Search for the soul

It has been horrifying, and quite literally nearly beyond belief, to hear the president of this nation, supposedly the world’s most powerful man, in this, supposedly the world’s most powerful country, rant and rave and rage incoherently about the tragic murder of two of the entertainment world’s brightest luminaries, Rob and Michele Reiner, who were presumably stabbed to death by their son Nick.

According to Trump, the cause of death was TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome. In simple terms, the Reiners died because of their political animus toward him. That these two brilliant people were both Jews, as is their son, adds to our personal dismay at the whole sordid saga. Our needy president sees the entire universe rotating around his own monumental ego. He is without compassion or kindness.

Bret Stephens, a renowned Jewish conservative who is a featured columnist for the New York Times, and former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, said it best in a Times op-ed titled “Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief.” I commend it to you. It’s a must read.

Trump, in his brief, unsolicited eulogy of the Reiners on Truth Social, his hate-filled social media platform, describes them as suffering from that fictional disease. As is typical, there is a grammatical error in his writing. The victim of the disease, more correctly known as Trump’s Derangement Syndrome, is Trump himself. He is a man with a missing part, a simple apostrophe. Its inclusion spells what we Jews know is absent — his Neshama. His soul.

Our world is no stranger to causeless hatred, known in Hebrew as sinat chinam.

I was born in 1939, which makes me older than almost all of you. Growing up on the peaceful streets of Newark’s Weequahic section, I was blessedly too young to understand those concepts of war and annihilation that then crazed our Earth. Had I looked for a clue, I would have found it in our family garage, where someone had etched a very good likeness of Hitler on an interior wall. There the neighborhood kids fought their own war against the murderous despot. They had a despicable target at which to aim whatever they could throw fiercely against that wall. When the war was finally over, my mother scrubbed the wall clean. At last.

But the scourge of antisemitism was not wiped clean. Here in these United States hateful rhetoric continues to dominate our nation, the nation that fought against the Nazis and for democracy, the land of the free and the home of the brave, which has succumbed to venomous speech, blatant lies emanating from our government where elected officials, led by Trump, issue a continuum of outright falsehoods in order to perpetuate their paranoid, vindictive schemes.

The lies are impossible to tally. But the pain and suffering that they inflict cannot be hidden. When we were kids, we all learned that sticks and stones would break our bones but names would never hurt us. It’s not true, my friends. Never was.

Is it possible to blame the pervasive hatred on a bully pulpit that perpetuates untruth, violence, and animosity? I cannot honestly say that I know all the answers. None of us do. But making people hate is far simpler than making them love. You could easily conclude that such speech from the powerful can ensnare even the innocent.

I’ve been to Bondi Beach and walked its sandy beauty long before it was stained with Jewish blood. Can we blame the rage that promulgated that murderous Chanukah attack in distant Australia on the constancy of American vitriol? I don’t know, but the spirit of negativity and explosive antisemitism that pervades our world today is here and now, worsening by the moment. None of us knows with certainty what causes such blatant loathing, especially directed at our people wherever they may be. We do know that the world is increasingly connected, and brutal voices are heard everywhere in an instant. That’s just how it is.

We see it directed to our own land of Israel, a nation that was brutally attacked and fought back and is now being accused throughout the world of genocide. The ripples of those baseless accusations reach each and every Jew, necessitating excessive security, expense, imposition, and intrusion in every public area of our lives and a gross misrepresentation of our values. Government officials, especially Trump, welcoming antisemites into their front parlors, certainly encourage this fear. Pervasive destructive speech very quickly lands on the Jews. That’s just the way it is!

Trump’s animosity extends in multiple directions, missing only his mirror. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, lays it out in shocking clarity in a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine. Widely synopsized, it provides incredible insight, although she now complains that her words were twisted.

Fortunately, tapes seem to exist from all 11 of the interviews. And we surely must question why she continued for so many sessions if she doubted they would be fairly reported.

Fellow Jews, it’s time to understand our emperor has no clothes. His baseless taunting of so many is symbolic of his own mediocrity, intolerance, and sheer laziness. It’s easier to send out an array of sparks than to eradicate fires.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com