to build a church someday. It will have a holy of holies and a holy of holy of holies, and in that ultimate box will be a random number table.”
Gregory Bateson

Randomness rules. Our attempts at order and control, intelligent or less so, benign or malignant, only go so far. Then randomness intervenes.

Good or bad, there it is. Which makes it worth contemplating, because maybe surprisingly, it turns out to be worth thinking about.

More and more, science has been humbled, realizing that any of its constructs don’t account for more and more observations. Order will only get you so far. Scientists didn’t need to apply all their hard-won expertise to realize that. As human beings they—we—already knew that, if we paid attention.

Please continue to do your best for the best by bringing some version of order to chaos. But be humble about it, not only aware of the limitations, but living in the limitations. Walk into Bateson’s church, into the holy of holies of holies of holies, and read that random number table. There you are.

Note: Randomness has plenty of practical applications. Lotteries can be found in the Bible. The I Ching has been reading random throws for millennia. If you are interested in exploring the practice of randomness, the options are many. Dice rolls, coin flips, etc. In digital times, a number of programs have been developed to generate as-close-to-true random numbers as possible. We can also turn to AI models to generate randomness, though they will tell you that for truer randomness, hardware-based applications come closer.