But Baldwin’s rage reminds us that the black and Jewish experiences of America have been very different: largely a liberation for one community, and largely enslavement for another. How much tension for black Jews, who experience both simultaneously! To help heal America’s ever festering wounds, we have to come to understand that experience.

Like all decent people, I feel sick from this dreadful weak in Florida.

This week we marked the 157th yahrzeit of one of the most fascinating and forbidding figures in Jewish tradition, R. Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, the Kotzker rebbe [1787-1859]. He is best known in our circles of American Jews through Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings, especially Passion for Truth, Heschel’s final book, comparing Kotzk with the Danish Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.

The natural focus of Parshat Yitro is always maamad Har Sinai, the “assembly of Israel at Mt. Sinai,” when Israel received the Torah. Yet the first chapter we will read this week, Exodus 18, which gives the parasha its name, concerns instead what Moses learned from the priest of another religion.