Mar

13

2026

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, I read this piece in New York Magazine by Narges Bajoghli on the relationship-ending conversations about Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran happening among Iranians scattered across the world, both in Iran and in the global diaspora. The author herself writes from amid the fracture: “In Australia, my cousin Ali and his group of friends—many of whom I knew from childhood trips to Iran—were writing screeds against me on social media for not using my platform to back the bombings of Iran. Cousins and old friends will no longer speak to me because I will not sign on to the proposition that American and Israeli bombs will deliver liberation. Some of them I have known my whole life. Some of them, I realize now, I did not know at all.”

It’s a familiar story for many American Jews, as the author notes explicitly in the piece. As a Miamian, I also recognize the passions and violence of other diasporas; I’m thinking now of a news story from a few weeks ago, in which Cuban exiles rode a speedboat from Florida into Cuban waters, aiming, as the Cuban government said, for “armed infiltration.” Four of them were killed. This comes at a moment where Lindsey Graham is gleefully threatening a US invasion of Cuba on Fox News: “Free Cuba. Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. It’s just a matter of time now.” He mentions he’s in Miami and holds up a hat that says “Free Cuba”; no doubt it was given to him by a Cuban exile.

It is shocking that anyone can look at the images from Tehran, water and sky on fire, and think, “I want this for my country because I love my country. I love its people.” But the ubiquity of this attitude is a warning in itself about the potency of the commingling of pain and nationalism in a collective story. To Bajoghli, the only ethical response in such a moment is a kind of “double consciousness,” or perhaps, a dialectics, that the story makes impossible. “The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time,” she writes. “I think you have to. I think the people who can’t, on either side, are telling you something about what they’ve had to shut off in themselves to survive this.”

David Klion (contributing editor): I’ve just binged the first four seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind ahead of the fifth season, which premieres on March 27th. I was expecting a sci-fi epic in the vein of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, both of which the show’s co-creator Ronald D. Moore was centrally involved in. But while there’s definitely some of that in For All Mankind’s DNA, the actual experience of watching has brought very different shows to mind, including The Americans, Mad Men, and perhaps above all Friday Night Lights. You know how Friday Night Lights is nominally about high school football, but really it’s a soap opera about the triumphs and tragedies of a close-knit community of Texans and a kind of grand metaphor for America as imagined by well-meaning liberals? For All Mankind is exactly that, except replace high school football with space exploration. It’s a show, in other words, I can enthusiastically recommend to all sorts of people in my life who don’t care about sci-fi.

Though it becomes increasingly recognizable as sci-fi as it goes, the show belongs more precisely to the genre of alternate history. The point of rupture from our timeline occurs in the pilot: In June 1969, about a month before the scheduled Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, the Soviet space program stuns the whole world by landing a cosmonaut there first. NASA is shaken, as is President Nixon, and instead of a manned moon landing serving as America’s pinnacle achievement in the space race, the Soviet win goads Americans into dreaming much bigger. What about a permanent lunar base? What about manned missions to Mars? What about… okay, no spoilers.

Each season leaps forward about a decade, with the first set mainly in the 1970s and the upcoming season set in the 2010s. Some things change, like the winners and losers of presidential elections, while others stay the same—Apple has punctuated the show with needle drops of era-defining songs that apparently would have been written in any timeline. While individual characters come and go, the show remains tightly focused on a core group of astronauts, mission controllers, engineers, and family members based out of Houston. For all the science and history geekery on display, For All Mankind is primarily character-driven. It invests us emotionally in a wildly diverse extended family whose lives are oriented around a space program far more ambitious and consequential than the one we know.

Among those consequences is an America that’s incrementally woker than the real one, where progress on women’s equality, gay rights, and more happens a little faster than it actually did. Is this strictly realistic? Maybe not, but here’s where I’m reminded of Star Trek, with its utopian vision of humanity transcending war, prejudice, and capitalism in favor of space exploration and scientific knowledge for its own sake. The original series, the one with Kirk and Spock, aired from 1966-1969, concurrent with the Apollo Program and the height of the Great Society, and premiering before Vietnam and the New Politics tore everything apart. Martin Luther King was famously a fan and convinced actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, that it was crucial for Black kids to see a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise; Nichols, in turn, inspired Mae Jemison, who became the first Black woman in space in 1992 (a fictional Black woman makes it to space much earlier in the For All Mankind timeline).

Regardless of that era’s myriad flaws, we’ve never fully recovered its idealism; today we live in a fallen America, one in which even space travel is the province of manic private-sector reactionaries (For All Mankind has something to say about for-profit space companies too). As corny and over the top as For All Mankind can sometimes be, there’s something beautiful and profoundly life-affirming about a show that imagines what our world might have been like if the 1960s Space Age had never ended. The show’s title is taken from the plaque the real Apollo astronauts left on the lunar surface (“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind”), but it’s appropriate to the spirit of the show, which is first and foremost a celebration of humanity—all of it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve always insisted that it’s impossible to judge another couple’s marriage. It’s difficult enough to understand the inner workings of our own, so how dare we judge those of others? But none of this applies when it comes to the marriages we encounter in literature, and it is as literature that I’ve felt free to judge the marriage of the great German poet Paul Celan and his French artist wife Gisèle Lestrange as we see it in Letters to Gisèle (1951-1970). Fixed on the page, like a dead butterfly minus the beauty, this collection is a horrific voyage into the depths of all that can be worst in marriage: deception, illusion, self-delusion, crushing of personality, willing submission, and, finally, destruction. Exasperation, anger, desperation are there, but also great loyalty and compassion, finally crushed under the weight of history and madness.

There is much discussion in these letters of Celan’s famously difficult poetry, his “messages in a bottle,” as he called them. This includes Celan’s fascinating and unconsciously comical attempts to teach his wife German by providing her with cribs of select words in poems he’s sent her so she can read and understand his work in its original form. Celan taught German at the Ecole Normale Supèrieure, so he had experience in teaching German literature. It seems certain that this method was not employed by the poet in his classes at France’s most elite academy.

There are, however, other commentaries on his poetry, some of them enormously enlightening. The most pertinent of them all is from a letter in 1965, which included a poem of which he was especially proud, though with a caveat: “It is quite decent, maybe not opaque enough.”

The volume is replete with Celan’s complaints that his work is insufficiently appreciated and understood, that people fail to see that his poetry is all a response to the death camps. But it is also a chronicle of a man’s war with his milieu, his insistence that those around him in the literary world were antisemites, that antisemitism was everywhere, the left as guilty as the right (“the brown red and the red brown,” as he calls them). Celan was unjustly accused of plagiarism by the widow of a poet with whom he had been close, and the charge and his insistence on the omnipresence of antisemitism ate away at his vitals, perverting him as a human being.

But more than anything, this volume is an account of a marriage whose stated motto was “I stand firm,” and whose obvious fault lines and fractures and problems were ignored in the false belief that all was well, until such belief was no longer possible. Pledges of eternal love flow back and forth, followed by separations, internments in mental hospitals, a stabbing… The couple’s second motto, repeated in countless letters—including one written two days before Paul tried to stab Gisèle—was “Wird sind es noch immer” (“We are still what we are”). Gisèle gives her life to her husband, as a person and an artist. She allows him to be the one to bestow titles on all her artistic works over the course of their marriage. She is forgiving of his infidelities, one of which lasted ten years. They convince themselves that all will be well, or at least that it’s possible. Paul says at one point that separation from her would be “the victory of our enemies. I do not accept this separation.” The enemies were within him, and they did win.

Pual and Gisèele finally separated for good, and on April 20th, 1970, he disappeared. The battles of Celan against himself, poetry, antisemites, the literary world, and his wife ended under the Pont Mirabeau. His body was fished from the Seine weeks later. Letters to Gisèle is the tombstone of their marriage, the memorial to that battle.

According to the Torah, the commandments to build the Mishkan (or Tabernacle) are delivered before the Israelites forge and bow down to the Golden Calf. And yet a significant majority of the Rabbinic tradition understands not only the actual building of the Mishkan in our parshah, but even the order to assemble it, as having come after and in response to the catastrophic construction of that idol. One strand within this tradition views the Mishkan as rehabilitating the Israelites: They sinned in rejecting and replacing God with a structure of gold, so now they are restored into divine relationship through building another structure of gold, one that focuses their attention on God’s continuous presence in their midst.

But there is an alternate tradition that understands the Mishkan differently: as collateral to God against the Jewish people’s future calamitous sins. The Biblical Hebrew word “Mishkan” comes from the root “sh-kh-n,” which means “to dwell,” referring in this case to God’s presence among the people; rabbinic Hebrew developed the cognate “mashkon” to refer to loan collateral, a piece of property that dwells in the possession of the lender as a guarantee against the lender’s loss if the borrower defaults. Noticing the apparently redundant doubling of the word “Mishkan” in the opening of our parashah—“These are the inventories of the Mishkan, the Mishkan of Testimony”—Rabbi Shmuel in the Midrash Tanhuma suggests that the doubling alludes to “the Temple, which will, in the future, be claimed as collateral twice, the first destruction and the second destruction.” According to this midrash, as Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has elegantly discussed, the instructions suggest that the Mishkan, as well as the future Temples that echo it, are collateral through which the Jewish people deposit their wealth to secure God against their default through idolatrous sin. In this model, God does not move past the sin of the Golden Calf; having seen their capacity to spend lavishly to supplant God, God forever after requires the people to deposit lavish wealth in a structure dedicated to service of God’s word—a deposit that God can claim should the people default on their obligations to fulfill the commandments.

Strikingly, the midrash implicitly rejects an intuitive contrast between the mobile and transient Mishkan and the landed and centralized Temples, instead collapsing them into one mythic frame. According to this tradition, the reason for the Mishkan’s unique name is simply to capture a characteristic of the future Temples: that they will be collected as collateral when the Jewish people defaults on its collective debt to God through its criminality. But the contrasts between the Mishkan and the Temples are profound: the former reflects God’s true boundlessness, while the latter is empire’s attempt to concretize and locate God within its domain, assimilating the Eternal to its sovereign whims. The connection between these two institutions in our midrash is especially noteworthy in light of these obvious differences.

A key commonality between them, though, also links them to the Golden Calf: They are all edifices of gold meant to contain cosmic meaning. What do the Mishkan and the later Temples share? Wealth—obscene, theologically embarrassing wealth. The Israelites left Egypt suddenly loaded with gold, their just and necessary reparations for 210 years of unpaid labor. But wealth hoarding is incompatible with religious life. In between the catastrophe of the Golden Calf and the building of the desert Mishkan on one end, and the conquest of land and the building of a supposedly permanent Temple on the other, God warns the people, in the book of Devarim: “Lest you eat and be sated . . . and your silver and gold multiply for you . . . and your heart becomes haughty and you forget YHWH your God—Who brings you out of the land of Egypt, from the slave house.” In Rabbinic summary, “Human beings rebel against God only from satiety.” This bloatedness was at the root of the Golden Calf fiasco. Once we see that, it’s hard not to see the Mishkan and Temples as similarly implicated. However, the framing of the Temples as collateral can help us understand how God’s golden homes are not implicated by, but rather respond to, that same crisis of excess.

Upon seeing their Golden Calf, God derides the Israelites with a new insult, calling them “a stick-necked people.” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg perceptively captures this slight as implying “an unexpected fidelity to old ideas”: God saw their idolatry, then, as revealing about the Israelites that, “Perhaps, they have never, in fact, left Egypt, that place of . . . the callous-hearted?” They needed to receive reparations to affirm their worth, but the wealth constituting those reparations bound them to Egypt and all it stood for. Material excess, this reading suggests, will always create a fetish to justify its existence. Garish abundance undermines the hungry posture of curiosity that is necessary for the surprise of divine inspiration, and lavish religious institutions are grotesque when they mirror opulence of the parishioners. The Mishkan and Temples alike, though, required extravagance as a displacement of the Israelites’ material excess. That’s the upshot of the Temples-as-collateral: Depositing their gold into the Mishkan or Temple effectively removes that gold from the economy. Sacral property is forbidden for profane use, and is useless as such to God. Its value is in being given up by the people, in standing before them as witness. If they act responsibly, respecting only the aristocracy of the collective, they will see their former excess in the sacred site, unavailable for hoarding. If they reject the covenant and activate the idolatrous life of domination and accumulation, then the collateral will be claimed, the Temple destroyed. Either way, the material excess is unavailable. Claiming it guarantees its destruction.

A Temple of gold and an idol of gold can be opposites or ultimately identical. Most Jews in the world today live in an empire of opulence and theft, whether in the belly of its beast or in its research and development client hub. Compliance with the murderous ethos of this empire yields opulent rewards that we know all too well from Torah are actually poison, disabling us from fulfilling the divine word, rotting our lavish religious institutions into collateral for our debts, signs of our destruction. Only through refusing the stolen rewards of this death machine can we possibly find a path to reconciliation with the One Who brings us up from the slave house.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.