Recently, I happened to be seated on a flight next to Yossi Klein Halevi, the writer and thinker whose books "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor" and “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden” (to name but two) have profoundly shaped a lot of my own thinking about Jewish identity, Jewish history, Israel and the Israel/Palestine conflict, spirituality, and power. We talked about many things, including our families and the state of the world and, most relevant to this post, the core of the Jewish story.
One thing he said: the miracle of the Jewish story is that, again and again, our ancestors snatched rebirth from the jaws of apocalypse.
I'm thinking about this sense of apocalypse in our global moment as I also just finished reading "King: A Life," Jonathan Eig’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr. King's life illuminates our present moment with uncanny clarity. He understood that true liberation begins in the spirit before it manifests in society. He recognized that those who wield power while willfully averting their gaze from their own deficiencies will inevitably inflict that damage upon those they govern. He contended that the only pragmatic approach to fighting such massive power had to be rooted in the deepest, most stubborn love that can be conjured by human life.
The sense of apocalypse
Before we go deeper, it’s worth asking: what is an apocalypse? The word apocalypse itself means "unveiling" or "revelation," suggesting that what's being destroyed isn't just the material world around us but the veneer over reality that allows us to live without confronting the deep brokenness within us and around us. We feel apocalypse when the world as we've known it—with all its invisible structures and scaffolding—begins to crash down on us.
The veil is lifted and we see—we are facing ruin.
It is terrifying, yes, but as I write this in the middle of the holiday of Passover, also called z’man cherutaynu/“the time of our freedom,” it is also clarifying, and perhaps liberating.
We all carry wounds—this is the universal human condition in an imperfect world. But there is an essential distinction between acknowledging our brokenness as a path to healing and allowing that brokenness to calcify into callousness.
Right now, broken souls hold the highest positions of power in our society. What makes their brokenness particularly dangerous is not its existence—we all have brokenness—but their profound aversion to healing it. Trump and his ilk have turned away from the painful work of self-examination. Rather than confronting their wounds, they have developed thick calluses over them—emotional scar tissue that prevents healing while utterly deadening their ability to feel. And so they are cruel toward others, particularly those perceived as vulnerable.
They have discovered a terrible truth: in our world, one can accumulate great material power without spiritual growth. And so that’s what they do.
Paths to wholeness
The big questions for us: what do we do? How might we draw on the Jewish wisdom of snatching rebirth from the jaws of our current apocalypse? What can we glean from MLK’s commitment to love and nonviolence? Can the Tao provide us an opening?
I believe the true battle line is not, as often claimed, between the powerful and the weak or between fear and fearlessness. Rather, it's between resignation to fear and the courage to engage with our fear. To resign to fear is to surrender to those who have grown calloused; to engage it courageously is to provide the space and energy for our brokenness to heal. One path leads to numbness and perpetuation of harm; the other to wholeness and renewal.
I want to seek the path of wholeness in this moment of such sustained fear and outrage. Between the Tao, Jewish wisdom, and some of MLK’s Christian love, I’m beginning to feel out a way.
The Wholeness of Tao: In Taoist philosophy, Tao is something like the cosmic flow of the universe—the natural pattern that keeps all things in balance and harmony. Unspeakable in its essence, it is not a concept but an experience, one achieved through living awareness. In that awareness what we encounter is the wholeness of everything, we sink from our wounds into the flow as part of something greater. A soul melts into the Tao and therein it is both at one with the Tao and whole unto itself and in that wholeness, it becomes an indomitable force, indeed the most indestructible force in existence. When we remain open to our brokenness rather than growing calloused, when we welcome in our wounds and treat them gently and softly, we allow the Tao to flow through us, leading us to a power far greater than the might of the broken and cruel. Chapter 78 of the Tao reads:
Nothing in the world is soft and weak as water.
But when attacking the hard and strong
Nothing can conquer so easily.
Weak overcomes strong, soft overcomes hard.Everyone knows this, no one attains it.
Therefore the Sage says:Accept a country's filth
And become master of its sacred soil.
Accepts country's ill fortune
And become king under heaven.
True words resemble their opposites.
Living Torah: As Yossi Klein Halevi said, Jewish wisdom lives by dint of its evolution in times of calamitous crisis. Consider the story from the Talmud of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai during the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome in 70 CE. —Jerusalem was under siege while the zealots who ruled refused peace negotiations. Yochanan, foreseeing the coming catastrophe and in a dramatic act of spiritual imagination, had his disciples ferry him out of the city in a coffin, pretending to be dead to bypass the zealot soldiers guarding against the escape of their own people. Once outside, he sought an audience with the Roman general Vespasian and secured permission to establish a center of Jewish learning in Yavneh. The symbolism is perfect—from within a coffin came the lifeline that created what we know as Judaism. At Yavneh, Rabbi Yochanan transformed the Temple-centered religion into a spiritual container of debate, striving, study, and prayer. Its core tenet, according to Rabbi Akiba—considered by many the greatest of the rabbis of his era—is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Philosophy of Nonviolence and Christian Agape (Love): King understood that when facing adversaries with superior material resources, the weaker party will lose a violent struggle. To him, the fight on spiritual ground is as pragmatic as it is necessary. Nonviolence, as King taught, isn't passive acceptance but the most demanding form of resistance. It requires remaining open to our pain—fully experiencing the weight of injustice without becoming numb to it. King recognized that the leadership of people who have numbed themselves to their own inner brokenness poses the greatest threat to freedom. Perhaps most importantly to us, he knew that spiritual oppression always precedes physical oppression. By refusing to harden his heart even in the face of overwhelming violence, King accessed a moral authority that no physical force could overcome.
An era of dissidence
These three wisdom traditions converge on a single truth: our response to brokenness determines whether we contribute to healing or further harm. As we now enter an era of dissidence, we must remember the tenets provided to us by these timeless wisdom traditions: to open ourselves to softness, to let our wounds pull us deeper toward the Tao and our collective Oneness; to search for our opportunities for renewal as Rabbi Yochanan did; and to remain steadfast in confrontation from the moral high ground as Martin Luther King Jr. did.
The Trump administration has already conducted illegal detention and deportation of noncitizens—actions the Supreme Court recently declared unlawful. Whether or not this administration will begin illegally detaining and deporting citizens remains to be seen, but the pattern is clear. Leaders who refuse to examine their own brokenness inevitably inflict that damage outward, first through spiritual oppression and then through physical harm. As I believe King would counsel us today, attempting to fight a conventional battle against materially superior forces is futile. Instead, we must wage a spiritual, nonviolent campaign. This means remaining open to our pain while responding with love rather than hatred. It means refusing to mirror the callousness of those in power by becoming calloused ourselves.
Right now, I stand at the threshold of fatherhood, about to welcome a child into this challenging world. As I contemplate the world my child will inherit, I find myself anchored by faith in truth regardless of what the powerful proclaim, and by striving for the courage to remain open-hearted in a world in which living inside the walls of the house of fear is so much simpler.
James Baldwin once said that he had a moral obligation to be optimistic, because he was alive. As I sit with my living breath now, preparing to guide a new life through our broken world, I feel much the same. The spiritual battle upon us is daunting and it will be immensely difficult. We witness the crimes, material and spiritual, perpetrated against our fellow human beings. We see the criminals compounding the pain of their acts by claiming to do them in our name. And we will cry out and we will march and we will resist. If we remain true, if we open to adaptation, if we are always recentering in profound love with all its pain, we will win.
Thank you. Are there any high profile thought leaders you know who are modeling this kind of morally staunch love?
Thank you for this wise, inspiring essay! I love this way of looking at brokenness as something necessary for self-knowledge and liberation. Wishing the best for you, your family, and your upcoming fatherhood!