Deprived of going to shul, people reexamined and renewed their relationships with prayer and with God. There were engagements, marriages, babies born. In a time when so much was suddenly impossible, people discovered the possible.

As 2020 comes to a close, many of us find ourselves fluent in a new language that would have been nearly indecipherable just one year ago. If we mention having a “socially distanced” picnic with friends, we can safely assume the listener knows we all stayed at least six feet apart and did not share food or drinks.

You don’t have to be a public health official to wonder when your state will “flatten the curve,” and thoughtful folks now talk about going into “self-isolation” after learning they were exposed to the virus.

When we look back at 2020 in the business world, we’ll remember it as the year online shopping stopped being the future of retail and catapulted firmly into the present. This was the year that local governments forced us to give up in-store shopping for weeks or months, and then when we had an opportunity to return when stores reopened, we mostly kept shopping online anyway.

In this bleak context, $2,000 checks are a golden opportunity to make sure Americans’ wallets are nice and fat in 2021 so that the economy will pop back to real full employment when everyone is finally vaccinated — undoing some of the post-2008 damage, driving labor demand into the most disadvantaged demographics (like people with criminal records), and boosting President Biden’s popularity.

It may be surprising, but household incomes are actually hardly down at all this year. We do have economic problems, but people not having money isn’t one of them… People have money but cannot spend it as they would wish: restaurants, bars, theater, vacations, live music, and the rest.

Sending out checks with money the Treasury Department doesn’t have doesn’t solve this problem.

The danger in trying to steer the economy through the recession was always in doing too little, not doing too much. Now is not the time to worry about spending restraint. Trump’s delay has caused more distress than needed. And the response will have to be bigger if we are to prevent even greater suffering and long-term economic damage.

…the claim lends it­self to charges of anti-Semi­tism. There are poor and down­trod­den peo­ples all over the world, but pro­po­nents of pro­gressive transna­tion­al­ism mainly talk about one group, namely Pales­tinian Arabs, whom they ten­dentiously por­tray as pas­sive vic­tims and whose vi­o­lent ag­gres­sions they sys­tem­at­i­cally ig­nore or de-em­pha­size. Why are rad­i­cals like Mr. Warnock so de­ter­mined, in de­fi­ance of rea­son and ev­i­dence, to rep­re­sent Is­raeli Jews as per­se­cutors?

In a 2018 sermon criticizing the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, Warnock accused Israel of indiscriminately killing Arabs protesting the move at the time. But he hid the context: that Israel was defending itself from armed militants using border protests as a smokescreen from which to launch terror attacks. He ignored the fact that Hamas officials publicly claimed that 50 of the 60 killed were their own operatives who had breached the Gaza border fence to infiltrate Israel.

…it appears that Warnock has never uttered or supported a single antisemitic statement… QAnon and other far right extremist groups often camouflage their antisemitism with code words: global, conspiracy, financier, Rothschild and Soros… This is at the heart of QAnon’s claims. And Loeffler has more than just refused to condemn them; she has sloughed off legitimate concerns, declaring confidently that “no one in Georgia cares about this QAnon business.”

Although he is another former military man (a fighter pilot who fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars), Huldai, unlike ex-chief of staff Gantz, is not jumping directly from the IDF into national politics. He’s had two careers in-between — as a school principal and, for the past 22 years, running Tel Aviv. Also unlike Gantz, he is clearly classifiable on the Israeli political spectrum, as a man of the left, which he made emphatically clear on Tuesday night.

The Israeli center-left doesn’t lack for voters. It certainly doesn’t lack for parties and would-be leaders. But as Huldai proved once again in his launch last night, they have no vision, no plans and no compelling reason for anyone to vote for them.

The new Israelis Party of Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai and Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn would win eight seats if the March 23 election would be held now… It found that the new party took four seats away from prime ministerial candidate Gideon Sa’ar’s new party New Hope, two from Yesh Atid-Telem and two from Yamina…

Republicans have been remarkably successful in labeling Democrats as socialists. But [.] Republicans are the ones that are gumming up the gears of American capitalism, promoting policies to prop up aging, anachronistic industries and, worst of all, enabling the imposition of environmental harms far in excess of what it would cost to avoid them.

…even if the world wanted to abandon fossil fuels, doing so would take many decades. But in all likelihood, the whole world does not, in fact, want to move to clean energy. Consider this: The energy sector is responsible for 10% of the Canadian economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP.) In Saudi Arabia, that share is even higher; 50% of GDP comes from oil and gas. Russia is the world’s second-largest natural gas producer, and the third-largest producer of oil. Do these countries want the world to move away from fossil fuels? Probably not.

If the green movement can continue to disrupt the certainty that investing in oil fields and pipelines will return big profits, count on this: capitalists will begin to desert fossil fuels big time. Billionaire investment strategist Jeremy Grantham predicts a tipping point in the near future. He expects that investors will respond to the mounting threats to the fossil-fuel industry “very slowly” for a while and then “all at once.”

[Body and soul] incomplete, perhaps woefully so, without the other. And of the many ideas that Pixar gracefully bandies about in “Soul,” it is this one that strikes me as the most profoundly Jewish.

On this very subject, there is a famous midrash, or ancient rabbinic homily, about a body and soul separated by death and standing before God in judgment.

Every soul, the Jerrys explain, has a spark that sends it into the world. Joe and 22 take this to mean that everyone has a unique purpose, a mistake that reflects a competitive, careerist ideology that the movie can’t entirely disown.

But it is nonetheless open to other possibilities, which may be all that any work of art can be.

It turns out that the unknowability of Earth life is one of its greatest pleasures. And if Soul had made that its chief revelation—as opposed to spending so much time positing fanciful theories about life before and after death—it would be a much better movie. But Soul is too fixated on the Great Before, a land of complicated rules that are explained in sometimes contradictory ways.