By the time you read these words, the election for president of the United States will be over. I don’t know if we will actually know the results yet, but it is entirely possible that we will not.
Regardless, the campaign leading up to the election has been perhaps the most contentious and difficult one in my memory. While elections are, by nature, contentious and often outright dirty, this one has far exceeded any expectations. The demonizing that took place to the extent that not one but two assassination attempts were made on a candidate for a major party is a testament to how things deteriorated.
The Difficult Yet Clarifying Nature of This Election
In all truth, I am worried about the aftermath of this election. I am concerned about the possible chaos and enmity that will emerge. This is not good for anyone in the country, but it doubly worries me as a Jew. Our history has shown that whenever there is turmoil, uncertainty, and flaring tensions in the world, the Jew is always in danger. He becomes the scapegoat for whoever has a grievance. We can only daven to the Baal Harachamim that He continues showering us with His protection and mercy.
At the same time, this election has been a very clarifying experience. It has made clear to all but the most naïve or stubborn among us that the longtime identification that Jews traditionally had with the Democratic Party is over. Not because labels mean anything; we don’t care if a person is a Democrat or a Republican. Rather, we care if there is room for us in their tent. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no room for Jews in the Democratic Party tent, not because we Jews have left the party, but rather because the party has sadly and tragically left us.
Virtually all the reasons why Jews traditionally felt at home in the Democratic Party no longer exist. Simply put, the party has changed.
The Story Behind Jews Aligning with the Democrats
Let me explain.
Why did Jews so identify with the Democrats in the last century? Newsweek’s Batya Unger Saragon explains: “As new arrivals here, we were overwhelmingly working class and brought a keen sense of the injustices suffered in the old country into the labor movement. When the Left shifted its focus from labor activism to civil rights, the persecution we had escaped and the memories of the Holocaust—just 20 years old when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge—made American Jews especially outraged at the injustices against black Americans, whose struggle for equality called upon a wellspring of Biblical texts for support and mirrored our own oppression in Europe. Even as the Left moved into a more identity-based iteration at the end of the twentieth century, progressive American Jews felt it was our role as people with privilege to stand with the oppressed—be they women…or undocumented immigrants. All of those do not apply anymore.
“After Hamas’s October 7 brutal massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis, many were shocked to find that the Left no longer had an affinity for Jews. American Jews felt abandoned by the Left, which seemed eager to erase, excuse, whitewash, or even celebrate Hamas’s crimes against our brothers and sisters.”
The radical nature of progressivism that has taken over the intellectual wing of the Democratic Party has not only made the party inhospitable to Jews, but also to the working class and the underdogs, who they have traditionally represented. The Democrats have become the party of the elites.
What Has Changed?
Some feel that especially in blue states, where such a large proportion of the frum population resides, we must show our allegiance to the Democratic Party. After all, that is where the money is. That makes sense on some level. That said, I think that, as time goes on, we will not be able to have that luxury for much longer. The almost dictatorial instinct that has become the norm in the Democratic Party is such that if you don’t pledge full allegiance to the false gods of today’s progressives—something we cannot halachically do anymore—we will have failed the progressive test. We, backward-thinking fanatics who hew to traditional values and know that Hamas is evil, will be excluded from everything.
This is already happening before our eyes in New York. The recent disclosures of how yeshivos and shuls were deliberately targeted during the Covid lockdowns, and the recent disclosure of the treachery of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who advised universities to downplay the blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses in the aftermath of October 7, show us that there truly is no room for us in the Democratic Party.
When to Stay in a Relationship…and When to Separate
So, what should we do?
In this week’s parsha, we see that sometimes, the only choice is to completely separate, even from those with whom we were once close. The Torah teaches us how, despite the fact that Avrohom and Lot were closely related, strife broke out between their followers. “There was a fight between the shepherds of Avrohom and the shepherds of Lot…” How did Avrohom Avinu deal with the fact that it seemed that there were some serious differences between his followers and those of Lot?
First, let us explore the Medrash that teaches us that the machlokes wasn’t just between the shepherds of Avrohom and Lot. Rather, it extended and became a personal machlokes between Avrohom and Lot.
It was about that machlokes that the posuk teaches us that Avrohom said to Lot, “Please let there be no strife between me and you and between my shepherds and your shepherds, for we are men who are brothers.”
What was Avrohom saying to Lot? Did he say, “Let’s make friends”? Did he say that there is much more that we have in common than what divides us? No, he didn’t. What he did say was, “Let us go our different ways.”
Sometimes, the only way to stop a machlokes or address differences is by separating.
Avrohom Avinu was teaching us a lesson: When there is an irreparable split, when you cannot reconcile competing values, there is only one choice, and that is to split—to go your different ways. In the long run, staying together will just make things worse. Initially, separation may be painful and seem the opposite of achdus, but Avrohom Avinu showed us the way. He demonstrated that even if that initial separation is painful, in the end, when two parties cannot reconcile their differences, the best way forward is separation.
There are those who say that we will lose a lot of money because the pot of money sits with the Democrats in New York and New Jersey. They may be right. It will be painful. But there is something even worse: Being tied at the hip to the Democrats, who are not only increasingly misaligned with our values, but are actually becoming increasingly hostile—very hostile—to them.
Sadly, there is no choice. It is time to separate.
Let us take the lessons from Avrohom Avinu to heart and realize that although it may be painful for us in the short term, in the long term we will be much better off.
