Mamdani’s Election as Mayor of NYC Is a Catastrophe? ‘We’ll See’

“G-d has blessed you, Chaim! What a wonder!”

Chaim smiled the way wheat smiles — slightly, with knowledge of weather. “We’ll see,” he said.

Three days later, the horse stumbled. Bone spoke its blunt language. The village smelled like iodine and worry. The officer’s uniform, still in paper, went back to the trunk.

“How terrible! How cruel!” the neighbors cried.

Chaim’s smile returned, that small crescent that refuses to be cornered by a single moment. “We’ll see.”

Six months passed and history knocked the door off its hinges. The map turned to fire. Young men in uniforms disappeared into the red mouth of war, and so many did not walk back out. The boy with the ruined leg stayed home—whole in the places war usually eats first.

“A miracle!” the village breathed.

“We’ll see,” Chaim said, and this time the words were a kind of prayer.

This is how the story is told: not to make us clever, but to teach us to hold our breath differently. Good and bad are labels our fear sticks on the future to tame it. But the world does not move in straight lines; it moves like a river under ice. The surface tells one story; the current tells another.

Now the curtain lifts over a different stage, a city of stone and steam and subways—the place where so many tongues learned how to speak to each other without losing their own names. In that city, people have chosen a leader. Some call it a dawn. Others call it a wound. Some hear the word “justice” and taste rain. Others hear “intifada,” “soak the rich,” “free for all,” and taste smoke. For one camp, it is a coronation of ideals. For the other, a siren.

The temptation in such hours is to declare the verdict at once. To stand on the steps of City Hall and lift a chalice or a curse. But the old peasant’s wisdom travels well: we don’t know yet what we have chosen—not because consequences don’t exist, but because they arrive in disguises.

Policies are seeds. Their fruit takes seasons to show its face. Rhetoric is weather. It can soften hard ground into spring, or it can flatten harvests we have not yet planted. A platform can sound like music and spend like mercy until the bill arrives. A promise can look like a door and open into a corridor without exits. We are not naïve about this; we have watched cities elsewhere ride that horse into a wall. We are not hard-hearted about this either; we know why the music plays. Pain votes too. It always has.

But the parable does not ask us to be indifferent; it asks us to be steadfastly awake. “We’ll see” is not a shrug. It is a discipline. It is the refusal to be drunk on victory or paralyzed by despair. It is the stubborn practice of counting what happens next—rent, safety, schools, bread, the pulse of small businesses, the frequency of sirens at 3 a.m., the dignity of the old woman with three bags climbing a broken escalator. It is the refusal to outsource reality to slogans.

Perhaps this new chapter will teach the city how to heal without consuming itself. Perhaps it will mistake rage for righteousness and arithmetic for oppression and wake to a ledger written in hunger. Perhaps it will do both, in chop and churn, and we will only understand what we lived after we have already lived it. That, too, is the way of things.

And the Jews of this city—what do we do, with our memory thick as honey and sharp as glass? We keep watch. We refuse to be flattered into amnesia by anyone’s poetry. We do not confuse compassion with complicity or mistake our neighbors for our judges. We test every lofty word against the safety of our children walking home in a kippah at dusk. We test every economic thunderclap against the quiet mathematics of a deli register at closing time. We do not let our fear curdle into hatred, and we do not let our goodness be mugged by euphemism. We learn the names of our doormen, our bus drivers, our bodega owners, and we pay attention to whether their days get better or worse.

The losers, they say, are the people of the city. But the people of the city are not a block to be tallied. They are an old man on a park bench making chess moves against the future. They are a nurse whose feet cry by midnight. They are a teacher who buys crayons with her own money. They are a kid learning trumpet in a building where elevators are a rumor. They are a woman who keeps a key under a rock for someone whose name she does not know, only the shape of his need. If there is losing, it will be measured there, in the places where policy lands like dust or bread.

So what do we do now? We trade prophecy for witness. We braid vigilance with mercy. We plant facts in the ground like markers and return to count them without lying to ourselves. We refuse to be entertained by our own outrage. We bless what is truly good when we see it, even if it wears a face we did not vote for. We name what is truly dangerous when we see it, even if it arrives wrapped in a word we once loved. We do not mistake the horse for the rider, nor the rider for the road.

And we remember the peasant who would not be rushed into certainty. The villagers needed resolution the way hungry mouths need sweetness. He needed truth. He knew how fast fortune changes clothes. He knew that a fall can spare a life and a triumph can invite a war. He knew that wisdom is often patient because it has seen too many mornings to worship a single dawn.

There is a time for speeches. There is also a time for invoices, police blotters, school attendance sheets, rent receipts, hospital intake forms—the humble paperwork of reality. The city will produce these in abundance. Read them. Trace them. Hold them up to the light. And keep your heart from either freezing or boiling.

History loves to sneak up with a ledger in its hand. It knocks softly. It says, “Count.”

We will count.

We will protect what is precious. We will refuse the cruelty that comes dressed as courage and the cowardice that comes dressed as love. We will keep a candle for our neighbors and a spine for ourselves. We will learn the lesson the story gives without pretending we know the ending the story withholds.

And when the years have turned this moment into a paragraph, we will tell what we saw, not what we were told to see. If it was rain, we will say rain. If it was smoke, we will say smoke. If it was both—if our beloved city learned something expensive and necessary—we will say that, too, without gloating or erasing.

For now, the ink is still wet. The horse has stumbled, the uniform is folded, the border is on fire, the son is home. Or not. Or both. The old man’s smile is the size of a scythe catching late light in a field that will be cut either way.

“We’ll see,” he says.

We will.