In our increasingly authoritarian world, I’ve been thinking a lot about social hierarchy.

My interest has been especially stoked by the seeming indestructibility of Donald Trump’s charisma for that mass of people who think he’s the messiah. How does it happen that vulgar, monstrous, narcissistic, ridiculous men become world leaders and world destroyers, over and over?

My contemplation of hierarchy was also provoked by the Academy Awards, a spectacle that I am always happy not to watch: the nauseating mixture of liberalism and show-off wealth, the Marie Antoinettishness of it all. I don’t enjoy the foolishness of seeing artworks ranked, and I have no desire to idolize actors, only to enjoy their work . . .

In my years of reading Jewish texts, one particular teaching has particularly popped for me, the atheist, because it encapsulates what I believe to be an actual reality principle.

I’m talking about Judaism’s recognition that justice must be balanced with mercy or the world will not endure. The Talmud expresses this in several passages. Here are three:

“When the Holy One was about to create Adam, he saw both the righteous and the wicked who were to issue from him. So he said: If I create him, the wicked will issue from him; if I do not create him, how are the righteous to be born? What did the Holy One do? He diverted the way of the wicked from before his sight, partnered the quality of mercy with himself . . . and then created him.” (From the midrash collection, Genesis Rabbah, as translated in Bialik and Ravnitzky’s indispensable The Book of Legends.)

I’m in the Confederacy once again, visiting my 6-year-old grandson in South Carolina on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend. En route this past Wednesday, we stopped the car to stretch our legs in a little town off Interstate 81 in eastern Pennsylvania. Since the day was blustery, we took our stretch in a shopping mall.

Like many shopping malls these days — including the one half an hour from my home in Ulster County, NY — this one was eerily deserted, with fewer than one out of ten of its stores occupied. Dimly lit, with barely any foot-traffic, the place felt post-apocalyptic, neutron-bombish — this less than three hours from the wealth and bustle of New York City.

It dates me to say I’ve been writing or co-writing editorials advocating a two-state peace arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians for over forty years: during the 1978 Camp David Accords (“When the self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza is established and inaugurated, the transitional period of five years will begin”); through the years of Peace Now activism in the 1980s; during the Madrid Conference (1991), the Oslo Accords (1993), and Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit (2000); following the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 and the Road Map for Peace and Geneva Accord of 2003; and so forth and so on.

Each little essay made virtually the same points: that Israel’s security and soul required the just treatment of the Palestinian people and the establishment of their own state; that Palestinian terrorism, and the deep hatred and distrust that it bred among Israelis, was the ugliest, worst possible strategy for ending the occupation; that Israel’s land-greed and violations of international law could only produce more horror; that both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, had wholly legitimate claims to national status, as recognized by the United Nations way back in 1947.

I was eleven years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. made his glorious “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. My parents went to Washington to attend; I watched on television at home with my grandmother.

As the child of communists (by then, former communists), I understood the basics of what those thousands and thousands of people were demonstrating about — but like the demonstration itself, the issues stood at a distance. Yes, we had spent my first four years of life in the Black neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, where my parents and several other leftwing couples had bought homes in order to try to stem “white flight,” but by the time the March on Washington took place, we had been living in a Jewish-majority neighborhood for seven years and had hardly any contact with people of color.

Since retiring five years ago, I’ve often said to my beloved wife, What’s next? Our half-century together has been punctuated by regular adventures that have always revived our mojo and strengthened our bond: leaving New York City, buying a house, adopting children, performing together, traveling cross-country and overseas, creating books and artworks, learning music, helping refugees, and so on. These and other experiences, popping out from our hard-working lives every few years, gave us a sense of the extraordinary that permeated the everyday.

But what now, in our seventies? I’m not interested in the time and effort it would take to start a new professional career; we haven’t the money to do something monumental like buy a boat, take off in a fancy camper van, or start a business; we are anchored in place by close friendships and family; I’m too cynical and lazy to throw myself into all-out political/volunteer work. Hmm . . .

I’ve just had a horrible week — my dear wife was in the hospital for six days, my daughter 1,000 miles away was having a crisis of her own, Trump was terrorizing the rest of us, and the rain (and hail!) wouldn’t stop for more than an hour at a time.

I felt anxious and despondent until I took a walk down my country road during one of those hour-long breaks from the rain. There in the canyon stream stood a grey heron, looking for a meal, then looking at me.

Ever since I moved to this house thirty-six years ago, herons have qualified as a good omen. Their slow, graceful wingstrokes always catch my attention — Ahh, it’s a heron! — and they have flown over my house, my car, and my head at auspicious times. This latest sighting awakened and cheered me, restoring me to a more hopeful feeling about the days to come.

The illustration at left lists a few of the beliefs I held at various stages of life. While I was never an insistent or even confident believer — I’ve always been more of a fence-straddler — I did think in certainties, especially as a young man, and was convinced that the world’s complexities could be parsed, understood, and reordered.

I also thought that the Cultural Revolution in China was a fine idea that might produce a truly transformed society in which everyone would wear the same outfit and feel good about it; that “enlightenment” is an actually attainable and enduring state of being; that dialectical materialism is a profound philosophical concept that I just didn’t quite grasp (keep trying!); that homosexuality has psychological trauma at its root; that nurture far outweighs nature in shaping human beings; that capitalism is the central cause of human suffering and alienation.

The first time I saw a Charlie Chaplin film, I was a temporary college drop-out, age 18, and was crashing, as we used to say, with an elementary school friend enrolled at Brandeis University. The campus held a weekly outdoor film screening, and I got to see “Modern Times,” Chaplin’s brilliantly funny 1936 film about industrialization, poverty, love, and resilience. The movie utterly inspired me as an artist and an activist, and I wrote a pompous letter to my parents making all kinds of declarations about my future.

Ever since, Charlie Chaplin has been one of my artistic and humanistic touchstones, to whom I return for inspiration every couple of years. His empathy for the working poor, his unabashed scorn for cops and for the pretensions of wealth, his endless take-downs of macho masculinity, his sweet sentimentality as a music composer, and his balletic beauty as a performer, add up to make his movies timelessly relevant, bittersweet, and hilarious.

Our beautiful, devoted, gentle giant, Elsie, died on Sunday evening. After an amazing day of walking and chasing rocks in the Wallkill River for an hour and a half, she came home with us and her respiratory system suddenly collapsed. We brought her to the hospital and learned that her white blood cell count was zero and her lungs were 70% dysfunctional. It was so, so hard to believe — Elsie seemed to have had such a run of good days, with walks and good meals and lots of contentment — but the vet described what she was facing, which was basically like drowning. He was blunt, he was honest, and he advised euthanizing her . . .

O, my sad, sad America . . .

With fifty million working people, 32 percent of the labor force, earning less than $15 per hour.

Jeez, that’s a whole lot of poor people . . .

“Our rabbis taught: When Adam, on the day of his creation, saw the setting of the sun, he said, ‘Alas, it is because I have sinned that the world around me is becoming dark; the universe will now become again void and without form — this then is the death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!’ So he sat up all night fasting and weeping and Eve was weeping opposite him. When, however, dawn broke, he said: ‘This is the way of the world!’ He then arose and offered up a bullock . . . ” —Avodah Zarah 8a

Back in my working days, when dusk came and the world outside my window became a silhouette, and I knew that it was time to stop being safely absorbed in my work and to join the what-shall-we-do here-and-now, I usually had to pass through a zone of dread. I may have drowned out the feeling with news on the radio, or sidled away from it with a glass of wine — but there was still a tug at my guts when I stopped working, stopped earning my right to exist . . .

Every other month or so, Susan and I make a two-day drive to South Carolina, with our giant dog Elsie in the back seat, to visit our daughter, who has lived there for fifteen years, and our grandson Max, who is a touchingly empathetic six-year-old. It’s an exhausting, thousand-mile-each-way trip for us, but it usually results in a very sweet visit. We’re lucky enough to own a small apartment in Columbia, the state capital, which is a relatively “liberated” blue town within this red state, and apart from playing with Max we take many walks with Elsie on the SC University campus, which is a veritable arboretum, and in our Five Points neighborhood, which is full of mansions and gigantic shade trees.

This time around, however, I’m in the middle of reading a classic history book about the aftermath of slavery in America: Been in the Storm So Long by Leon F. Litwack (1929-2021). A Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner in 1979, the book has brought me deeply into the experience of people liberated by the Civil War from a dozen or more generations of enslavement . . .

I’m an avid reader of Foreign Affairs, a 101-year-old publication produced by the Council on Foreign Relations. Of all the magazines I subscribe to — New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic, New York Review of Books, Smithsonian — I tend to hang onto Foreign Affairs the longest (each edition is 200+ pages) and read it most exhaustively. It features the voices of all sorts of government officials, advisors, and political scholars from various universities and think tanks around the world. Most of the writers tend to be internationalists (with an occasional nationalist and autocrat thrown in); among the Americans, there are centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans, “realists” (guided more by practical questions of political power than by moral sentiment),and people privy to inner-circle expertise and information. Reading Foreign Affairs is like watching The West Wing or Borgen — except these articles are the real article. These people shape world events.

A friend of mine who works in the civil and human rights field in New York City recently asked a social-work class he was teaching: What percentage of Americans are Jewish? The students’ answers ranged from 20 to over 50 percent! The class of would-be social workers and organizers was a mixed lot, about 70 percent white, he reported. Race and ethnicity did not seem to affect the answers; there were even two half-Jews in the class, who also gave preposterously high estimates of America’s Jewish population. (And yes, my friend said, they all understand statistics.)

Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, when many people in the counterculture took themselves down spiritual paths, I was giving a good deal of agitated thought to issues of human susceptibility and how gurus establish their authority. Our whole generation was being influenced by psychedelic drugs; by the Beatles’ involvement with Transcendental Meditation; by the books of Carlos Castanedas, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Starhawk and others; by the splintering and suppression of progressive political movements following the end of the Vietnam War; and by the arrival on these shores of numerous Hindu and Vedic gurus. I had been raised as a scientific skeptic, however, and resisted the trend — but not without feeling my worldview deeply challenged by it.

One sabbath afternoon, some two thousand years ago, Rabbi Elisha ben Avuyah was studying Torah when he looked up and saw a man climbing a palm tree. The fellow had apparently spotted some birds’ nests and was breaking the sabbath law to raid them. He seized both a fledgling and its mother — another violation of halakha (Jewish law), which commands hunters to let mother birds go free — and then clambered down safely and hurried off with his prizes.

Hours later, after the sabbath had ended, Elisha again looked up to see another man approaching the same stand of trees. This man, too, climbed and took a young bird from its nest, but shooed the mother away. As he descended, he was bitten by a deadly snake, and by the time he reached the ground, the venom had done its work . . .

I was listening to a TED talk the other day by a woman attorney and activist who was complaining about how marriage is privileged by the legal, taxation, and cultural systems. However we choose to create “family,” she argued — mentioning same-sex partnerships, polyamorous relationships, platonic partnerships, and much more — we should all be entitled to the same supports, the same rights, the same opportunities. (I didn’t catch her name, and there are so many TED talks on the subject of “privilege” that I didn’t have the time to find out which was hers.)

Anyway, I agreed with her, fundamentally — until she began to explain, kind of vaguely, how capitalism was responsible for privileging heterosexual marriage. It’s true, of course, that capitalism did make normative the nuclear family, which was the most economical structure for keeping workers working. But as I listened, two thoughts that I found heretical and revelatory came into my head . . .

Some Thoughts about This Website

I waited many years, but I’ve now collaborated on the creation of a personal website, called “Babushkin’s Playhouse” (Babushkin being the family name from which my father’s older brothers carved out our name “Bush”). The site is a kind of museum of my creative work — books and other writings, artworks, and music — which I hope to grow into a theater of interactivity as well as a marketplace at which to sell my stuff.

There’s a degree of embarrassment involved in launching and promoting this site, because I know that my reputation as a writer and artist hovers precariously above the borderline separating people whose creative work is in demand (they have enthusiastic fans) from those who demand attention for their efforts (they have obliging friends). Embarrassed or not, however, this is how I spend many of my days: writing, creating visual art, composing and playing music, and seeking to share it all in hope that people will be moved and think well of me.