Leonard Zwelling

At the urging of the Head Rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City, Angela Buchdahl (the first Asian-American rabbi ever, she was born in Seoul), and after her sermon on Kol Nidre evening, September 15 streamed live, I am going to try to understand those with whom I disagree. Rabbi Buchdahl framed her sermon around the old joke of there being two Jews, so three opinions. She pointed out it is not that Jews are inherently argumentative, although we do like to debate, it is that in a respectful debate, the opinions brought to the argument by the two opposing sides may, over time, coalesce into a new third opinion with which everyone can agree.

Contrary to what my conservative friends believe, I was a reluctant voter for Joe Biden in 2020. I thought he was too old, no longer sharp, and offered no new ideas for the challenges facing the country. What I did not foresee was how damaging a Biden Presidency was going to be. Now, I am afraid, I do. Given who he ran against, my only choice in 2020 should have been to stay home or simply not vote for President. Now it appears, the irreparable and inevitable has unfolded. This should give those conservative friends a great deal to gloat about, but I could not vote for a man as ethically compromised as Donald Trump and I should not have voted for one as arrogant and stubborn as Joe Biden.

Let’s say, as a hypothetical example, that you are the leader of a major economic power in a world full of chaos and confusion. Let’s say you have over a billion people to feed and are engaged in a struggle with a smaller, but slightly more powerful enemy power across the world with a very different governing philosophy than yours. Let’s say you want to find a way to dominate that smaller power by unleashing an unforeseen weapon that strikes at the most vulnerable aspect of your enemy. What might you do?

I specifically avoided any commentary about the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on this country before 9/11/21 because I had not really thought I had anything useful to say. But after having seen how the nation paid tribute, I wanted to integrate the coverage of that day by the major media outlets into my comments about how America is dealing with these events twenty years on.

Brett Stephens makes a good case in The New York Times on September 8, that Joe Biden is on the verge of giving America another failed presidency after the same could be said of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. What’s Biden’s problem? He was supposed to be the solution to the chaos of Donald Trump yet has proven to be anything but. As Stephens says of Biden, he’s “headstrong, but shaky, ambitious, but inept. He’s proud, inflexible, and thinks he’s much smarter than he really is.”

There are those who are predicting a near-term end to the covid crisis as everyone who might get infected gets infected with schools back in session and herd immunity is reached. This is wishful thinking at best. What is more likely is that our weak societal response to the threat of this new virus and its delta variant in the face of good vaccines will result in covid being with us forever in ever-more virulent novel forms. It is likely that we will have a new seasonal flu and that those who are fully vaccinated will, in the main, be protected from serious illness while the unvaccinated sicken, get hospitalized, and some die while spreading the disease to those unable to be vaccinated (under 12).

Ivermectin is not a benign drug and it is not for use in humans with viral diseases. For the most part it is a deworming agent for use in cattle. Its discovery did win a Nobel Prize in 2015, but again, that was for its treatment of parasitic diseases only. I remember having to spend six hours on the phone trying to get the FDA to approve its emergency use in a bone marrow transplant patient who had contracted strongyloides. It took all that time just to track someone in Washington down on a Saturday to gain the approval which a faculty member rightly sought help to acquire before he employed the drug in his patient.

In this very important article buried on page A18 of The New York Times on August 30, David Leonhardt gives a brief overview of our current status with regard to the advisability of booster shots against the covid-19 viral disease. It was surprising.

The real push to get booster shots comes from data emerging from Israel that suggest that early recipients of the two dose mRNA vaccine are beginning to contract covid at an accelerated rate. But the real story is as Leonhardt notes, “more complex.”

The last time Americans felt this unsafe and filled with disquiet was 9/11. We had been there before. Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and various stock market crashes come to mind, but this is decidedly different.

The novel coronavirus is a worldwide threat to every human on the planet. It emanated from somewhere but no one will own up to releasing it into the world. The Chinese explanation is that it either came from bats to another species to us or was actually released by the United States. Both of these explanations are hard to swallow given where the plague began (Wuhan) and with the presence of the Wuhan Institute for Virology there and the general sentiment that gain-of-function research with coronaviruses was going on there.

As the time to the end grows shorter and the time from the beginning longer, my view of the journey has been altered mightily. Two recent deaths have brought this home as death often does.

I started collecting 45 rpm single records when I was about ten. I have the original Purple People Eater record and a bunch of stuff by Jimmie Rogers, the Everly Brothers, and the Coasters. I fell in love with rock and roll long before there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Nonetheless, I was a huge Stones fan in their heyday. Thus, the passing of Charlie Watts marks yet another irreplaceable loss.