Rabbi's Week in Review Blog

A couple of snippets for this week’s blog. Last week, KCMO City Councilman Nathan Willett put forth a resolution ostensibly to fight antisemitism. Thankfully, it was defeated by the City Council. 

Recently, there has been a spate of politicians doing performative politics in their disingenuous concern about antisemitism. Willett, like Elise Stefanik and Michael Johnson et al., are now all about antisemitism. Yet their silence was deafening when it came to the tiki torch-carrying neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

In the case of Willett, he had proposed to follow up the resolution with a resolution in which the City Council would apologize to Harrison Butker for the criticism he received after his speech at Benedictine College. Mind you, Butker’s speech included a not-so-obscure reference to Jews having killed Jesus — an antisemitic trope that got a lot of Jews killed over the centuries. (By the way, we were “let off the hook” with Vatican II in 1965.)

All of which is to say, the recent “support” for fighting antisemitism is coming from folks who are not our friends. They fall in line with other white Christian nationalists who basically are saying this is a Christian country (read: anti-abortion, anti-diversity, homophobic and certainly not Jewish).  

On a lighter note, I write this blog sitting on the couch with my foot propped up, due to having broken it Sunday. During a run on a beautiful day, my foot conspired with a short, fat branch lying on the ground. I wish I could say I was doing something courageous, rather than simply being a klutz. 

While I could have received a good lesson without breaking my foot, I am reminded of others who face far more serious physical challenges, and the frustration that comes with not being able to just get up and go. (I am prohibited from putting any pressure on my foot for probably about six weeks.) In my zeal to always want to get somewhere, and to get there sooner rather than later, I need to realize the need for patience — patience for others and not just myself. And I need to be OK with getting help from others.

There are others who have faced restricted mobility for much longer and with far greater restrictions. While I am certain there will be times that I will slip into old mindsets and forget this lesson learned, my hope is to go forward with greater empathy and patience for others, even as I remain something less than patient about my own present state of being.