To Be a Jew After the Election

There’s an old Jewish joke, usually set in Berlin in the 1930s. A Jew is sitting on a park bench reading Der Stürmer, the Nazi newspaper. His friend walks by, horrified. “What are you doing reading that garbage?” And the man answers: “When I read our Jewish papers, it’s all bad news: pogroms, persecution, people fleeing for their lives. But in this paper? We control the banks, we run the governments, we start the wars. Here, at least, I get good news!”

I don’t think I’ve ever told a joke from this bimah that fits a week quite as well as this one.

This past Tuesday was Election Day. I suspect many of us woke up Wednesday disappointed; some were pleased, and almost all of us, however we voted, woke up uneasy about where things are heading.

Some of us are troubled by Michigan, where voters elected a senator who has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide and apartheid, with the support not only of his party’s progressive wing but of Josh Shapiro, one of the proudest Jewish public servants in America. Are views about Israel that were once fringe becoming normal in a party so many American Jews have long called home?

And some of us are troubled by what we heard from the White House the next morning. Vice President Vance wrote that “the reason we lost is the war.” Then, citing a pollster, he listed what Trump voters who switched to the Democrats said would bring them back: end the war, focus on the cost of living, put America First, and change our relationship with Israel. The President said Vance was probably right, but that he would do it all again. It is legitimate to debate the war with Iran. But when “change our relationship with Israel” appears on a list of reasons for losing an election, many of us hear where that conversation can go next: a war Israel wanted, gas prices Americans paid for, an election Israel cost us.

That same morning, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, put it more bluntly than most of us would dare: “So ends half a century of the U.S.-Israel relationship as we have known it.” But the line that stayed with me came later. For the voices now setting the tone, on the left and the right alike, he wrote that the issue is no longer what Israel does. It is who Israel is.

Oren was writing about Israel. But many of us heard ourselves. When the objection is no longer to a policy but to an identity, it doesn’t stop at a border. And so, whichever way we lean, the fear is the same: that when things go wrong, Jews will be blamed. Underneath that fear is a question American Jews haven’t had to ask out loud for a long time: Do we really belong here?

People answer that question in two ways. Some hold on tighter: we belong here completely, so let’s be all in, tie our Jewish future to our political camp, and assume that if our side wins, we’re safe. Others let go: “This is it. America is turning on us. We should start packing.”

These sound like opposite answers, but they make the same mistake. Both assume we have to choose: either we are fully at home here, or we are strangers passing through.

The Torah gives a different answer, in the first piece of land a Jew ever owns. Avraham stands before the people of Chet to buy a grave for Sarah, and he says: “Ger v’toshav anochi imachem.” I am a stranger, and I am a resident among you.

Not one or the other. Both.

But can you really be both? The Gur Aryeh states the problem bluntly: “אם הוא גר אינו תושב, ואם הוא תושב אינו גר.” “If he is a stranger, he is not a resident. And if he is a resident, he is not a stranger.”

The Mizrachi answers that Avraham is both at once: “שבזמן אחד נקרא גר ותושב בחלוף הבחינות, גר מצד שהוא מארץ אחרת, ותושב מצד שנתיישב עמהם.” “At the same time he is both, in different respects: a stranger, because he comes from another land, and a resident, because he has settled among them.”

Centuries later, Rav Soloveitchik made this the heart of his essay “Confrontation.” The Jew, he taught, is a full participant in the society around him, and at the same time, set apart by his covenant with Hashem. And he insisted that we may not choose one side. Our task is to live with both.

The Ohr HaChaim asks: if Avraham needs the people of Chet to treat him as a resident, why mention that he’s a ger at all? He answers: “כי חש לומר על עצמו תושב בעולם הזה והוא הפך מדת הצדיקים.” “Because he was wary of calling himself a resident of this world, which is the opposite of the way of tzaddikim.”

If a tzaddik won’t call himself fully at home even in this world, a Jew should be careful about calling himself fully at home in any country. Jewish history, from Spain to Germany, is full of communities that believed they had become fully toshavim, only to learn how fragile that was.

But the Malbim warns against the opposite temptation. A ger, he says, would never ask for a permanent family burial plot, because he doesn’t plan to stay. So why does Avraham ask for one? “ועתה אני רוצה להיות תושב לשבת פה בקביעות עם בני ביתי.” “Because now I want to become a resident, to live here permanently with my household.”

Avraham has just suffered the greatest loss of his life. If ever there was a moment to say, “This isn’t really home,” this was it. Instead, at the moment of his deepest grief, Avraham doesn’t pack up. He puts down roots.

And look at how he does it. The Ramban explains that each family had its own burial ground, with one common field for strangers. Avraham refuses the strangers’ field. Then the people of Chet offer him the choicest of their own graves, and he refuses that too. He won’t be pushed to the margins, and he won’t disappear into them. He insists on a place of his own, “imachem,” among them. He pays full price, publicly, at the city gate. He bows to his neighbors, gracious and respectful. But he never apologizes for being there, and he never makes himself smaller.

So what do we do this week? Avraham shows us three things.

First, be a ger v’toshav. Avraham insisted on a place among his neighbors. So do we. We vote, we serve, we build relationships across the aisle, and we stay engaged in American life. As the Rav taught, this isn’t a “secular” part of our lives; our citizenship is part of our avodat Hashem. And notice that Avraham didn’t negotiate with friends of his choosing. He negotiated with the neighbors he had. As Rabbi Noah Farkas of the Los Angeles Federation put it this week, we work with whoever wins; that is what it means to be a minority in the Diaspora. But Avraham also called himself a ger. We are full participants, yet our deepest identity and our ultimate security don’t come from any party or any election. The question is not which party we belong to, but whether those in power, on either side, make room for Jewish safety, Jewish identity, and our bond with Israel. So when we hear troubling words, we don’t panic, and we don’t disengage. But we also don’t tell ourselves “hakol b’seder.” The toshav keeps showing up. The ger remembers who he is.

Second, be a nesi Elokim. Notice what happens next. Avraham introduces himself in the humblest terms possible: “I’m just a stranger here.” And the people of Chet answer, “Nesi Elokim atem b’tocheinu – you are a prince of God among us.” Why? Not because of power or wealth, but because of who he was: his open tent, his kindness, his integrity. And the Midrash HaGadol says it was precisely because he presented himself as a ger. Hashem told him, “אתה השפלת עצמך, חייך שאני משימך אדון ונשיא עליהם.” You humbled yourself, so I will make you a prince among them. Avraham never demanded standing. He earned it.

We can’t control who wins elections or what people say about us on the news. And we should judge our friends, on every side, the way Avraham judged Efron: not by warm words, but by deeds. But here is what we can control: whether our neighbors, coworkers, and the people we do business with look at us and say, “nesi Elokim atah betocheinu.” That happens in how we treat the cashier and the contractor, whether our word can be trusted, and whether we’re the first to show up when a neighbor is in trouble. That standing no election can take away, because no election gave it to us.

Third, build the next generation. What is Avraham’s very next act after burying Sarah? At 137, grieving, among neighbors who are polite but not quite friends, he sends Eliezer to find a wife for Yitzchak. In his darkest week, Avraham invests in tomorrow.

That instinct has carried our people through every era. We’ve known expulsions, pogroms, and kings who wished us gone, and an election is not even in the same category. Yet each time, the Jewish response was the same. When a community was destroyed, Jews planted a new one somewhere else. When a shul burned, they gathered the next week in someone’s living room. They leaned on one another, held their heads high, and refused to let others write their story. And through it all, they brought children into the world and raised them as Jews.

So must we. Strengthen our children’s Jewish education, fill our Shabbat tables, fill our shuls, and deepen our bond with Israel, so that our identity doesn’t rise and fall with any election.

Let me end with that field in Chevron.

It didn’t look like much: one field and one cave, bought at an inflated price, in the worst week of Avraham’s life. But Rav Hirsch teaches that the word “achuzah” doesn’t mean a person holds the land. It means the land holds him. The first thing that ever bound Avraham to the land, he writes, “הקשר הראשון שיכבול אותו לאדמה,” was Sarah’s grave.

And look how that land held on to his children.

About fifteen hundred years ago, Jews carved their names into the walls of the building over the cave: names like Nachum, Tanchum, and Yaakov. Jews, praying at the graves of the Avot and Imahot, a millennium and a half ago.

Then, in 1267, Jews were banned from entering. For seven hundred years they could climb only to the seventh step outside, and they prayed there toward a small hole in the wall believed to face the graves. You might imagine bitter prayers. But the accounts of Jewish travelers describe the opposite: they came with joy, like children coming to visit their parents. Seven hundred years on the outside, and they still came with joy, because those were their parents.

On the eighth of June 1967, the day after he blew the shofar at the Kotel, Rabbi Shlomo Goren arrived at the gates of Me’arat HaMachpelah with a sefer Torah and a shofar, went inside, and prayed, the first Jew to do so in some seven hundred years.

And this Shabbat, Shabbat Chayei Sarah, tens of thousands of Jews, including my son Daniel, gather in Chevron to hear this very parsha read, in the very place it describes.

Where are the people of Chet? Where is Efron? They’re a footnote.

Which brings me back to the man on the park bench. He was learning who he was from the people who hated him. Avraham never did, and neither will we. We don’t read about ourselves in other people’s papers. We know who we are because of a field in Chevron, bought with dignity in the middle of grief, that still holds Avraham’s children nearly four thousand years later.

Elections come and go. Accusers come and go. What lasts is what we build the way Avraham built: as ger v’toshav, engaged in the world around us and rooted in who we are.

May we show up as gerim and toshavim, may our neighbors call us nesi Elokim, and may we keep building, one child, one Shabbat table, one generation at a time. Am Yisrael Chai.