To explain the victory of Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States, people keep quoting from Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” the story of a fascist takeover of our country.
The results of last week’s election hit with the force of a crash. The car was our democracy and now there is wreckage everywhere.
It seems very clear to me that FBI Director James Comey’s Oct. 28 letter announcing a reopening of the investigation into emails from Hillary Clinton changed the outcome of the election. For nine of the final 11 days before the election, the negative story dominated the news and cast a cloud over her candidacy, and the polls reflected a downturn for Clinton during that same time. In the end, Clinton narrowly lost four states — Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where voters who said they decided in the final week greatly favored Donald Trump.
Typically, I try to keep politics off of the pulpit. I believe the job of clergy is to help people deepen their relationship with God, and I recommend only that everyone act ethically and become active and involved in their political passions.
To the approximately 30 percent of American Jews who supported, voted for and have celebrated Donald Trump’s win; and to the approximately 75 percent of my fellow Iranian-American Jews who are part of the 30 percent:
Turns out that the whole Democratic Party lost hugely on Election Day. In addition to losing the presidency, Republicans retained control of the Senate despite far more Republican Senate seats being on the ballot; they held their already substantial majority in the House of Representatives; and now 33 of the nation’s 50 governors are Republican.
In his inspiring book \”Words That Hurt, Words that Heal,\” Rabbi Joseph Telushkin wrote: “Because words can be used to inflict devastating and irrevocable suffering, Jewish teachings go so far as to compare cruel words to murder.”
As scholars of Jewish history, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles.
I listen to girls in the school hallways as they hopefully talk about their grades, their college test scores, their eagerness to leave our progressive, liberal, all-girls school bubble; they will take up jobs they are more than qualified for and reach the top of the work force’s hierarchy.
