The election is over – Biden won, history was made. Time to move on, right?
Not quite.
Trump isn’t willing to accept the results of the election. He claims there is fraud and corruption, a conspiracy against him, that the numbers don’t make sense. Supposedly he even has proof that dead people voted, and plans to go from city to city to prove his point.
I sincerely doubt there is a conspiracy against him, and I can’t speak about fraud and corruption. Who knows, perhaps certain people voted for Biden because they felt they had to, or were promised certain benefits? Isn’t that how political lobbying works?
But the numbers? He may be onto something there. Not because I think there is a campaign against him, but because I think more people than ever before voted. This was a political race that’s going to go down in history, and everyone wanted to be a part of that history. It was a tangible moment in time to literally change America, one way or another.
I didn’t get to vote in 2016, and I made damn sure to vote this year. I voted for Biden and he won, so why are there times I feel like I made a mistake?
It’s because it is out of step with the majority of the ultra-Orthodox world I live in. Trump is prust – from the word pritztus which means that something is coarse or unrefined. And yet, he has done a lot of good for the Jewish people. The gedolim say that people who are extremely wealthy at times act prust because of their wealth, as if the same rules that apply to the rest of the world are somehow relaxed or eliminated if you have a lot of zeros in your bank account. Like it’s somehow okay to say you want to grab women in a certain part of their anatomy, as long as you broker peace with the UAE.
It is okay, though? Maybe it is, maybe not, but here’s the thing: Trump speaks his mind, never apologizes, never sugarcoats. He lies and bullies, but still gets things done almost as an afterthought.
I spoke about a lot of the things he has done for the Jews in a previous article – I still believe he did do some good, good that will hopefully last for quite a while.
But I voted for Biden anyway. I couldn’t vote for Trump because of his actions: the constant drama and exaggerations, his failure in handling COVID, his unwillingness to unequivocally denounce white nationalists as supremacists and their actions as hateful, his use of divisive language designed to rile certain groups of people up. His record of the way he mistreats women, the way he mocks people with disabilities – it was too much for me to look past. I also knew that the election was between Biden and Trump only, and I didn’t want Trump to win.
For almost a century, the majority of Jews voted Democrat. However in this election, many, many Orthodox Jews voted for Trump. It makes sense: he can’t publicly say he’s against same-sex marriage, abortion, and medical rights for transgender persons, but his messsage is made loud and clear by the election of his latest choice of Associate Justice for the Supreme Court. These are all issues that Biden has expressed his support without ambiguity.
Aside from my personal issues with certain aspects of Orthodox Judaism, I have to admit I admire the community as a whole. This is one of the reasons why – no matter what the world around them says, they stand for what they believe to be al pi Torah. The package may be prust, but if the message rings true, well. We all know Hashem tends to work in mysterious ways.
And that is the bottom line, at the end of the day. We have to do our part. We have to educate ourselves at least on the basics of the issues, understand what is happening. The days of living in a closed off world are well and truly gone in America – the riots in Boro Park proved that.
If we as a Nation want Hashem to be there with us, and for us, we need to be present as well. We are required to do our part, small as it may be, and Hashem will do his.
